Forbes Dropped Their List of Africa’s Billionaires — And Only Five Out of 18 Are Black

Of the 18 richest people in Africa, only five of them are Black.

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That’s according to the latest list compiled by Forbes, which revealed that more African billionaires are Afrikaners (descendants from the Dutch, French, and German colonialists in South Africa) than any other African subgroup. And this shouldn’t be surprising, considering how the after-effects of colonial times are still being felt today. In 2015, data released by New World Wealth (via BusinessTech of South Africa) revealed that there was an inequitable transfer of wealth to so-called “marginalized groups,” which includes groups of Black Africans that didn’t even have rights in the country prior to 1994 on account of apartheid.

While these statistics about the richest people in Africa are distressing, it’s still better than the statistics regarding the number of Black billionaires in America. As AfroTech previously reported, only seven billionaires — out of 724 — are Black, meaning less than one percent of all billionaires in the United States are Black.

So, we say this all to say — we still have a long way to go, both in the United States and in Africa to reach full Black equity.