When Success Needs Explaining: The misogynoir hidden in a headline
Headlines & Heartbeats with Afrodiva
Sometimes bias hides in what an editor decided was the most important truth about a person.
Last week, MyBroadband published this headline:
“South African tech CEO who makes R32.75-million a year started at an iconic frozen fish business and barely knew any English at school.”
The subject is Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa, CEO of Naspers.
Read it again.
Not “CEO of Naspers.” Not “One of Africa’s most accomplished corporate executives.”
Not “Veteran investment banker and business leader.”
Instead, readers are invited to marvel at the distance between a fish counter and a R32.75 million salary—as though the salary itself requires an origin story to make sense of it. As though someone needs to explain how she got there.
That has preoccupied my mind ever since.
What the headline left out
It was very easy to find—let me tell you who Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa actually is—because the headline didn’t.
Before becoming CEO of Naspers, she had already built one of the most substantive careers in South African corporate life. She led Shanduka Group as CEO. She co-founded Sigma Capital. She served as Vice President at Fieldstone Africa. She holds a finance degree from Rutgers University, an MBA, and has completed executive education at Harvard. Across decades, she accumulated deep expertise in finance, investment, governance, and executive leadership.
Those aren’t just mere background details; they are the qualifications. They are the reason she leads one of Africa’s largest multinational technology companies, yet none of them made the headline. What made the headline was the frozen fish business and the English.
The architecture of misogynoir
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I want to be fair: the headline isn’t fabricated. Phuthi has spoken proudly about her time at Irvin & Johnson. She has talked about arriving at school with limited English, as millions of South African children do, educated first in their mother tongue in a country with eleven official languages. So the issue is not the facts but what the facts are being used to do.
In media coverage, misogynoir rarely announces itself with slurs; instead, it works through narrative choices, as well as through what gets centered and what gets left out. White male CEOs are routinely introduced by their strategy, vision, and the empires they built; meanwhile, Black women are more likely to be introduced through improbability.
She came from humble beginnings. She overcame impossible odds. She barely spoke English. She worked in a fish factory.
The achievement is made inspirational before it is allowed to be professional. And inspiration, however well-intentioned, carries a subtle implication: that the success was unexpected and that it requires accounting for.
Ask yourself honestly: would MyBroadband have written this about a white male CEO?
“Executive who runs South Africa’s largest company struggled with Afrikaans in primary school.”
“CEO who earns R40 million once packed shelves after school.”
Of course not. Because those details would be treated as charming biographical color — the kind of humanizing backstory that makes a powerful person relatable. They would not explain why he earns what he earns. But for Black women, humble beginnings are persistently framed as the central feature of the story, the thing that makes the success make sense. As though without the context of where she started, the destination would be somehow implausible.
A word about the English
The phrase “barely knew any English” deserves its own moment. In the headline, it serves as shorthand for overcoming disadvantage. But growing up speaking isiZulu, Sesotho, Setswana, isiXhosa, Tshivenda, or any of South Africa’s other indigenous languages is not evidence of deficiency. It is evidence of being South African in a country whose education system still treats English as the language of intelligence and opportunity—and treats everything else as something to rise above.
The headline didn’t mean to say that multilingual Black children start behind. But it did. And that particular assumption — English equals competence, everything else is an obstacle — says far more about our inherited hierarchies than it does about Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa.
The story we should be telling
Here is what I kept coming back to: why do we still feel the need to explain why a Black woman earns at that level? Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa is not a miracle nor an against-the-odds story. She is a highly credentialed, deeply experienced executive who spent decades building the kind of track record that leads to the corner office at a company the size of Naspers. The fish business and the English are not the story; they are interesting footnotes.
A headline tells you what an editor believes the story is. This one tells you that a Black woman’s origins are more compelling than her qualifications, even when discussing compensation. That her salary is more remarkable than her leadership. That the arc from fish counter to boardroom is the point, rather than the two decades of exceptional work that actually got her there. That is the quiet, persistent work of misogynoir. Not loud enough to provoke outrage but just consistent enough, repeated enough, and normalized enough to slowly shape what we expect from people who look like her—and what we find surprising.
The better headline was always simpler:
“Naspers CEO Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa earns R32.75 million leading one of Africa’s largest technology companies.”
No explanation needed, no origin story required, and no distance to marvel at. Just a woman, her work, and the position she earned. We should practice becoming comfortable telling that story first because it’s the only story that was ever really there.
Headlines & Heartbeats with Afrodiva—because the stories we choose and the way we tell them shape what the world comes to believe is possible.
