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Lily Adeleye is a six-year-old CEO making big waves in the business world. She is the CEO of Lily Frilly Company that is into children’s hair accessories, clothing, and more. Her children’s accessory brand is launching into over 1,000 Walmart stores and on their website this month.

The six-year-old hails from Orlando, Florida. Launching on Walmart is the second of her retail launch. She and her mom had launched at Target only last year.

Adeleye’s launch on Walmart will bring a new assortment of her brand’s hair bows, exclusively designed for the Walmart partnership, and will be available for purchase, according to a statement on PRNewswire. “These new and exclusive designs include the Gold & Glitter Hair Bow, Galaxy Girl Hair Bow, Safari Party Hair Bow, and the Candy Rush Hair Bow,” the statement further noted.

Adeleye and her mom, Courtney Adeleye, are excited about their new moves. Courtney is optimistic that what her daughter has created will inspire other young girls to follow their passion. “Lily Frilly started out as a brand my daughter Lily and myself created, as I have always believed it’s important to let your children follow their passions, whether that be art, sports or in this case, growing a business.”

She added, “Now, Lily Frilly has become so much more than just that – it’s become a brand children love, as well as a symbol of inspiration and confidence for young girls as well as for the black community. It’s amazing to see what kids can do, and we’re so glad Walmart is providing this platform to give Lily Frilly the room and attention it warrants.”

Walmart’s Omni Associate Merchant Hair Accessories, Jennifer Aguirre, in a statement said the retail giant was excited and honored to work with Adeleye.

“We are excited to bring Lily Frilly to Walmart and honored to work with Lily Adeleye, as she represents the youngest founder among our Black-Owned business initiative,” she said. “We have been enchanted by Lily’s ingenuity and designs. We are certain that the assortment will captivate our young customers and inspire them to express their beauty and confidence with their hair.”

According to Lilly Frilly’s website, Adeleye loves to learn about investments with her parents. She, however, never forgets to watch Saturday morning cartoons with her older brother and sister.

Saniyya Dennis, a SUNY Buffalo State College student from the Bronx who disappeared last month, died by apparent suicide, authorities said Thursday.

“It appears that this poor girl took her own life,” Erie County District Attorney John Flynn told reporters at a news conference.

He said although officials have not located the body of the 19-year-old, they believe she took her own life following a timeline of her last hours before she went missing.

According to Flynn, Dennis, on the afternoon of April 24, got into an argument with her boyfriend in New York City over the phone. She called him about 59 times but he didn’t respond, Flynn said. Dennis then called another male friend in New York City and told him she wanted to kill herself, Flynn said.

The two talked for several hours before Dennis said she had thought it over and wouldn’t end her life. About 11 p.m. ET, Dennis was captured on campus surveillance video leaving her dorm at the SUNY Buffalo State College. She subsequently threw away “personal items that would lead someone to believe that she was not returning to the dorm,” Flynn said.

Video from the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority then showed her riding two different buses heading toward Niagara Falls. She was alone. She was later picked up by cameras around midnight walking toward Goat Island, where her cell last pinged, Flynn said. The male friend, at around 12:18 a.m., sent her text that read, “Call me back or my next call is to Buffalo PD.”

The male friend called her. She answered and said that she was going to jump off a bridge, Flynn said. The two talked for about an hour before Dennis told him that she was on the bus going back home. Phone records show that was false, according to DA.

Her phone left the network at about 1:20 a.m. April 25. The DA said this means that it was either destroyed or turned off. On April 26, Dennis’s family members reported her missing to Buffalo State Police, leading to an investigation, Flynn said.

Search dogs found Dennis’ scent near Goat Island. Authorities now believe she went over the falls, with her body likely pinned on the rocks below. Flynn said authorities may never find her body because of the rocks below the area. “There is a possibility that if we believe what happened happened, we may never find her body,” he said. “That’s a possibility.”

Dennis’ parents were made aware of the findings on Wednesday afternoon, the DA said.

At a news conference last Friday, Dennis’s family members said they were “baffled as to what’s going on.”

“Saniyya worked two jobs. She was a mechanical engineer major. She was very focused on her studies,” Keyora, Dennis’s sister, said. “She was a good friend. A good person. She has a good heart.”

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has ordered a White South Carolina restaurant manager to pay $546,000 as restitution to a Black man with intellectual disabilities after he forced him to work at an eatery under his management for five years without pay.

