Footage showing aftermath of 2021 looting in South Africa shared out of context

“This is Durban, South Africa. This is what decolonization looks like (sic),” reads an X post shared more than 23,000 times since March 5, 2025.

“A glimpse into the future of the West, particularly Europe if nothing changes,” it adds.

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A screenshot of the misleading X post, taken on March 6, 2025

The post includes footage from a TikTok video that appears to be shot from inside a moving car. The 60-second clip shows streets in a city centre covered in trash.

A caption on the TikTok video reads: “This is the situation in Durban town right now.”

Durban is a city on South Africa’s east coast.

The timeline from the X account is riddled with discriminatory, anti-foreigner rhetoric. Some of the X user's March 2025 posts have also been endorsed by South African-born billionaire Elon Musk — who owns the social media platform and is an advisor to US President Donald Trump.

A reply to the post claims that “Durban is how White erasure looks when Whites are no longer in control of our environment,” while others responded with racist memes praising colonialism, implying South Africa’s streets would look different under white rule — a popular narrative among far-right supporters globally (archived here).

Colonial history

In an article on September 23, 2024, labour law scholar Marthinus van Staden wrote that racial segregation in South Africa began with Dutch and British colonisation and worsened after discoveries of gold and diamonds in the 1880s (archived here). 

Pass laws then restricted the movement of black people, and the 1913 Natives Land Act limited their ownership of land, forcing many into cheap labour or reserves. 

This led to forced removals and deepened segregation, which was reinforced by later laws expanding urban segregation and native reserves.

Apartheid, as the racist system of government was known, ended in 1994 when South Africa held its first democratic elections (archived here).

While the video in the post does show scenes from Durban, the footage was filmed after a bout of unrest in 2021.

Deadly riots

Reverse image searches of keyframes from the clip found the same footage published here and here in July 2021 when a week of violent unrest in parts of South Africa, including Durban, left more than 350 people dead (archived here). 

Apart from a difference in quality, the clips circulating in 2021 and 2025 are identical. 

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Screenshot comparisons of the same 60-second clip on posts in 2021 (left) and in posts circulating in 2025

A search of the TikTok account “@affe78”, as seen watermarked on the older videos, found no videos about South Africa.

Using the names of the stores visible in the videos, AFP Fact Check geolocated the area to West Street in Durban’s bustling central business district (archived here).

The Google Maps Street View of West Street, captured as recently as November 2024, shows a busy but fairly orderly road without the rampant litter seen in the viral video. 

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Screenshots matching the stores in the misleading video posts (left) with the street on Google Maps

July 2021 unrest

In the aftermath of the looting, about 50 billion rand ($2.7 billion) in damage was incurred, and millions of jobs were affected.

The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) described it as a “violent culmination of deep-rooted political and social challenges” (archived here).

The violence, exacerbated by frustration over poverty, inequality, and the economic impact of Covid-19 restrictions, broke out in the same week South Africa’s former president, Jacob Zuma, surrendered to authorities. 

Zuma had been sentenced for defying a constitutional court order to give evidence at an inquiry investigating high-level corruption during his nine years in office until 2018.

However, the SAHRC concluded the two events were coincidental. 

The misleading posts are circulating in the thick of a diplomatic row between South Africa and the United States after Trump falsely accused South Africa’s government of illegally confiscating land from white farmers, culminating in the expulsion of South Africa's ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool (archived here and here). 

Earlier this year, the African Union classified “slavery, deportation and colonisation as crimes against humanity and acts of genocide perpetrated against African peoples” (archived here).