‘Virgin women’ in slave market ‘somewhere in Africa’? No, video of young men in Senegalese coming-of-age ceremony

“In Africa women are being sold to the highest bidders.” That’s the start of a common caption to a video circulating on social media since late August 2023.

The video shows dozens of people huddled on the ground covered in white cloth. Men stand around and between them, talking loudly.

The caption continues: “These women won’t get reparations, unlike scrounging chancers across the west who cry about oppression whilst incidents like this are ignored. Black Lives Matter, just not these black lives aye??”

Other captions to the video include:

• How Sickening? Virgin women in a slave market to be bought and sold as Sex Slaves, somewhere in Africa.
• Black African men selling women to the highest bidder. This is not hundreds of years ago. This is today. Instead of the globalist UN bleating about “reparations” to nations that ended slavery, why don’t they focus on the rampant modern day slavery continuing in non-White nations?
• Here is a modern-day slave market in Africa. Here are black people trading other black people like animals. It has been going on for thousands of years –– well before Europeans ever set foot in Africa. You should ask yourself why your liberal friends and the mainstream media don't care about *these* black lives.
• A modern Slave Market in Africa, the location is undisclosed.

But what does the video really show?

Serer community’s Ndut ceremony filmed in 2022

The first sign that the captions are bogus is that none of them say where in Africa the slave market is supposed to exist. 

Africa is the second-largest continent after Asia. It has 55 countries, all of them different.

To find the source of the video, we took screenshots of several frames and ran them through a Google reverse image search.

One of the results was on the meme website 9GAG, under the tag Funny Senegal. Senegal is a country in West Africa, on the Atlantic Ocean.

The 9GAG post, dated 17 August, includes the video. It’s captioned: “A post blew up claiming this is slavery. ITS NOT! This is ndut dance in Senegal which is just a cultural thing for 'boys to become men'. It has nothing to do with slavery.”

A similar video was posted on TikTok in December 2022 by an account that often uses the hashtag #tiktoksenegal. In the video two men walk among the crouching people in white as drums beat and people sing. Women are among the crowd looking on.

The video is labelled, in French: “Ndout Djilass 2022. Koumakh et Kalma au devant de la scene.” This translates as: “Ndout Djilass 2022. Koumakh and Kalma take centre stage.”

That video also appears on YouTube, captioned: “Ndout Serere: Djilass perpetue la tradition.” (“Djilass continues the tradition.”)

Djilass (or Djilas) is a village in western Senegal.

The Serer are a community of more than a million people who mainly live in Senegal and the Gambia, a small country within Senegal’s borders.

The video shows the Serer’s Ndut male initiation rite, one similar to many across the world. It is a ceremony in which teenage men are recognised as adults.

The people under white cloth are young men being celebrated by their community in Senegal. They’re not women being sold in a slave market “somewhere in Africa”.