Mary Alexander • 7 August 2025

“This is Durban, South Africa,” begins the caption of a video posted on the X account of US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on 20 July 2025.

“This is what removing ‘White Oppression’ and replacing it with Soros NGO systems looks like,” it continues. “A glimpse into the future of ALL Western countries if changes are not made fast as already seen in the SH!T HOLE blue city’s across America.”

The post has been viewed more than 1.6 million times so far, and has spread widely on X (here and here), Facebook (here, here and here) and elsewhere (here, here and here).

The footage shows mounds of trash strewn over an otherwise almost empty street lined with closed-up shopfronts. Taken from TikTok, it’s overlaid with the text: “This is the situation in Durban town right now.” It’s also been reposted with captions such as “This is Durban, South Africa, in neighborhoods where there are no white people.”

Durban is a port city in South Africa’s eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, on the Indian Ocean coast.

Alex Jones, Donald Trump and ‘white oppression’

The founder of the InfoWars disinformation platform, Alex Jones has built his fortune on fake news and false conspiracies. For his relentless claim that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting – where 20 children aged six and seven were killed – was a hoax staged by “crisis actors”, US courts have ordered him to pay US$1.5 billion to the victims’ parents.

In the X post, what Jones means by “White Oppression” is presumably South Africa’s universally condemned racist system of apartheid, which ended with the country’s first democratic elections in 1994.

By “Soros” he refers to the billionaire US philanthropist George Soros, founder of the pro-democracy Open Society Foundations and a favourite target of conspiracy theorists.

Jones is a strident supporter of US president Donald Trump, a Republican.

Since retaking office in November 2024, Trump has made false claims about land restitution and white genocide in South Africa. He has also criticised its genocide case against Israel, cut US aid to the country and slapped a 30% tariff – the highest in sub-Saharan Africa – on South African imports.

Trump has in the past referred to African nations as “shithole countries”. Jones’s “SH!T HOLE blue city’s [sic] across America” is his description of cities governed by the US Democratic Party.

Nine days of violence in 2021

The video does show Durban, but during a historic upheaval more than four years ago.

We took a screengrab of its first frame and ran it through a Google image search. This led us to a Reddit thread on the clip, where one user had this to say:

The video was originally uploaded July 13, 2021 by TikTok user Afu Afu (@af__ptl) and shows Durban, South Africa during the July 2021 riots. The TikTok account is private now but it can be seen in tweets from the time.

The user links to two X posts with the same video, one from 15 July 2021 and the other posted three days later.

From 8 to 17 July 2021 violence exploded across South Africa after former president Jacob Zuma was sentenced to 15 months in prison for defying a court order to testify at a commission probing corruption during his presidency. The “Zuma riots” were largely confined to KwaZulu-Natal – Zuma’s home province – and the urban province of Gauteng.

The looting that followed was largely opportunistic, as people took advantage of the chaos to raid shops. More than 300 people were killed over the nine days. It remains the worst violence South Africa has seen since the end of apartheid.

At the time, the world was still gripped by Covid. Analysts ascribed the violence not only to longstanding poverty and inequality, intractable problems with roots deep in the apartheid past, but also the social and economic turmoil of the pandemic.

The video does not show a typical day in Durban. It was shot from 440 West Street in Durban Central, heading east. A Google Street View of the same route snapped in November 2024 shows a very different scene.

Taken in its entirety, Jones’s claim is false. The footage is from a moment four years ago, when the country faced the unprecedented crisis of the arrest of a former president. And it could be said that the July 2021 riots were ultimately caused by the “White Oppression” of apartheid, not by its removal.

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MARY ALEXANDER • 28 MARCH 2024

Has former US president Donald Trump endorsed uMkhonto weSizwe, South Africa’s newest political party? A low-res video circulating on social media since early March 2024 indicates he has.*

In the clip, Trump appears to say:

Greetings. All South Africans, my name is president Donald Trump. I urge all South Africans to vote for uMkhonto weSizwe May 29th. The African National Congress of Cyril Ramaphosa has failed all South Africans. With this new backed party by president Jacob Zuma, all South Africans will matter. Vote uM …

It then cuts out.

South Africans are set to vote on 29 May in what are slated to be the country’s most pivotal elections in 30 years. Opinion polls suggest the ruling African National Congress (ANC) could lose the parliamentary majority it has held since 1994.

