French-Algerian Cyclist Who Biked Across Africa Says Viral Chase Clip Was Taken Out of Context
A clip of adventurer Meryem Belkihel apparently being chased during her three-year solo cycle across Africa went massively viral worldwide, but she stepped forward to explain the footage was misleading and the encounter posed no threat.
Meryem Belkihel, a French-Algerian adventurer who documents her journeys online under the name Meghy Lost, spent three years cycling from Morocco to Ethiopia. A short clip from the trip, filmed in Kenya's Samburu region in August 2025 near the end of her journey, resurfaced and went viral worldwide in mid-to-late October 2026, appearing to show her being chased across a dirt road by a man carrying what many commenters assumed was a machete. The clip prompted alarmed and sometimes hostile reactions about Kenya and about solo travel in Africa more broadly. Belkihel came forward to correct the record: the man was a member of the local Samburu community and was carrying a traditional wooden stick, not a machete, and the encounter was not the threat it appeared to be. She said the moment had been stripped of its context and that her overall three-year experience cycling across the continent had been overwhelmingly positive. CNN covered her story on October 20, 2026, interviewing Belkihel and reporting how widely the miscontextualised clip had spread. The case became a widely discussed example of how social media strips context from travel footage and generates unfair narratives about specific communities. The story continued to circulate and prompt debate about online misinformation through the final week of October, with the Sunday Guardian Live among outlets republishing her account.