The recent ruling comes after a district court initially ordered 56-year-old Bobby Paul Edwards to pay $273,000 to John Christopher Smith in unpaid wages and overtime compensation after he reached a plea deal with authorities in 2019, The Washington Post reported. Edwards, who ran the J&J Cafeteria in Conway, was also sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of forced labor.

However, an April 21 ruling by the appellate court determined the district court “had erred” in not calculating the initial amount based on federal labor laws – meaning Smith was actually entitled to $546,000 or twice the amount. Smith, who worked at the restaurant from 2009 to 2014 without any remuneration, was also subjected to physical and racial abuse by Edwards during that period. Smith was also reportedly forced to work for over 100 hours every week and was not entitled to any day-offs.

“When an employer fails to pay those amounts (regular and overtime pay), the employee suffers losses, which includes the loss of the use of that money during the period of delay,” the ruling determined.

Smith, 43, started working at the eatery as a dishwasher and table busser in 1990 at the age of 12. And though he initially did not have any issues with the previous restaurant managers, things started to go south when Edwards took over in 2009. With the now-convicted Edwards in charge, Smith was denied his salary and was treated without any respect for human decency.

Edwards forced the Black worker to move into an apartment that was infested with roaches, The Washington Post reported. Smith’s attorneys said the apartment, which belonged to Edwards, was “sub-human,” “deplorable” and “harmful to human health.” Besides that, a Department of Justice report also stated Edwards subjected Smith to physical abuse. This included beating him into submission, whipping him with a belt, knocking him with pots and pans, and at one time, burning him with hot grease. Edwards also prevented Smith from having any contact with his family and threatened to call the police on him.

“Most of the time I felt unsafe, like Bobby could kill me if he wanted,” Smith said, per court documents. “I wanted to get out of that place so bad but couldn’t think about how I could without being hurt.”

Edwards was eventually arrested in 2014 after a lady whose daughter-in-law worked at the restaurant reported him to authorities. Workers at the restaurant were initially hesitant to report Edwards out of fear of retaliation from him.

“For stealing his victim’s freedom and wages, Mr. Edwards has earned every day of his sentence,” U.S. Attorney for the District of South Carolina Sherri A. Lydon reportedly said after his 2019 sentencing. “The U.S. attorney’s office will not tolerate forced or exploitative labor in South Carolina, and we are grateful to the watchful citizen and our partners in law enforcement who put a stop to this particularly cruel violence.”

Twenty years after the United States launched an ill-advised military offensive in the Middle East, President Joe Biden has announced that American soldiers who number about 2,500 will be pulled out of Afghanistan, a process that started in May and is expected to end in September.

The war in Afghanistan is America’s longest ever and has taken more than 300,000 lives, many of whom have been Afghan civilians. A little over 2,000 American soldiers have also lost their lives. All of these are on top of a collapsed national infrastructure and the cessation of the dreams of hundreds of thousands of young Afghans.

In this year that America begins to walk the talk that has been uttered by all the presidents after George W. Bush., it is important to remember the only congressperson who voted against a joint legislature resolution to give the American president an inexhaustible right to do all that they thought to do militarily in response to the September 11 attacks: Barbara Lee of California’s 13th District.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force was passed on September 18, 2001, exactly a week after the saddest day in modern American history. America was a nation wailing and wondering who its enemies were. The foes had not been absolutely faceless but public opinion succumbed to the impression that the enmity was present and pervasive and its ammunition was imaginably dangerous. What happened was what economist Naomi Klein has called the Shock Doctrine – how governments – or better still, free-market apologists – use natural disasters or attacks as bases to assume far-reaching powers that drastically shifts the tectonics of political culture.

In the case of the United States own shock doctrine after the plane crashes, the industry that made the machines and materials for war was hopeful of a brute American response to September 11. They lobbied power to make war happen. In some including Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney, the military industry could count on men who were the farthest from pacifist.

In all honesty, public sympathies lied with revenge of different sorts and one could make sense of that as a legitimate human response. But what Lee stressed at the time was that American leadership needed to be circumspect lest they cajole the citizenry into irreparable damages. As the sole vote against the bill, Lee said on the floor:

However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. There must be some of us who say, let’s step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions today-let us more fully understand their consequences. We are not dealing with a conventional war. We cannot respond in a conventional manner. I do not want to see this spiral out of control. This crisis involves issues of national security, foreign policy, public safety, intelligence gathering, economics, and murder. Our response must be equally multifaceted.

She would go on to criticize in media interviews, the biggest “blank check” ever handed to an American president. The law effectively gave powers to President Bush that no other president before him had had. This legal reality also translated into public spending. Between 2001 and 2003, the year America invaded Iraq, the defense budget budget grew about 30% from $330 billion to $440 billion.