The new uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party takes its name – “spear of the nation” in isiZulu – from the ANC’s military wing during the struggle against apartheid. MK’s profile was boosted when former ANC president Jacob Zuma backed the party and began campaigning on its behalf.

The ANC recently lost a court bid to have the electoral commission’s registration of MK declared invalid. It is currently in another legal battle over who owns the uMkhonto weSizwe name and logo.

One opinion poll suggests that in KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma’s home province, the ANC could lose half its votes to MK in the upcoming elections.

But does the video really show Trump urging South Africans to vote for MK?

Another fake made with Parrot AI

First off, a closer look at the video clearly shows that the audio doesn’t match the movement of Trump’s lips.

Africa Check took screenshots of the video and ran them through a reverse image search. This revealed that the viral clip was taken from a 2017 interview with Trump by the US broadcaster NBC News. The MK party was registered in September 2023.

Trump’s tie, the angle of his face and the flag pin on his jacket are all the same. The background shows the same US presidential flag positioned to his left.

In the 13-minute NBC video, Trump says nothing about uMkhonto weSizwe. The viral video is fake.

It’s likely it was created by Parrot AI, which sells itself as a “celebrity voice generator”.

Africa Check recently debunked another fake, using the same NBC clip, in which Trump appears to berate Nigerians for criticising president Bola Tinubu. That video includes the Parrot AI logo.

* Some claims posted on Facebook and Instagram may have been deleted by users after being rated via Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program.

Published by Africa Check on 11 April 2024

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MARY ALEXANDER • 14 FEBRUARY 2024

A video of a huge crowd in green and black marching down a long avenue is doing the rounds online with the claim they are supporters of a new contender in South African politics, the uMkhonto weSizwe Party.*

The party takes its name from the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC) during the struggle against apartheid. MK for short, uMkhonto weSizwe means “spear of the nation” in isiZulu.

The struggle ended with South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, won by the ANC. It’s since been re-elected every five years. But with the country set to vote again in 2024, opinion polls suggest it may lose its majority for the first time.

On 24 January, the video was posted on TikTok with the words “ANC is out. Viva MK party.”

A week or so later it appeared on X/Twitter with the caption “MK IS THE BIGGEST POLITICAL PARTY IN SA CURRENTLY!!!” The post has been viewed more than 91,600 times so far.

It was also uploaded, with the same caption, on YouTube, where it’s had more than 28,000 views. The YouTube video has in turn been posted across Facebook – here, here, here, here and here.

The MK Party was registered with South Africa’s elections commission in September 2023. Debate about who actually owned the name “uMkhonto weSizwe” soon followed.

The confusion continued into December when Jacob Zuma, president of the ANC government from 2009 to 2018, endorsed the MK Party and began to campaign on its behalf. He was quickly expelled from the ANC.

Debate has extended to the party’s logo, which uses a slightly modified version of the original MK emblem of a warrior holding a shield and brandishing a spear, in black, set against a green background.

But does the clip really show MK Party supporters?

Fuerza del Pueblo march on Workers’ Day

The video’s watermark shows it comes from the TikTok account @rolandomarte81, where it was posted on 11 November 2023.

Other videos on the account suggest it’s based in the Dominican Republic, a Spanish-speaking Caribbean country east of Central America on the island of Hispaniola, which it shares with Haiti.

A Google Lens reverse image search of the first frame of the video led us to another TikTok account from the Dominican Republic. It also brought up a post on X with a longer version of the clip.

Here it’s described as being shot on 1 May 2023 in San Ignacio de Sabaneta, a city in the northwest of the Dominican Republic.

La lucha por la rebaja en los precios de los alimentos y combustibles; más que ideología política, es justicia social. ¡Únete a la lucha por una sociedad más justa e igualitaria! @LeonelFernandez@FPComunica#MarchaTrabajadoresFP#MarchaFP #FuerzadelPueblo pic.twitter.com/v4aXnO8V6D

— Magdalena Valerio (@Magdale34645821) May 1, 2023

The post’s mentions include Leonel Fernández, a former president of the Dominican Republic, and his opposition Fuerza del Pueblo (“power of the people”) political party.

It also includes the hashtag #MarchaTrabajadoresFP, which leads to numerous X posts about a 2023 Fuerza del Pueblo march held on 1 May – recognised as May Day, Labour Day and International Workers’ Day – in the Dominican Republic. In Spanish, “marcha” means “march” and “trabajadores” means “workers”.

