An image circulating widely on South African social media in April 2026 shows late president Nelson Mandela posing with a bespectacled grey-haired man and a young child, both in suit and tie. The posts claim the man is billionaire philanthropist George Soros and the child Geordin Hill-Lewis. 

Hill-Lewis was elected as the leader of the Democratic Alliance, the second largest political party in South Africa, in April.

The posts, which appeared on X and Facebook, include variations of the claim, with many also positing that the image suggests long-standing involvement in or manipulation of South African politics by Soros. 

But there is no evidence that the child in the image is Hill-Lewis. Here’s what Africa Check found.

Democratic transition and conspiracy theories 

Some versions of the post claim that the image shows ‘DA Leader Geordin Hills-Lewis and Nelson Mandela at Oppenheimer’s House in 1997’, and appear to imply that Hill-Lewis’s election to DA leader is somehow part of a larger plan stitched together during South Africa’s transition to democracy in the 1990s. 

“Codesa arrangements are playing right before our eyes. Ignorant as we are, everything will continue going according to their plan,” the posts warn.  

Other posts come to similar conclusions, reposting the image with the same text and adding that the African National Congress are ‘puppets’. (The ANC is  South Africa’s largest political party. It was led by Mandela until 1997. Mandela was the country’s first democratically elected president from 1994 to 1999.)

Others take it further, invoking anti-semitic conspiracy theories that have long targeted Soros, often using the term ‘globalist’. This has become a reference to a conspiracy theory around supposed Jewish control of global economic and political power structures. 

Unpacking this requires exploring South Africa’s political context briefly. In the early 1990s, the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) was a formal negotiating process for the transition to a democratic South Africa after decades of apartheid, a system that enforced white minority rule. 

Soros has a history of supporting various political, human rights and social justice causes through Open Society Foundations (OSF). And he did have a connection to South Africa in this period, but through philanthropy and civil society support. 

In 1979, Soros established a scholarship programme for black South Africans and in 1987 he funded a dialogue between South African business and political leaders ‘seeking to dismantle the apartheid system’, according to OSF. 

(Disclaimer: Open Society Foundations was previously one of Africa Check’s funding partners.) 

Alexander Soros likely the child in photo

In a 2018 article on the OSF website, George Soros’s son, Alexander Soros, reflected on his father’s involvement in South Africa in the 1990s and describes meeting Mandela in the early 1990s .

In a video linked to the article, Alexander says of his father in this period that “Mandela asked him to give him some thoughts about how to reform the South African economy and make it more inclusive but also stable, and my father provided him with his own views.”

The video includes two images of George Soros and Mandela speaking, in which Soros appears to be wearing the same suit and tie as in the circulating image. 

While we could not find other publicly accessible images of Alexander around that time, we did trace one of the other similar images of Soros and Mandela back to Greg Marinovich, a photographer with an extensive archive of photos, including of Mandela and Soros around that time. 

And according to the OSF, this was taken on April 1, 1994 in Cape Town, with Marinovich credited as the photographer. At the time, Alexander, born in October 1985, would have been nine years old, which appears consistent with the age of the child in the image. (Soros is just over a year older than Hill-Lewis, who was born in December 1986.) 

As for the circulating image, the earliest source we found was Alexander Soros himself in July 2025, who posted the same image on his official Facebook page with the caption: “On Nelson Mandela Day, we celebrate one of the world’s great heroes. He and my father shared a special friendship and strong belief in open society – something I cherished witnessing in my youth.” 

The same image also appeared in an article about Soros from New York Magazine.  

All this points to Alexander Soros being the boy in the image. As for Hill-Lewis, we could not find verified images of him at the same age, or any other evidence linking him to Soros or Mandela at the time the image would have been taken.

“This report was written by Africa Check, a non-partisan fact-checking organisation. View the original piece on their website.”

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