Seeing how things turned out in Afghanistan, it was hard to forget Lee’s protest vote. Yet when she did it, Lee was the object of scorn and contempt. She recently revealed that she received death threats forcing to toughen her personal security. Her patriotism was questioned and was referred to by several unsavory names. Two decades on, she is not gloating but appreciative of the Biden administration’s efforts to return soldiers home.

“Finally, we are beginning to bring our troops home, which we should have done years ago. Taking them out of harm’s way and using diplomatic [means] and diplomacy tools that we to make sure that we do this right,” she told.

Tanitoluwa Adewumi, the young New Yorker of Nigerian descent who came into national and international prominence about two years ago after he was discovered as a homeless chess genius, is now reportedly a United States National Chess Master.

The prodigy is still only 10-years-old and a fifth-grader. Adewumi’s new status was reported by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, one of Adewumi’s earliest media hype men. He also reiterated that the former Nigerian refugee still has a roof over his head as well.

According to the website of the body that oversees chess competitions in the US, the United States Chess Federation, the national master title is given “to any player who reaches a rating of 2200. Less than one percent of rated players hold the title. An Original Life Master is a National Master who has played 300 games with a rating [of] over 2200” points accrued from games.

The average age of a US National Chess Master has actually decreased over the decades even though Adewumi is thought to be one of a kind. For those born after 1990, the average US National Chess Master is around 19 years old. Adewumi was born in 2010.

There are growing expectations among those in the chess-playing community that Adewumi could be a Grandmaster (player with 2500 points) before he turns 21. Such has been the meteoric rise of the young boy since 2019.

In late 2019, it was reported that Paramount Pictures have secured the rights to the project around the boy whose family relocated from Nigeria to the States as refugees. Daily Show host, Trevor Noah, is set to produce the biopic.

A film project is not the only thing Adewumi and his family will have about their life. A three-part book is set to be released by W Publishing in 2020 about the travails of the family that had to escape the violence of the terrorist group, Boko Haram.

The film will be sourced from the books. However, on his part, Noah has yet to comment on his role as a producer through his company, Day Zero Productions.

Day in, day out, residents of Freetown, Sierra Leone, are being exposed to indoor and outdoor pollution, leading to numerous health problems, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Most households are using charcoal or wood as a source of fuel for cooking, and this is increasing the amount of carbon dioxide being produced in cities.

Transportation is another major problem. Experts are calling for renewable transport to ensure cleaner air for citizens. It is in this regard that a 24-year-old university student decided to build a solar-powered car made from trash and scraps.

It took Emmanuel Alieu Mansaray, a self-taught Sierra Leonean inventor and engineer, three years to build the car. He now drives it around town. Dubbed the ‘Imagination car’, it can reach speeds of 15km per hour. Mansaray’s aim is to address goal 7 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which talks about clean energy.

“…Having a solar car like my ‘Imagination Car’ using solar power for transportation will make for a cleaner atmosphere, thereby reducing the risk of dangerous gaseous emissions that have led to the death of thousands of people around the world,” he said in an interview with Salone Messenger.

Mansaray is a student of the Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Geology. He began developing his innovation skills in 2018 when he built the first locally made solar-powered tricycle in Sierra Leone. “During my primary school days, I used to pick up trash cans (example: milk tin, tomato tin, etc.) which I used to make different types of cars. I also used to collect trash batteries from the dust bin and convert them to supply electricity,” he said.

Now, his ‘Imagination Car’, which is designed using the country’s signature colors of green, white and blue, has made him a star in his community and beyond. The eco-friendly car does not use any fossil fuel to power it, he said. Its body is built with bamboo. The car has a large solar panel at the top of it, which powers the engine and also acts as its canopy. What’s more, the car comes with a self-made engine with three gears attached to it for both back and front movement.

There are two doors and two mirrors attached to the car’s left and right flanks. People are also amazed at its brake system, its left and right traffic light, as well as its four headlights and horn. Most importantly, the solar-powered car is pollution-free. Mansaray explained that it operates by converting sunlight into electrical energy using photovoltaic cells. Thus, it does not produce harmful or hazardous emissions, he said.

Mansaray’s car will not only make for a cleaner atmosphere but will also help the disabled, he said. “Some disabled people have cars that they can’t drive unless they paid individuals to drive them because their feet can’t reach down the clutch, brake, and accelerator, which is challenging. But for my ‘Imagination solar-powered car’, all the features are installed in the steering; including the clutch, brake and accelerator, and all other necessary features. With all this, every disabled person can drive with less to worry about.”