Many of the posts under the #MarchaTrabajadoresFP hashtag include other videos that clearly show the same scene in the viral clip.

It was shot in the Dominican Republic, not South Africa. The people in green and black are supporters of Fuerza del Pueblo, not the uMkhonto weSizwe Party.

Published by Africa Check on 16 February 2024

* Some Facebook and Instagram users may have deleted their posts after Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program rated their claims as untrue.

The post Video of May Day march in Dominican Republic, not uMkhonto weSizwe Party supporters in South Africa appeared first on South Africa Gateway.

A Treatment Action Campaign march in Durban on 18 July 2016 on the opening day of the 21st International Aids Conference. This was the second time South Africa had hosted the conference. The first was in 2000, when both the Aids epidemic and Aids denialism were reaching a point of crisis. (GCIS, CC BY-ND 2.0)

Mary Alexander

Nkosi Johnson, who died of Aids in 2001 at the age of 12. (South African History Online)

On 9 July 2000 an 11-year-old boy, small for his age but sharp in a blue suit and sneakers, stood alone on the stage of the Durban International Convention Centre. He held a microphone too big for his hands. He smiled at the audience.

And as he spoke, he shamed a president.

“Hi. My name is Nkosi Johnson,” he said.

“I live in Melville, Johannesburg, South Africa. I am 11 years old and I have full-blown Aids. I was born HIV-positive.”

It was the 13th International Aids Conference, the first held in Africa.

In the audience were international policy makers, government leaders, health experts – and South African president Thabo Mbeki.

“I hate having Aids because I get very sick,” Johnson told the audience.

“I get very sad when I think of all the other children and babies that are sick with Aids. I just wish that the government can start giving AZT to pregnant HIV mothers to help stop the virus being passed on to their babies. Babies are dying very quickly.”

Poverty, or virus?

When Nkosi Johnson died on 1 June 2001, just 11 months after standing on the stage in Durban, he was 12. Had he lived, he would have turned 36 in 2025.

At the time of his death, Nkosi was thought to be South Africa’s longest-living HIV-infected child.

In 1994, as South Africa became a democracy, the Aids epidemic began to grip communities across the country. People were dying and babies were sick.

Life expectancy fell and death rates rose. The disease tightened its grip through the presidency of Nelson Mandela.

Then, in 1999, Thabo Mbeki became president.

Instead of acknowledging the growing crisis of HIV and taking action to ensure treatment was available in government health facilities, Mbeki embraced Aids denialism.

This fringe theory, espoused by both the well-meaning and charlatans, held that the HI virus did not cause the disease Aids, that Aids drugs such as AZT were toxic (many were, but not as toxic as the disease itself), and that Aids could be managed just with good nutrition and cocktails of vitamins.

Mbeki, the son of Govan Mbeki, was a stalwart in the struggle against apartheid. He was convinced that the deficient immune systems of people with HIV were mainly a result of poverty, not the virus. He was convinced that antiretroviral drugs would make people infected with HIV more sick.

He was convinced. But he was wrong.

Mbeki refused to accept the scientific consensus that contradicted his conviction. He thought he knew better than the scientists. And he was South Africa’s president.

‘How does a virus cause a syndrome?’

In South Africa’s parliament on 20 September 2000, to the approving laughter of MPs, president Thabo Mbeki openly rejected the fact that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (Aids).

People died.

Statistics reveal the tragedy.

In 2000, in South Africa, the lifetime risk of dying of Aids was as high as 50%. The life expectancy of South Africans plummeted, reaching a low of just 51.6 years – 50.1 years for men – in 2005. This was the lowest it had been since 1961, during the worst deprivations of the apartheid era.

Click image for a larger view.

While the disease was spreading through the country, a government policy informed by Aids denialism denied life-saving antiretroviral treatment to hundreds of thousands of HIV-positive people. Among these were HIV-positive pregnant women. Without treatment, the virus easily passes from mothers to their newborns.

By 2000 HIV infection of newborns had climbed to 80,000 a year. The antiretroviral drug nevirapine offered the potential of preventing the infection of up to 40,000 children a year, and was offered to the government for free for five years. The government refused. Instead, it would introduce prevention of mother-to-child-transmission (PMTCT) therapy only in pilot sites, and delay setting these up for a year – denying most mothers and their babies access to treatment.

