Naspers South Africa chief executive officer Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa has cemented herself as one of South Africa’s most successful businesspeople.
“When I arrived at McAuley House, I barely knew how to speak English, and my school friends, whom I had to fit in with, lived in a world that was really foreign to me,” Mahanyele-Dabengwa recalled in“My school friends used to invite me to birthday parties at venues that didn’t accept black people back then, so arrangements had to be made for me to be there every day when I went home to Soweto, my reality was very clear to me, that my life was very different to that of my school friends,” she...
Shortly thereafter, she started her university life at Douglass College at Rutgers University in the United States. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Economics in 1993 and, in 1996, earned an MBA from De Montfort University. The group was founded in 2001 by Ramaphosa—then sitting outside of politics and firmly in his business era.After holding the top position at Shanduka for over 11 years, Mahanyele-Dabengwa resigned from the company in 2015—the year Ramaphosa sold off his shareholding to the Phembani Group, and the two firms merged.