Tiffany Haddish Defends Herself After Being Surprised Zimbabwe Has Grocery Stores, Social Media Rips Her

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I f you haven’t gotten wind of it by now, actress and comedian Tiffany Haddish has been getting dragged across social media after recording a video of her visit to a grocery store in Zimbabwe, during which she appeared to be surprised that a regular-degular grocery store existed in Africa. Apparently, the Girls Trip actor was surprised that her video expressing her surprise that a store in Africa has basic food items like organic strawberries, meat, frozen food, sanitary products, trash bags, cornflakes and pet food wasn’t received well, particularly, by citizens of Africa. Now, Haddish is defending her video as a testimony that “we have been lied to” about how primitive Africa is. In other words, she was trying to point out American ignorance by — *checks notes* —demonstrating American ignorance.

“Look at this grocery store. It’s huge! It’s absolutely humongous. In Africa, baby. Yeah. Believe it, believe it, believe it, believe it. Africa. Zimbabwe. Uh-huh,” Haddish is heard saying in the video.

Maybe Haddish didn’t hear the condescension in her own voice when she said in a congratulatory tone, “They got a grocery store!” and marveled at how “beautiful” and “humongous” the visibly normal-sized store was. Maybe it really was all a big joke meant to mock the way Americans view the continent of Africa. Either way, people weren’t feeling it, which put Haddish where she often finds herself: in defense mode.

From Entertainment Weekly :

“I am an American a Black one at that and Told for years that people are starving in Africa, showed pictures of babies with flies on them,” she wrote on X . “Told crazy stories of how they kill each other and there is war everyday there.”

Of her trip to Zimbabwe, she added, “I asked my Black friends to go with me and they were scared. We got here and I have been eyes full of tears finding out the truth. The media be lying. I thought I would share cause I know people in the USA that believe Africans don’t have anything.”

In several additional posts, Haddish expanded on her desire to shut down misconceptions about Africa, and pointed out that the heavily-circulated clip is only a fraction of the full video.

“If they would have showed you the whole video you would have seen me say I am demystifying some bulls— that we have been told and showed in America,” she wrote .

The full video does show Haddish saying, “I just like demystifying sh*t.” Still, her video doesn’t exactly make it clear that’s what she was doing. She just came off like an ignorant American tourist doing ignorant American tourist sh*t, which is why folks on X were pretty ruthless in their responses.

Check out some of the reactions to her video below.