Leading Inclusively Here: A Look at Naspers' History and Transformation
A Heritage Month case study on Naspers and Prosus, and why inclusion built for South Africa cannot be borrowed from anywhere else.
Heritage Day at your office can take many forms. Someone wears traditional dress. Someone else brings a dish their grandmother used to make. There is a nice moment in the boardroom where people talk about where they come from.
It is a warm day, and also, for a lot of organisations, one of the few days heritage shows up at all. Our heritage does not switch off after the 24th, so building it into how you lead is really a year round job, with heritage day being one of the many chances you can take to celebrate it unapologetically.
This month we are looking at a company that took on the harder version of that job. Naspers and Prosus did not stop at how to celebrate heritage for a day. They built a business that actually works for the people, backgrounds and markets South Africa and the rest of the continent represent.
A company that had to reckon with its own history
Naspers was founded in 1915 as a publisher of Afrikaans language newspapers. Its founding editor, D.F. Malan, went on to become the prime minister who built apartheid into law. For much of the twentieth century, the company's titles stood closely behind the National Party government he led.
However, the company has since turned a significant new leaf, taking deliberate steps toward reckoning with its legacy and building a more inclusive future.
At the company's centenary in 2015, Media24 chief executive Esmare Weideman publicly apologised for the company's role, acknowledging complicity in a morally indefensible political regime and the hurtful way that played out in its own newsrooms and boardrooms. That is not a footnote the company has tried to bury, especially when it comes to its own corporate lineage.
Today, Naspers operates through Prosus in more than 100 countries, with a leadership team spanning South Africa, Brazil, the Netherlands and beyond. Getting there took more than a change in business model. It took deliberately building an organisation that could see and serve markets its founders were never built to understand.
Why Inclusivity was key for Naspers and Prosus
There is a hard commercial logic behind this, grounded in the reality of our shared South African heritage: understanding the people you serve requires sharing their context. McKinsey's most recent Diversity Matters research, drawing on 1,265 companies across 23 countries, found that companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity on their executive teams are 39% more likely to outperform financially than those in the bottom quartile of ethnic diversity. For a company making investment decisions across South Africa, Nigeria, India and beyond, a leadership team that only reflects one part of that picture is a blind spot with a price tag.
That gap does not close on its own. Access to education, capital, networks and leadership opportunity has never been evenly distributed in South Africa, and none of that disappears just because a company gets big or goes global. It shows up in who is in the room when decisions get made, unless you do something deliberate about it.
What Naspers built beyond the boardroom
The clearest example of this deliberate work is Naspers Labs, the company's youth digital skills programme. Since 2022, more than 7,200 young people have trained through the programme, with over 6,200 moving into work, with a deliberate focus on women and young people with disabilities. This was not charity. Rather, think of it as building the digital talent pipeline the business itself will need.
A newer initiative extends the same thinking into entrepreneurship. In 2025, the Tech FoundHER Africa Challenge drew 1,163 applications from women-led technology businesses across the continent, awarding equity-free grants totalling over $100,000 to winners from Nigeria, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa. The scale of interest alone says something important. The talent was always there. What was missing was a structure built to actually reach it.
What connects both programmes is that neither treats inclusion as separate from the business. They are how Naspers and Prosus find the people, markets and ideas the company would otherwise miss entirely. Invest in the next generation of digital leaders and founders long enough, and South Africa's diverse heritage becomes more than a talking point. It becomes the business's competitive advantage.
Three things worth borrowing this Heritage Month
Maybe you’re a manager reading this thinking, ‘How can I lead my diverse team more inclusively?’
Lucky for you, you do not need Naspers's scale or budget to apply the same thinking to your own team. Three practices, drawn from what worked for them, are worth building into how you lead.
Name your organisation's own history honestly
Naspers's public apology in 2015 did not undo its past, but it did something else that mattered. It gave the company a clean, honest starting point to build from, rather than a past it had to keep managing around quietly.
Most teams are not carrying anything as significant as a corporate apology, but every team, diverse or not, carries an implicit history regarding whose voices carry weight, which cultural behaviours become the unspoken standard, and whose perspectives remain overlooked. Addressing these dynamics directly and without defensiveness fosters significantly greater trust than acting as though every team starts with a blank slate.
Set yourself up for success by first assessing your own self-awareness and conflict resolution skills. These conversations require careful handling to avoid backfiring or creating defensiveness, so having a thoughtful plan can make all the difference to ensure you don’t speak out of term or trivialise anyone’s experiences.
Take time to quietly reflect on your team's established dominant culture(s) norms and implicit history by considering whose voices typically carry weight, which behaviors are rewarded, and what perspectives may have been overlooked. Equally its important to ask how different ways of ‘showing up’ and ‘performing work’ has been rewarded or punished.
Whatever surfaces, acknowledge it plainly rather than explaining it away. The acknowledgement itself is often the more important step.
If you feel unequipped to navigate these sensitive dynamics safely, consider seeking professional guidance. 54TwentyFour can provide the kind of coaching to help you facilitate these discussions constructively without risking team cohesion.
Build representation into the pipeline, not just the leadership photo
Naspers Labs works because it invests upstream, in the skills and opportunities that eventually produce a more representative talent pool, rather than trying to fix representation only at the point of hiring or promotion.
For most managers, this means looking earlier than your next vacancy. Who is getting the big project or opportunity that builds the experience needed for that next role, long before the role itself opens up.
Look at who has been given visible, career-building opportunities on your team in the last six months. If the same one or two people keep appearing, that is your pipeline problem, not your hiring problem.
Deliberately offer the next visible opportunity to someone outside that usual pattern, and give them the support needed to succeed at it.
Let representation change what you see, not just who you employ
The point of the McKinsey finding on market understanding is not simply that diverse teams look better. It is that they see things a more homogenous team would miss entirely. Inclusive leadership means valuing the cultural shorthand and lived heritage that team members bring to the table, ensuring those insights are actually invited into decisions, rather than the team being diverse in composition but uniform in whose opinion actually shapes the outcome.
Before your next significant decision, invite team members with relevant lived experience to shape the direction early, not comment on it after the fact. Be mindful of how this lands. Asked the wrong way, even good intentions can feel transactional, as though someone is being consulted for their background rather than their judgement. The goal is not a checkbox conversation. It is psychological safety strong enough that different perspectives surface on their own and genuinely shape the outcome.
Notice whether the same voice tends to have the final say regardless of who else contributed. If so, that is worth naming and adjusting.
Beyond the one day
Heritage Month is a good moment to reflect on where you come from. It becomes a genuinely useful one when that reflection extends into how your team actually works the other eleven months of the year.
Naspers did not become a company capable of serving South Africa and the rest of the continent by celebrating heritage and inclusion once a year. It did it by building structures, in its talent pipeline, its funding programmes and its leadership table, that made room for the people its own history had once excluded.
That is the more demanding version of inclusion, and it is also the more lasting one.
If your organisation wants to build inclusion into its systems and structures, not just its calendar, 54TwentyFour supports leaders through coaching, facilitated sessions, and leadership development designed for the South African professional context.
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