Mansaray said he would like to come up with more awesome inventions that will solve pressing issues that affect the environment and his country. However, his challenges are lack of funding, raw materials, sponsorship, and mentorship. “Sometimes I meet people for help and they don’t. Some people won’t even motivate me, instead they’ll try to kill my dream with negative energy,” he said.

All in all, the young student’s aim is to fly his country’s flag higher above all other flags. “My aim and dream are to work for my country, have a successful career, and help develop my country, Sierra Leone.”

At age 10 while most boys were thinking of the latest video game, Curtis Lawrence III was taking his SATs. Now a teenager, Lawrence has his eyes set on attending an HBCU after receiving more than $1.6 million in college scholarships and being accepted into top universities in the country.

The 16-year-old graduated from DC’s School Without Walls, a magnet high school, and started taking early college classes through a special program at George Washington University when he was just 14 years old.

Lawrence has now been accepted into Ivy League schools including George Washington University, Hampton, Harvard, Howard, Morehouse, Morgan, North Carolina A&T, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, and Yale.

However, the next phase of his educational journey will be at Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University where he will take a double major in biology and computer science.

“First I started thinking about what schools had good biology programs,” the 16-year-old told FOX 5 DC. “Then I started looking specifically at HBCUs because I wanted the HBCU experience and to be surrounded by the people who are just like me and who are not only Black but academically talented.”

He learned to read by age two from his mother. Both parents are educators with two gifted sons. “My mom just always pushed education, pushed advanced academics and especially being at the elementary school in Harlem, I was surrounded by other people who were advanced, so it just felt like the norm for me,” Lawrence said.

The gifted boy’s mother, Malene Lawrence, said her son has “loved dinosaurs and paleontology literally since he was one. And some people think, ‘Oh, your kid is going to grow out of that.’ But you foster that love of whatever it is.”

“So we’d keep dinosaur books. Like, we kept tons of nonfiction books in the car, and he would be pronouncing the names of dinosaurs and I was like, ‘How does this kid know this?’”

Apart from taking the SATs at age 10, he also studied abroad in China, where he stayed with a Chinese family and improved his Mandarin, according to wtop.com.

His parents are supportive of his ambitions and knew from the onset he wanted to take it to the doctorate level. And that is what they are working towards as a family.

“This has been a really long process that kind of started in seventh grade as we were thinking about college prep,” said Malene Lawerence. “His goal is to get a Ph.D., so we kind of helped him plan backward.” 

Lawrence is ever grateful to his parents for instilling in him the “love for learning” and the chance to advance himself in academia.

“We’ve taught them from an early age that education is key to opening up the opportunities and having access to things that they want to live,” his father, Curtis Lawrence, told FOX 5 DC. “Since they were born, we’ve given them those experiences to make sure they know the importance of education.

Two teenagers were fatally shot by their older brother on Friday night while they were headed home from a Ramadan service at the Somali Center of Kansas City, authorities disclosed. The suspected killer, identified as 25-year-old Hanad A. Abdiaziz, was killed by the Kansas City Police during an armed standoff the next day, People reported.

Authorities also said they’re yet to establish the motive behind the killing of 16-year-old Abdulwahid and 14-year-old Abdirahman Abdulaziz. “Two young lives were taken last night as two teens were shot returning home from Ramadan services at their mosque in Historic Northeast KC,” the police department announced on Twitter.

Following the double homicide, the police sought the public’s assistance in locating the suspect. And though they managed to track him down a day after the incident, they were unable to take him in alive.

“Officers attempted to make contact [with] the suspect, but the suspect presented a short barreled rifle,” Kansas City police added. “An officer fired his service weapon, striking the suspect. Officers immediately performed life saving measures. Suspect was transported to a local hospital where he was pronounced deceased.”

In an interview with 41 Action News, a teacher for the deceased teens, Ayman Hassan, expressed his shock at the incident, adding that the boys were amazing and not the type to get into any kind of trouble.

“They were amazing, we have had no complaints from them they were not like trouble makers or something like this,” he said.

Hassan, who said the brothers were killed hours after they had led a prayer service, also praised their commitment to their religion. “Memorizing the whole Quran knowledgeable, well versed of Islam.”

Meanwhile, a GoFundMe that was set up to help raise funds to cover funeral costs for the brothers and other expenses has so far raised over $60,000 – surpassing its $50,000 goal.

