Mary Alexander has more than 30 years of experience in publishing, 20 of them online. She’s worked in newspaper, magazine, educational, book and online publishing in overlapping roles: writer, illustrator, researcher, editor, webmaster, designer and project manager. Her site South Africa Gateway tells the stories of South Africa and the rest of Africa in essays, data, graphics and animation.
5 June 2024 – The West African country’s new military government has ordered US forces out and welcomed Russian “military trainers”. But the photo is unrelated, taken four years ago during the Syrian civil war.
3 June 2024 – The ICC’s chief prosecutor has applied for an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu for “war crimes and crimes against humanity” in Israel’s attack on Gaza. But it’s only the first step in a long process, and no actual warrant has been issued.
South Africa is twice the size of France and five times as big as the UK. With an area of 1.2-million square kilometres, it dwarfs the countries of Europe – except Russia – but doesn’t stand up to the giants of Asia and the Americas.
22 May 2024 – A scammer’s voice has been dubbed onto a Financial Times interview with Johann Rupert. South Africa’s richest person is not promoting a scheme offering a dubious $1,000 daily return.
21 May 2024 – The agreement to better prepare the world for future pandemics is a new target of conspiracy theorists. But it’s yet to be finalised, so South Africa couldn’t have signed it.
21 May 2024 – Pharma giant AstraZeneca has acknowledged the rare side effect of its coronavirus vaccine for years. The drug has now been withdrawn simply because it can’t compete with newer and better alternatives.
20 May 2024 – The man with a noose around his neck is not Hamza Bendelladj, as fact-checkers have pointed out for years. The hacker is alive and serving his sentence in a US prison for selling malware that caused major financial harm not only to institutions, but to individual people.
20 May 2024 – Russia’s visa policy for Africa is more relaxed than those of the US and EU. But most African countries still need some kind of visa for travel to Russia.
17 May 2024 – The treaty is conspiracy theorists’ new bugaboo. But there’s been no public backlash and the voluntary agreement – still being hammered out by World Health Organization member states – hasn’t been abandoned.
15 May 2024 – The lazy social media clickbait reuses the same wording, in Afrikaans, teasing “shocking” news about local celebrities – politician Julius Malema, cricketer AB de Villiers, actor Pearl Thusi and more.
14 May 2014 – The viral graphic gets a lot wrong. The photo on the left shows Serena Williams, not Venus. The photo on the right shows French tennis champ Amelie Mauresmo, who is not trans. And there’s been no credible report of the match.
10 May 2024 – All the video shows is a small contingent of Angolan cadets, students at a military institute in southern Russia, marching in a parade competition. They won the audience award – but didn’t join the Russian army.
7 May 2024 – Photos of a student left dead in a gutter in Nigeria have been misused to score political points in Liberia.
5 May 2024 – False claims about the size and changing fortunes of African airlines have been circulating online for years. The privately owned Air Peace is doing well, but it’s not Africa’s largest.
3 May 2024 – The 2016 opening ceremony for Switzerland’s Gotthard railway tunnel has been described as more than odd. But it has nothing to do with Cern, the physics project that discovered the Higgs boson “god particle” and is hundreds of kilometres away.
2 May 2024 – If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The South African store card company RCS is not using social media to offer loans of up to R400,000 to people blacklisted from other credit.
26 April 2024 – Anti-migrant sentiment is a hot campaign issue, but the video only shows Mozambique’s electoral commission registering citizens living in South Africa to vote in their own upcoming elections.
22 April 2024 – Any claim to “cure” HIV is false. A new social media scam targeting HIV-positive people in Zambia latches onto Crispr gene editing technology, used in an exciting experiment in the search for a possible cure – but not the actual cure.
22 April 2024 – Suggesting a third world war, the claim first appeared soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. But the doom merchants were just making stuff up.
21 April 2024 – The false claim that “tonight” the Earth will “face its highest radiation” has been circulating online for well over a decade. It’s been given new life by the April 2024 total solar eclipse over Mexico, the US and Canada.
17 April 2024 – People can still get an mRNA coronavirus vaccine in Japan – they just have to pay for it. And the country’s ageing population has nothing to do with the jab.
15 April 2024 – Kenya was to lead a now-delayed international policing mission to quell gang violence in Haiti. But the X post reporting Africa’s “D-day style invasion” of the Caribbean country is not by CNN.
9 April 2024 – When Cape Town’s Democratic Alliance government erected uncovered public toilets in 2009 it sparked outrage and a lawsuit. In 2024 a photo of one is being used for disinformation in the run-up to elections.
8 April 2024 – Vladimir Putin hasn’t said anything about Jesus’s skin colour. And the false claim ignores the art of many Christian traditions – including Africa’s ancient Ethiopian church.
2 April 2024 – Bassirou Diomaye Faye has pledged to fight France’s “economic stranglehold” on Senegal. But the viral video of a man slamming the former colonial power been dubbed into English – and it shows Ousmane Sonko, not Faye.
1 April 2024 – The viral video appeared online after a spate of school kidnappings by militants in northern Nigeria. But it shows a different conflict, in Cameroon.
What’s the biggest country in Africa? What’s the most unequal? Which country has the largest economy? Which emits the most greenhouse gas? Where in Africa are gay people most welcome? Which country is the most urbanised? In 15 infographics, we explore the huge contrasts of the world’s second-largest […]
28 March 2024 – Former US president Donald Trump has not urged all South Africans to vote for the new political party in upcoming elections. The altered video was created with Parrot AI, a “celebrity voice generator”.
