New Delhi: Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a video has recently surfaced on the Internet that has taken netizens around the world on a roller-coaster ride. The video shows a man from the Maasai tribe attacking people for defying curfew and coming out on the streets of Kenya.
A WhatsApp message being circulated along with the video claims: “The Kenyan government uses the Maasai tribe for the curfew decision after the police failed to implement it because people are not afraid of the police, (Massai tribe don’t consider a man as a brave one Without killing a lion with his spear) so the government asked their leader to bring his men to the cities and implement the curfew, within 24 hrs, not a single ant was seen in the street.”
EastMojo’s factchecking team swung into action to verify the claims of the video and did a few reverse image searches with screenshots of the video taken at random timestamps and found the original video on YouTube uploaded by n user named MBUZI SELLER on April 2, 2020.
If you notice closely, the 30-second clip going viral on internet also has the name MBUZI SELLER watermarked on the upper left hand corner of the video. After looking into the other videos uploaded by MBUZI SELLER on YouTube, it was pretty much clear that this channel makes pranks and funny videos in Kenya. The original video of 7 minutes and 34 seconds in duration was also categorised under the ‘Entertainment’ section by the uploader.
Here is the original video:
The video title written in Swahili says “ SHERIA YA CORONA ONE METER”, which means “one metre corona law”, when translated to English.
In the video uploaded by MBUZI SELLER, the Masaai man was in fact pranking others by attempting to beat up the crowd and was heard repeatedly appealing people to maintain a distance of 1 metre among themselves in the wake of coronavirus pandemic. So, it is safe to say that the video that is being ciruclated on Internet is in fact a prank video made to educate people on maintaining a distance of 1 metre among themselves and is NOT a video of Maasai men ordered by the Kenyan government to beat up people for violating curfew.
If you come across any such videos and want us to check the authenticity of the claims in the video, email us the video and all the details to editor@eastmojo.com and we will factcheck them for you.
