Oprah Is Or Is Not The Richest Black Woman In The World

Earlier this month, the Internet reported that Oprah was no longer the richest black woman in the world. Meet Nigeria’s Forlounsho Alakija.

Alakija’s networth is estimated to be about 300 million dollars more than Winfrey’s and that gap is pretty hefty. Forlounsho’s immense wealth can be attributed to her high-end label, Supreme Stitches, and her oil-exploration license.

Want to know more? I did! According to Time:

The 62-year-old started her career as a secretary at the erstwhile Merchant Bank of Nigeria, but moved to England in the early 1980s to study fashion design. She then returned to her native country and set up a high-end label called Supreme Stitches.

Although she amassed some wealth from the label, a significant proportion of Alakija’s fortune comes from an oil-exploration license granted to her company Famfa Ltd. in 1993. The 617,000-acre oil block would go on to become the highly lucrative OML 127, in which Alakija’s family retains a 60% stake.

Today, Forbes puts Alakija’s net worth at $2.5 billion, making her one of the richest people in Africa, alongside Angola’s Isabel dos Santos.* (Note: of the top 10 richest people in Africa, 9/10 are male and 7/10 look like they’d fit right in at St. Andrews.) That doesn’t seem to exceed the spending power of Lady O, though, whose fortune Forbes estimates at $3 billion. Hm. I guess Oprah caught up fast? Never underestimate a woman who gives away cars for fun.

Forbes also mentions that Alakija is one of 52 children. And you thought you were scrunched up in the backseat of your parents’ car! In these times of extreme and ever widening income inequality along racial lines, when 80 Daddy Warbucks types have as much wealth as 50% of the rest of the world combined, it can be heartening to read about self-made, successful entrepreneurs around the world. Here is an article on Fortune, for example, about the prevalence of women overcoming discrimination to make bank in China.

if American women have been historically tepid about embracing a get-rich culture, women in post-Mao China haven’t been shy at all.

In China, where “the ethos of the last 30 years is that to get rich is glorious, that instinct is gender neutral,” Osnos tells me. “I never encountered a sense [among women] of being inhibited about wanting to get rich. One of the measurements they have for themselves is the financial success of their companies and themselves.” …

Osnos prefers to go beyond the numbers to tell us the human story — like that of Gong Hainan, born small and sickly in a rural village, her leg and face later crushed in a tractor accident. Despite all that, Gong couldn’t repress her entrepreneurial gene. As a child, she bought and resold ice pops to villagers, mapping out a route of likely buyers and noting, “Whatever you do, you have to be strategic.”

Startling factoid: “Half of the world’s self-made female billionaires are Chinese.” Just how many self-made female billionaires are there? 28. So 14 of them are from the mainland. Maybe there’s something to the Tiger Mom thing after all.

Anyway, hopefully this is the kind of story we can expect to read more about from the amazing Roxane Gay, who has apparently cloned herself, Tilda Swinton-style, once more, so that she will also be able to write a column called “Beyond the Workplace.” Welcome to the beat, Roxane!

* Not sure why Isabel dos Santos doesn’t qualify as the richest black woman in the world with her holdings of $3.7 billion; I guess she must not identify as black? Her father is Angolan (the President-for-Life of Angola, in fact), her mother is Russian, and her story seems fascinating.

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