22 March 2024 – The World Economic Forum is often the subject of fearmongering fictions by conspiracy theorists. One example from The People’s Voice exploits worries about artificial intelligence.
22 March 2024 – The US did lift sanctions against powerful people in Zimbabwe, only to impose “new sanction tools”. And Zidera, the law that sanctions the country itself, remains.
22 March 2024 – Ethiopia’s massive hydroelectric dam could be Africa’s largest, although it’s sparked a row with Egypt over who owns the Nile. But the photo on social media shows the Tungabhadra Dam in southwestern India.
20 March 2024 – The image is not proof that Israeli and US intelligence agencies created the Islamist group. The original photo shows the soldiers holding a green and yellow flag – not the black and white flag of Isis.
18 March 2024 – It’s an election year in South Africa, and most political parties campaign mainly on local issues. Just two could be said to “stand with Israel”.
12 March 2024 – The “Nigerian drug dealer” is one of many harmful stereotypes of migrants in South Africa. But the video was shot in the West African country of Liberia.
12 March 2024 – The conspiracist website Real Raw News makes up false stories about public figures it dislikes being executed at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay. Its latest subject is the World Health Organization’s Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu.
5 March 2024 – A old online rumour that if a registered voter doesn’t turn up at the polls their vote “automatically” goes to the ruling ANC has resurfaced in another election year. But while a good voter turnout makes a better democracy, no democracy works that way.
29 February 2024 – The TikTok clip completely makes up the quote, using an edited and out of context video of Benjamin Netanyahu giving a speech in Uganda in 2016.
28 February 2024 – Western inaction against Rwanda for its role in the deadly M23 rebel conflict sparked protests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Flags and tyres were burned, but no embassy was set on fire.
Each of South Africa’s 11 languages has a fascinating vocabulary, with some words and phrases influenced by other languages, and many unique to that language.
22 February 2024 – China’s policy of “mosque consolidation” has closed or demolished hundreds of mosques in Xinjiang province. But the video wasn’t shot there.
21 February 2024 – The People’s Voice website has made up another lie, that Microsoft plans to shut down computers used to post disinformation – the site’s speciality.
20 February 2024 – There was no violence after South Africa lost to Nigeria in their Africa Cup of Nations football semifinal, despite a controversial Nigerian embassy warning. Photos used to claim otherwise are from 2019.
16 February 2024 – The viral video was shot when Ousmane Sonko was facing trial, not after Macky Sall postponed Senegalese elections “indefinitely”.
14 February 2024 – It’s being used to claim that the new party is South Africa’s “biggest”, but the clip actually shows Fuerza del Pueblo supporters in the Dominican Republic.
12 February 2024 – “Disease X” is simply a placeholder name for a possible future pandemic, used in planning a response to such an outbreak. Conspiracy theorists have hijacked the name to spread their special brand of fear.
8 February 2024 – Xenophobic posts mislabel a photo of a local oddity from Georgia – a train carriage converted into a river bridge – to sustain a harmful stereotype of Zimbabwe.
7 February 2024 – The myth of white genocide in South Africa continues to be sustained by false information. In this case, the Economic Freedom Fighters political party is blamed for an attack on a gay man on a different continent.
5 February 2024 – The woman stripped and beaten is not the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s elections commissioner. All she did was cast an unpopular vote.
Artificially generated images are a new source of disinformation. Zambia doesn’t have a mobile phone factory – yet.
South Africa’s story of HIV and Aids starts with tragic arrogance in a new democracy suddenly threatened from an unexpected direction. Then came activism and tenacity by ordinary citizens. Today, the country has one of the world’s biggest treatment programmes.
Key facts on South Africa’s currency, time, geography, population, languages, provinces, government and education.
The South African Multidimensional Poverty Index looks at how poverty reveals itself in people’s health, their level of education, the dwelling they live in, how they cook their food, the water they drink …
Nearly a third of black South Africans speak isiZulu as a first language, and 20% speak isiXhosa. Three-quarters of coloured people speak Afrikaans, and 86% of Indian South Africans speak English. Sixty percent of white people speak Afrikaans, and 30% speak English.
South Africa has held three official censuses in its recent democratic history: in 1996, 2001 and 2011. The censuses have revealed both a growing population – from 41 million to 52 million – and a significant shift in the country’s racial profile.
The Eastern Cape is South Africa’s poorest province, both in its percentage of poor households and the number of its people who live in poverty. The province with the smallest share of households in poverty is the Western Cape.
Black men have the shortest lives, and white women the longest. Find out more about the country’s population structure with this infographic charting the realities of age, race and sex in South Africa.
The death rate of children is the starkest indicator of the health of a country’s society and economy. In 1974 South Africa’s mortality rate – deaths per 1,000 live births – was 88.1 for infants under a year and 125.5 for under-fives. By 2016 it had dropped to 34.2 for infants and 43.3 for under-fives.
In 2024 South Africa had a population of 63 million. Black people were the majority at 51.5 million – 81.7% of the total. There were 5.3 million coloured people (8.5%), 4.5-million white people (7.2%) and 1.6-million Indian/Asian people (2.6%).
Life on Earth needs oxygen to survive, right? Maybe not. A South African scientist and his colleagues have discovered the remains of giant bacteria that flourished on our planet billions of years ago – breathing sulphur.
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