A claim that a cultural practice in Namibia which requires a bachelor to be seduced by the sisters of his intending bride has resurfaced on X.
The claim was posted alongside a 20-second footage by an X user, @Africa_Archives.
In the video, two women could be seen twerking on top of a man while songs and drums were playing in the background.
The caption on the post read:
This is a cultural practice in Namibia. A bachelor is seduced by the sisters of his intending bride. If he is aroused, the marriage will not go on because they claim he will cheat on his wife Your comments on this.
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The post has garnered more than 13 million views with over 47,000 likes and more than 4,800 reposts. It has also gotten over 2,600 comments and 24,000 bookmarks as of June 5.
The same footage was posted by another X user, @madvidss, with the same claim here.
CLAIM
Video shows a cultural practice in Namibia.
THE FINDINGSÂ
Findings by The FactCheckHub show that the claim is MISLEADING!
When the video was subjected into keyframes analysis using INVID weverify and Google reverse image search, the results show there exists an earlier version of the footage on YouTube.
A look at the YouTube video shows that it is the same video in circulation and it was a compilation of videos from a music festival in Uganda called Nyege Nyege. It was uploaded in 2019 by Value Farm, a farm management company in Uganda.
The Nyege Nyege Music Festival is a four-day electronic music festival held annually in Jinja, Uganda. It features a diverse line-up of artists from Africa and around the world, showcasing a wide range of genres, including techno, house, kuduro, and afrobeat etc.
Further online search using the keywords ‘Namibia Cultural Practice Bachelor’ shows that the claim had been previously debunked in 2021 by AFP fact-check when it first surfaced on the internet.
Another keyword search on the words ‘Namibia Traditional marriage rites for bachelors’ led our fact-checker to a peer reviewed article on intech.open titled “Marriage Practices of the Masubiya: Past and Present.”
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In a part of the journal, it noted that before the encounter with Europeans, it was customary for a man to marry a child by making arrangements with the parents of the child while she was still in the mother’s womb or too young to marry. When a girl received her first menstruation (kufulumana), she was kept in isolation (chikenge) for some period of time where she would be taught a lot of things. This often resulted in young girls marrying men twice their age. These practices are now uncommon.
THE VERDICTÂ
The claim that the video shows a cultural practice in Namibia is MISLEADING; the video was taken at the Nyege Nyege music festival held in Uganda in 2019.
Seasoned fact-checker and researcher Fatimah Quadri has written numerous fact-checks, explainers, and media literacy pieces for The FactCheckHub in an effort to combat information disorder. She can be reached at sunmibola_q on X or [email protected].
