IN SHORT: A video which appears to show Zandile Dabula, leader of South African anti-migrant group Operation Dudula, saying her parents are from Zimbabwe, has been circulating online. However, the video is just a convincing fake.
Operation Dudula is a controversial South African anti-migrant group and associated political party. It claims to oppose undocumented migration to South Africa, but has indiscriminately targeted and attacked all migrants, particularly from other African countries.
Members of the group have also forcibly prevented people who did not provide South African identity documents from accessing healthcare services. In 2025, a one-year-old child died after Operation Dudula members reportedly prevented the child’s mother from accessing a clinic in Johannesburg, a city in South Africa’s Gauteng province. The group denied the allegation.
So it may be surprising to hear Operation Dudula leader Zandile Dabula saying that her parents are Zimbabwean, as she appears to in a video circulating on TikTok, Instagram and X.
Keep up with the latest headlines on WhatsApp | LinkedIn
The video seems to show Dabula standing in a street, saying to someone off camera: “Yes, my parents are from Zimbabwean, but I was born in South Africa and that makes me a South African.”
One of the guiding principles of spotting false information is: “If it sounds too shocking to be true, it probably isn’t.” This claim was so surprising that Africa Check took a closer look at the video and found that it’s likely a deepfake.
AI-generated video, based on old photo
The video is very convincing, at least at first glance. But a closer look reveals visual inconsistencies and errors, suggesting it may have been created or altered with artificial intelligence (AI) tools. For example, there are visual errors around Dabula’s mouth, where her lips and teeth blend or change shape throughout the video.
Background elements also include visual errors. For example, bystanders in the background are unusually still, sometimes blend unnaturally into other background elements, or appear to be surrounded and trailed by indistinct, blurry blobs. These errors are easy to overlook because they are small, subtle and often present for only a few frames at a time.
Below are the cropped and slowed portions of the video, which make it easier to spot some of these errors.
AI-generated videos have become much more convincing since the technology first became publicly available, as Africa Check wrote in this article on the advances in Google’s Veo AI video-generation software. Veo 3, the third version of the tool, can generate convincing short video clips with synchronised sound from a single still image.
In fact, this video may have been generated by Veo. The longest version of the video shared online is just eight seconds, the upper limit for Veo videos. It also appears to be based on a photograph of Dabula published in an August 2024 article by the Daily Sun newspaper. The article was about Operation Dudula’s attempts to forcibly close shops owned by migrants in Soweto, a township in Johannesburg. In the photo, Dabula seems to be speaking to someone out of frame, while background elements and her clothing match those in the video.
Africa Check contacted Nhlanhla Khomola, the author of the Daily Sun article, who was credited with taking the photograph of Dabula. Khomola said she did not know about the video. Africa Check found no evidence that the circulating clip was legitimate or that Dabula’s parents are from Zimbabwe, suggesting the video was not an interview conducted around the time the Daily Sun article was published.
The video of Dabula was likely generated by Google’s Veo or a similar model from an old photo. Some of the earliest versions of the video posted to X even have the 16:9 aspect ratio typical of Veo. The bottom-right corner of the video, where a Veo watermark would appear, is covered with an emoji.
However, even if the video was not generated specifically with Veo, there is no reason to believe it is authentic.
No evidence that Dabula is Zimbabwean, or born to Zimbabwean parents
The head of a prominent anti-migrant organisation having foreign-born parents would be surprising and newsworthy. If Dabula had revealed this in an interview or if there was other evidence to support the claim, it would have been widely reported by reliable sources.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
Not only is there no reliable evidence to support the claim, but Dabula has also only ever told the media that she is South African in response to questions about her heritage. In September 2025, she denied claims that she was born in Zimbabwe and called herself “a bona fide citizen” of South Africa.
Meanwhile, claims that Dabula’s parents are Zimbabwean have only been shared by unknown or unreliable sources and are short on details. None of them explains when or where the video of Dabula was meant to have been recorded, or who she was supposedly talking to.
Whether you are verifying the authenticity of an image or video, fact-checking a breaking news story, or deciding whether to forward a WhatsApp message, it is helpful to look for the original source of a claim and compare it to what trusted news sources have reported.
The subtle clues that this video is AI-generated are easy to miss, but basic verification skills are enough to reveal that the video does not come from a trustworthy source.
