With a beaming smile and a gigantic baby bump: This is how Gosiame Thamara Sithole can be seen in a photo that has been going around the world since this week.
The 37-year-old South African from Tembisa, a poorer town between Johannesburg and Pretoria, allegedly gave birth to tens on Monday.
That has never happened before - and it would be the second sensational multiple birth within a few weeks.
It was only at the beginning of May that Halima Cisse from Mali gave birth to nine babies in a hospital in Morocco.
Claudia Bröll
Freelance Africa correspondent based in Cape Town.
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Congratulations poured in from all over the world immediately.
The news of Sithole's tenfold baby happiness was clicked hundreds of thousands of times on Internet platforms.
In South Africa, some called for a "babyshower" welcome party to raise funds.
Meanwhile, the officials in the offices in the Gauteng province are scratching their heads at a loss.
Despite allegedly intensive research, they could neither confirm nor deny the event three days later.
On Wednesday - the day after the Pretoria News announced the news - the social services agency found out that Gosiame Sithole exists and is in hospital after giving birth. But they didn't know how many babies she had given birth. Late in the evening, the provincial government announced that there had been no decent births in any state or private hospital. The Pretoria News published an appeal for donations with private bank details. The family later thanked the South Africans for their interest and good wishes. Gosiame Sithole is doing well and is overjoyed with the "ten bundles of joy".
With each passing day without official confirmation, however, doubts about the authenticity of the message grow louder. In May, 25-year-old Halima Cisse, the mother-of-nine from Mali, was brought to a clinic in Morocco at government expense that is equipped for such complex medical interventions. Ten doctors, 18 nurses and several paramedics were present at the birth by caesarean section. The tiny babies had to go to intensive care incubators because of underdeveloped organs. The pregnancy had already caused a lot of excitement in the West African country.
It is all the more astonishing that, according to reports, the december birth in South Africa went smoothly and that no doctor or hospital has so far boasted of this extraordinary achievement. On Thursday, the social services office wanted to visit mother and babies. The Guinness Book of Records is waiting to see whether the mother from Mali's newly recorded world record has actually been broken that quickly.