IN SHORT: A widely shared image of a man with a machine gun has been used to stoke xenophobic tensions in South Africa multiple times, including by a prominent politician. But it appears it was taken in a contested area of Somalia in 2023, and not in South Africa.
“A Somalian armed with LMG for community in Naledi” begins the message accompanying a photo of a man walking through a street holding a hand-held machine-gun and a belt of ammunition.
Naledi is an area of Soweto, within Johannesburg, South Africa. In October 2024, an incident of suspected food poisoning, possibly contamination of food with pesticides, led to the deaths of six children. This was blamed on food sold by a shop owned by an Ethiopian national. The shop has since been looted, and local authorities have called for calm amid reports of other foreign-owned shops being targeted.
South Africa has a history of xenophobic violence, and international human rights experts have warned several times that the scapegoating of migrants for issues in the country encourages continued discrimination and violence.
This is the context in which the photograph of the man with the machine gun was shared on Facebook, X and WhatsApp, where it was forwarded to Africa Check. But the claim that it was taken in Naledi, Soweto is false.
Here are the facts.
False claim previously amplified by South African politician
The South African Police Services (SAPS) issued a statement on 11 October which read, in part: “Soweto, specifically Naledi policing precinct has had high police visibility since the beginning of the week. Patrols have been intensified in the area and it is unlikely that a person carrying such a weapon could walk the streets without being noticed by the police as well as the community.”
SAPS encouraged social media users “to refrain from spreading such false information as that could instil panic in the community and cause unnecessary tensions”.
But this isn’t a new claim. It was shared on social media, minus the detail that it was supposedly taken in Naledi, in July 2023 and repeated in July 2024.
Gayton McKenzie, head of the political party the Patriotic Alliance, was responsible for much of the attention the claim received in July 2023. He posted the photo on X and wrote “the sooner we deport the better”. This post has been viewed nearly 900 000 times. An identical post on his official Facebook page has been shared over 700 times.
McKenzie and his party have been repeatedly accused of promoting and taking political advantage of xenophobic rhetoric. McKenzie is currently the subject of a criminal hate speech complaint related to comments encouraging South African hospitals to deny treatment to foreigners.
(McKenzie became South Africa’s minister of sport, arts and culture in July 2024.)
Many social media users responded to McKenzie in July 2023, to point out that the photograph had reportedly been taken in Somalia earlier that year. McKenzie does not appear to have corrected the false posts.
A reverse image search confirmed that the photograph was not recent, and supported the suggestion that it was taken in Somalia. The oldest version of the image Africa Check found was posted on Facebook in January 2023. This post claims that it was taken in the Somali city of Las Anod, referring to it by its Somali name Laascaanood.
This context can be confirmed with a little extra investigation.
Photograph certainly from disputed Somali city of Las Anod
Las Anod is a city in a region of Somalia that is claimed by two self-declared autonomous states, Somaliland and Puntland. Las Anod itself has seen intense battles for control, particularly in 2023 when – as we will demonstrate – the photo was taken. Since late 2023, it has been controlled by a third group called SSC-Khaatumo, aligned with the Somali state.
The two biggest clues as to where the photo was taken are a distinctive yellow building, and a telecommunications tower visible in the background.
There are several similar towers on the hills around Las Anod, but the best visual match is this tower. The man in the photo is also walking on a tarred road, narrowing down the search significantly to one of Las Anod’s tarred main roads. Satellite imagery seems to show a yellow building on this main road, which would be consistent with the photograph having been taken just east of the building, facing the telecommunications tower to the west.
Photos of the outside of the building, a hotel, do not match the yellow building visible in the image of the man with the gun. But, according to a Facebook page sharing local news, the hotel officially opened in February 2024, so it is possible that the building was renovated or rebuilt before this date. In drone footage of Las Anod uploaded to YouTube in 2021, the building is absent.
Just up the road from the building is this local landmark, listed on Google Maps as “Taalada Shuhadada”, a Somali phrase which, according to machine translation, means “Statue of Martyrs”. With some digital digging, Africa Check found photos taken at the landmark and posted online in 2023, including several taken facing to the east. These show the yellow building as it appears in the photograph shared on Facebook.
A final piece of evidence, the shadows visible in the image, are consistent with the photo being taken in the morning of 3 January, the date the image was posted to Facebook. The shadows are not clear enough to confirm the exact date and time that the image was posted, but because they fall to the north, this rules out much of the year. As demonstrated by the free tool SunCalc, from around April until September, shadows at this location would be overhead or fall to the south for the entire day, briefly falling west or east during sunrise or sunset.
In 2022, protests against the separatist Somaliland government, which controlled Las Anod at the time, erupted into violence. Fighting would escalate into a war between Somaliland and SSC-Khaatumo forces in February 2023 and continue until August of that year.
Verify before sharing!
It is extremely likely that the photo was taken in the city very near the date it was posted (3 January), amid increasing violence and political unrest.
The false claim that the image was taken in South Africa was popularised by Gayton McKenzie six months later (July 2023), reposted at least one separate time a year after that (July 2024), and then repeated in the context of rising xenophobic tensions in Naledi in October 2024. Each time it was shared, there was plenty of evidence available online to prove that the claim was false.
It is vital to verify information before sharing it and publicly correct yourself if you do accidentally share false information – everyone makes mistakes! This claim demonstrates how unchecked false information can encourage xenophobic rhetoric, and obscure discussion of the original, important and politically complicated, context.
