Madame Noire | Black Women's Lifestyle Guide | Black Hair | Black Love

If any of you watched last night’s episode of the “Real Housewives of Atlanta” maybe you can tell me what was going on because for the last 7 minutes or so I had no idea.

Apparently amongst all of the yelling, screaming, and awkward sound effects between her and Sheree, she threw a shot commenting on Sheree’s gay friend whose party she wasn’t invited to, saying:

“Well anyway, that’s why you don’t have a man. Go and hang with them f*****s with your ugly ass.”

Today she wrote an apology on her website stating that immediately after the incident she reached out to her close friend and assistant to apologize for her language and that she looks forward to continuing to build support with the gay community. You can read the full letter on the YBF, but here’s a snippet:

“I would like to offer from the bottom of my heart the fullest and most heartfelt apology for my recent use of an anti-gay slur. When I used this word, I was not mindful of the demeaning connotation that this has in the gay community. My speech was irresponsible, thoughtless and said with the intention of conveying anger rather than as a statement on my feelings towards the gay community as a whole…

“I applaud and admire this community for their triumph over a sometimes harsh, mean spirited society that discriminates and even violently attacks those who are different. These are obstacles that I relate to and that I have been inspired by them to overcome. I celebrate this community and am saddened by any indication otherwise, that my actions may have caused…”

Maybe at some point she can get around to apologizing to black women too because she was an absolute mess on last night’s show. Still, it’s good she saw the error of her ways and quickly corrected it when it came to the gay community.

Check out a clip of the argument here. Did you watch last night’s episode? Who do you think is wrong, Marlo or Sheree?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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South Africa’s Simone Besterfield is making moves in online fashion and beauty advice. The 20-year-old part time student from Cape Town in South Africa started MyFashionBeautyTips.com in August 2011.

“MyFashionBeautyTips started out as a small website intended to give young girls and women inspirational ideas about Fashion, Beauty, Make-up, Hair and all other things ‘girly,’” Besterfield said on her website. Six months after its launch, the site currently receives about 1,200 hits daily and has a Facebook following of over 1170.

“I never in my wildest dreams thought that it would grow into such a popular website and get as many visitors as it does,” Besterfield, who started the site as a hobby, said. Besterfield is both the owner and editor of the site and works with web developer and SEO consultant Daniel. The site has tabs for everything fashion and beauty from hair, handbags and magazine to news shoes and make up. It features articles on fruit that help you lose weight, juicy couture and the highest earning women celebrities.

In a press-release Besterfield says she “keeps strict quality control on the website so that the content is always helpful and informative for her readers.”

She hopes that this year her site will reach 500,000 visitors.

A poster from the Democratic Alliance in South Africa’s Youth wing depicting a naked white man and black woman with the tagline “In OUR future, you wouldn’t look twice,” is causing some people to do much more than that in the present.

Most have been supportive of the alliance’s message of racial tolerance and integration, but others say they don’t approve of the sexual innuendo, much less the implication of white male dominance, as the Washington Post points out in comment found on the organization’s Facebook page:

“Who is the head of a house? Yes, a man, and the man makes the choices and the women listens. So to some it has been offensive that the man is white and the woman is black, because it places the black nation under the head of the house, so to speak.”

South Africa’s trade-union congress, which is closely aligned with the government, had a much stronger response:

“The poster says, ‘Join the DA to have an affair with a white person,’” Zet Luzipo, a provincial secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, told a South African news service.

“It entrenches the white supremacy that we fought against during the liberation struggle. We will not be excited with having an affair with a white person; we will not be enticed by that.”

Those who support DA Youth’s mission say this image has opened up a conversation that the country should have had nearly 20 years ago, and the alliance is standing strong in defense of the poster as well.

“We will not defend people who try to force others to comply with their preferences when those preferences show intolerance, unkindness, lack of imagination, failure of sympathy, absence of understanding, ignorance of alternative interests and needs in the human experience and arrogance in believing theirs is the only acceptable way.”

Sounds like the alliance is prepared for a fight.

Do you understand people being offended by the poster or do you think some are reading too much into the image?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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You know Oprah wouldn’t miss the first graduating class from her school in South Africa, Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, and she also wouldn’t show up at the graduation looking a mess. She kept it simple but fresh in this green frock, contrasting with the white dresses of her students.

Check out Oprah’s fit and some other pics from the day’s events at Styleblazer.com.

