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An old video is claimed to show the deceased British monarch throwing money or food at poor children, but this is clearly false.
The viral video clip did the rounds on various social media platforms, including in Namibian social media spaces, in the days and weeks after Queen Elizabeth II died on 8 September 2022.
The colourised 30 second video shows a woman in a white dress and wearing a hat apparently tossing coins at people hunched and scrambling to pick up the coins from the ground. There are two other women in the video, one in the background and another one, also in white, to the right of the woman in the centre of the footage. The other women also appear to be tossing coins or morsels of food at the people.
Following is one of many Twitter posts that spread the claim:
The post goes on to state that:
“This is what Queen Elizabeth II was doing to black people,demonizing them,so disheartening.anyway she can’t rest bcos she’s in hell as Queen of incessant suffering.”
Here’s another post claiming the woman in the video is the deceased British queen:
The facts
The video does not show Queen Elizabeth II tossing coins or food at poor Africans or other dark-skinned people.
It is in fact a footage recorded in what was once French Indochina, but now Vietnam.
A Wikimedia post created on 30 October 2017 describes the scene depicted in the video as follows:
“Still from a film made by Gabriel Veyre, in French Indochina (current Vietnam), between April 1899 and March 1900. It depicts two women (wife and daughter of Governor-General Paul Doumer) throwing small coins in front of Annamite children. Item number 1274 in the Lumière film catalog.”
As the Wikimedia post indicates, the time period depicted in the video is from well before Queen Elizabeth II was even born.
The footage that has been misleadingly used in the viral claims about Queen Elizabeth II can be viewed here.
The claim about the video depicting Queen Elizabeth II degrading and humiliating dark-skinned colonial subjects was debunked by fact checkers around the world.