Click image for a larger view.

In 2002 the mortality rate for children under five was 71.3 per 1,000 live births, higher than that of conflict-ridden countries such as Sudan and Afghanistan.

But 2002 was also a turning point. That year, the Treatment Action Campaign sued the Minister of Health in the High Court to demand that PMTCT therapy be provided to mothers in all state hospitals – in line with South Africans’ constitutional right to access healthcare. The High Court agreed, and the TAC won the case. The government appealed to the Constitutional Court, the highest court.

The Constitutional Court rejected the appeal. In section 135 of its judgement the court ordered the government to remove restrictions on nevirapine and make the drug available in all state hospitals and clinics, to provide HIV counsellors, and to extend testing and counselling throughout South Africa’s public health sector.

Over the next three years, through activism, international pressure and in court, the Aids denialism of the president was rolled back and antiretroviral treatment rolled out to HIV-positive people across the country. When Thabo Mbeki was recalled as president in 2008, denialism was finally abandoned.

Since then South Africa has robustly tackled the HIV pandemic, setting up the world’s largest treatment programme for its people. In March 2017 some 3.8-million people were on publicly funded antiretroviral treatment, according to the Department of Health.

Today HIV is a chronic condition, controlled as many chronic diseases are – such as diabetes – with medication.

Children like Nkosi Johnson, infected with HIV before, during or after birth, now live, flourish and grow into healthy adults – adults who live long lives.

Forty-four million people tested

Testing is a major weapon in the fight against HIV. Simply knowing they are HIV-positive makes people far less likely to risk infecting others.

In 2010, the fight against the pandemic was ramped up with the launch of the world’s biggest operation to test for infection, the HIV Counselling and Testing campaign. Since then 44-million South Africans have tested and know their HIV status. Over 10-million South Africans take the test every year.

Aids-related deaths have declined from 345,185 in 2006, when the disease claimed 49% of all deaths in the country, to 126,755 in 2017, when 25% of all deaths were Aids-related.

The transmission of the virus from mother to child during or after birth – all the potential Nkosi Johnsons – dropped from 70,000 infant infections in 2004 to fewer than 7,000 in 2015.

In 2013 fixed-dose combination antiretroviral medication was introduced, a single tablet which makes complying with treatment that much easier. In 2016 the Department of Health began to roll out treatment to anyone diagnosed as HIV positive, no matter what their CD4 count. This slows down the rate of infection.

An Aids awareness mural on the road into the township outside Beaufort West in the Western Cape. (Chris Kirchhoff, Media Club South Africa)

But HIV is a powerful enemy. There are still problems to be unearthed and tackled.

One is a worrying prevalence of new HIV infection in girls. It is estimated that some 2 000 girls and young women aged 15 to 24 are infected by HIV in South Africa every week. This is by far the highest rate of infection in any age or sex category – and one of the highest infection rates in the world.

HIV thrives in conditions of ignorance and poverty, and in situations of gender inequality. This infection rate is intertwined with other critical social problems directly experienced by South Africa’s young people: high rates of teenage pregnancy, high school drop-out rates, widespread sexual violence, and high youth unemployment.

As an effort to tackle the problem, in late June 2016 South Africa launched the National Campaign for Girls and Young Women. This aims to fight life choices that put young women at risk of HIV: unsafe sex, destructive behaviour, drug and alcohol abuse.

The campaign will involve multiple sectors of society, and work at community level. Another goal is to build young women’s confidence and resilience, and give them greater economic opportunities. It will also target men, encouraging them to help effect the crucial, fundamental change in South Africans’ sexual behaviour.

Working with NGOs and local Aids councils, the new campaign will encourage men – both young and older – to use condoms, stick to one sexual partner and not prey on young girls and women. It will task men with joining the call for safer sexual behaviour and an end to violence and the abuse of women.

The project is supported by over $140-million in funding from the US and German governments and the Global Fund. It will be rolled out over the next three years to 51 municipalities with the highest incidence of new HIV infections. At its core is the principle that our best weapon in South Africa’s new battle against HIV and Aids is education.

This is an edited version of an article ghostwritten for president Cyril Ramaphosa and published by the Daily Maverick on 13 July 2016.

Written, researched and designed by Mary Alexander.
Updated 20 January 2020.

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