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It really bugs me when people refer to Africa as a country. Sadly enough, people like Oprah and influential celebrities don’t help in trying to correct the matter with the general public. Africa is the motherland of culture and the second largest continent on the planet; nevertheless, it’s merely associated with one country most of the time and that’s South Africa. Ironically, the country where apartheid oppressed Africans so boldly is the place that’s most benefiting from tourism.

Just because other African countries don’t invest in the PR machine like South Africa doesn’t mean that potential tourists shouldn’t be made aware of these other wonderful destinations. We couldn’t cover all 56 countries of course but here are a few cities that you should consider for your winter break (hey, it’s always warm in Africa)! We’ll continue to highlight various African countries in future installments of our travel series. And as always, feel free to nominate some destinations in your comments.

Stone Town, Zanzibar 

Zanzibar is a small island off the coast of Tanzania that boasts a mythical flavor. A three hour ferry ride from the mainland of Dar es Salaam will bring you to this very quaint fishtown of Stonetown which offers world-renowned architecture. The mix of Arab, Indian and East African influence is reflected in the diverse array of foods from currys to, of course, great grilled fish. A great time to go would be during the Zanzibar International Film Festival in the summer, which is the second largest film festival on the continent.

Earlier this month The World Economic Forum released its Global Competitiveness Report for 2011-2012. While the United States continued its decline in the rankings, now holding steady in fifth place, South Africa moved up in the ranks.  But South Africa, which ranks 50 among the nations was only one of three African countries to cut through the top half of the rankings. 13 African nations were ranked among the lowest economically competitive.

What does competitive mean? According to the Forum, “a more competitive economy is one that is likely to grow faster over time” due to institutions and policies in place. Since we like to pay homage to the motherland here’s a list of the top ten economies on the continent of Africa:

10. Senegal

Coming in at number ten is Senegal. The Global Competitiveness report put them at 111 among all the nations and here’s why. The nation relies heavily on donor assistance, and when the global financial meltdown of 2009 came about Senegal suffered. Their GDP declined 2 percent. Since then the nation which since 2007 has battled an unemployment rate of roughly 48 percent has struggled to get its bearings. Industries and services only make up 22 percent of jobs, as Senegal is mostly committed to agricultural. The nation has also been hampered by protests against what many claim is a corrupt government.

By Charlotte Young

The door to corporate growth in Africa is wide open and steadily bringing in financial saavy takers. Wal-Mart has laid its claims in South Africa, but South Africa’s Pepkor Ltd, plans to begin expanding in Nigeria. Pepkor Ltd, South Africa’s biggest clothing company, is owned by billionaire Christo Wiese. The store sells clothes mostly to low income shoppers.

“Africa is awakening,” Wiese tells Bloomberg. “It’s a huge market of almost a billion people with huge resources and a young population. People spend when they’re young.”

 Bloomberg reports that Wiese is set to open his first store in Nigeria this year, with plans to expand to about 50 outlets and invest as much as 100 million rand in the project or $14 million. According to Forbes Magazine, Wiese has a net worth of about $1.6 billion. He also controls Shoprite Holdings Ltd, which is Africa’s largest grocer, and owns more than a third of South Africa’s largest private equity company, Brait SA.

He believes the African economies have the chance to grow faster than the economies of the US and Europe, and is making his moves now. In addition to its stores in South Africa, Shoprite has 76 supermarkets in 15 other African nations. This will directly benefit his expansion plans for Pepkor, which he plans to expand in “nodes across the continent.” Pepkor already has 2,800 stores in southern Africa.

Wiese, the son of a farmer and gas station owner in Upington, located in South Africa’s Northern Cape, says that his businesses are “not for sale.” They will be kept in the family. The 69-year-old billionaire predicts he has about five or seven years left to run his companies. His 30-year-old son is already involved in his father’s companies, and when he retires, his two daughters will most likely take his place.

Wiese is certainly not alone in ventures to stake financial claims in Africa. Wal-Mart recently bought 51 percent of Massmart Holdings Ltd, South Africa’s largest wholesaler, to secure its position on the continent. Massmart Holdings Ltd also has investments in 12 other African countries. While Wal-Mart may have stepped into the growing competition in Africa, Wiese is not intimidated.

He tells Bloomberg that with the growing market in Africa, “there’s enough for everybody.”

(BET) — It’s been about 35 years since South Africa’s youth revolt against apartheid, the racial segregation system that served to oppress the nation’s Black majority. But now, South Africa could be facing another uprising, this time due to high levels of youth unemployment, according to one of South Africa’s top union officials.  In fact, during the recent interview with CNN, Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African trade unions, also likened such a rebellion to the Arab spring from earlier this year (which saw longtime leaders from Egypt and Tunisia get booted), warning that the nation could stand to become the “new Egypt.”  “If we don’t do something urgent enough with the crisis of youth unemployment in South Africa we will be in Tunisia and Egypt very soon,” he said during the interview.

Read More…

By Alexis Garrett Stodghill

Most Western news about Africa focuses on the seeding of al-Qaeda terrorism in nations like Yemen, or revolutionary battles against dictators like Muammar Gaddafi. But there is another, quieter disruption taking place in countries like Kenya in which black coders and tech entrepreneurs are creating their own boom. In Alex Perry’s article for Time, the author outlines numerous stories of success that have had international implications emerging from the continent, chronicling Africa’s exponential growth in the sector. Mobile tech via cell phones in particular has seen a host of creative applications sparked by African inventiveness. About the impact of cell phones on Africa’s economies, Perry reports:

 According to studies by the London Business School, the World Bank and consultants at Deloitte, for every 10 additional mobiles per 100 Africans, GDP rises 0.6% to 1.2%. [...]

But this is not a story merely of how technology is changing Africa. Africans are changing technology right back. They now use text-message networks to send e mail, run social networks (South Africa’s MXit) and even verify from a bar code whether a drug is genuine or fake (mPedigree in Ghana and Sproxil in Nigeria). Africa’s influence on global technology is most marked in mobile banking: with its M Pesa service (M for mobile, pesa meaning money in Swahili), Kenyan operator Safaricom became the first-ever telecom company to create a mass mobile-banking service, setting industry standards now being copied from California to Kabul.

Africans, and Kenyans in particular, are making their presence felt online too. When Kenya erupted in violence in the aftermath of a disputed general election in late 2007, a handful of Nairobi code writers created Ushahidi (meaning testimony in Swahili), a data-mapping platform to collate and locate reports of unrest sent in by the public via text message, e mail and social media. The idea was simply to find out what was happening. Says Ushahidi co-founder Juliana Rotich: “The TV was playing The Sound of Music while we could see houses burning in our neighborhood.” But the desire to know what’s going on turned out to be universal, and Ushahidi quickly became the world’s default platform for mapping crises, disasters and political upheaval. According to Rotich, by May of this year, Ushahidi, which is free to download, had been used 14,000 times in 128 countries to map everything from last year’s earthquake in Haiti to this year’s Japanese tsunami and the Arab Spring.

We can only expect more African tech companies to blow up as plans to add Internet cables in the region are executed in the coming years. The cost of connectivity will go down and the speed of the average connection will go up as a result, leading to more involvement by the already active community. Growing investment from companies like Google, which has its regional headquarters in Kenya’s Nairobi, will lead to similar inventions like cloud computing, which came out of South Africa.

But unlike South Africa, the most developed African country, Kenya is the nation tech onlookers are observing with the greatest expectations. It has promoted the free and open use of telecom, unlike leaders that over-control or underdevelop state resources to the detriment of their useful application. Kenya invests in tech infrastructure so that both companies and citizens can enjoy the Internet as “a basic human right,” the nation’s information minister told Time.

Such is its affinity for technology that “Kenya’s love for IT has earned it the nickname Silicon Savanna,” Perry wrote. Playing on the name of America’s tech hub — Silicon Valley — this moniker shows just how important the region has become as a leader in international innovation.

Read more in detail about the leaders, movers and shakers of Silicon Savanna on Time.com. Does this movement shake up your vision of Africa as impoverished and underdeveloped? Is investing in its burgeoning tech sector something you would consider? Leave your comments below!

By Alexis Garrett Stodghill

Today the world is celebrating the birthday of Nelson Mandela, an icon of freedom who continues to inspire even though he has retired from public life. Now 93, this recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize is being commemorated widely and creatively on his special day.

A rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday” has been sung for him by 12 million South African school children. Bikers in South Africa have toured the nation doing good in the name of the man who spent 27 years in prison as a beacon of hope against the tyranny of racial oppression. Fellow human rights leader Desmond Tutu came out of retirement to give an interview in honor of his friend and fellow revolutionary. President Obama sent birthday wishes to the great man. And, in one of the most modern expressions of appreciation, the youth arm of the ANC is encouraging all to change their Facebook profile pictures to reflect Mandela today, to show the leader how much he means to all.

Yes, Mandela’s 93rd birthday is touching the lives of millions, even though his frail condition prevents him from interacting with us. Mandela will be celebrating privately today with family at his home in the village of Qunu. But that doesn’t mean you, too, have to quietly rest.