Todd Baldwin was raised by his single mom. Now 27 years old, he is a millionaire with multiple streams of income. What’s more, Baldwin saves 80% of his earnings and does not engage in frivolous expenses.

The serial entrepreneur started working when he was only 12 years old. He would save much of what he earned as he considered it as not only a sound financial management practice but fun. “It’s actually really fun being able to buy something and then choosing not to,” he tells CNBC.

The African-American entrepreneur now brings home $615,000 annually ($305,000 after business expenses) from his multiple businesses. His mixed-income comes from rental properties, his day job working in commercial insurance sales, and the extra cash he makes as a secret shopper.

He owns six rental properties with his wife, Angela, which brings in the majority of the revenue he makes. For instance, they earn $460,000 per year in rent and keep about $150,000 of that per year after expenses such as mortgage payments, taxes, insurance, and utilities.

“Although our net worth is seven figures, we don’t do a lot of the typical things that most people envision millionaires doing. We are super frugal,” says Baldwin.

The entrepreneur says he is able to save as much as 80% of his income because he keeps his expenses so low. He does not pay for entertainment like movies or restaurants because he gets paid for that as a mystery shopper. He gets paid for dining out, grocery shopping, seeing movies, and visiting hotels and casinos.

“There are a lot of businesses out there that want to know how their employees are doing and how the market is responding to their products,” he explains. “So those companies will hire mystery shopping firms to find independent contractors like me to go pose at their establishment as a regular customer, buy the product or service and then report on it.”

Baldwin started mystery shopping while he was in college and has so far made $30,000. Since he started mystery shopping, Baldwin and his wife spend around $25 on food. Another thing Baldwin tries to avoid is spending money on needless bank account fees or credit card charges.

Despite being very conscious of what to spend his money on, the serial entrepreneur has no qualms about spending on his wife. Even that, he needs approval. He recalls spending $500 on a designer purse for his wife but she took it back and exchanged it for a $60 purse.

“My wife is more frugal than I am!” he says. “A couple of years ago, I bought her a designer purse for like 500 bucks. But when I surprised her with it, she immediately took it back, exchanged it for a $60 purse at Macy’s, and then we invested the difference.”

Gabon is a former French colony in Central Africa bordered by Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon to the north, Congo Brazzaville to east and south and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. It is a country of just over two million people and although it is a nominally rich country due to its oil, the majority of its people are not beneficiaries.

The country used to be part of what was known as the French Equatorial Africa Federation. It was established in 1910 and comprised the following territories: Ubangi-Shari (now majorly known as the Central Africa Republic); French Gabon; French Congo (now split between Congo Brazzaville and the Central African Republic) and the territory that is now called Chad.

The Pygmy people are thought to be the autochthonous people of this region that includes modern Gabon. The Pygmy people are a constellation of different ethnicities in Central Africa whose way of life was negatively impacted by the coming of the Europeans and continues to be so even after colonization.

For instance, from 1910 to 1940, the lands of the Aka, a Pygmy people, were presided over by the French Equatorial Africa, which forced tribes within the vicinity into rubber manufacturing. Their habitats in the forests enabled them to revolutionize their hunting techniques such as using nets as opposed to spears and encouraging more women to become hunters as well.

There are concerns, however, that traditional knowledge and many Aka rituals are slowly disappearing because of the drastic change of lifestyle and reduction of game in the forest due to modernization.

It was in the 15th century that the first Europeans, the Portuguese, arrived in this area of the Atlantic Ocean’s coast. They went inland into Central Africa, making encampments around the Komo River in modern-day Libreville, Gabon’s capital city. They called the estuary of the Komo, a gabão, Portuguese for “cloak”.

Gabão was corrupted by later arriving Europeans, giving us the modern iteration of the name: Gabon.

Many entrepreneurs would grab a $1 million investment opportunity from any credible investor. But that was not the case for Deborah Torres when angel investor Mark Cuban offered to invest in her fried chicken company, Atlas Monroe.

Torres had appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank in 2019 to pitch her company for investment and was offered $1 million for 100% of the company. However, she refused the investment because Cuban and guest investor Rohan Oza’s offer did not reflect the true value of her company.

“The fact you guys are even offering a million dollars lets me know you do understand what we are worth,” Torres said on the show.

CNBC quoted her as saying, “As soon as we get our facility, we will fulfill the orders and hit a million dollars immediately.”

“We walked away from a million dollars, and we’re walking into $24 million. We know we have something really extraordinary in our hands,” she said at the time.

Since then, her company has made giant strides in the food industry. Atlas Monroe is set to become the largest vegan fried chicken company in the world. This comes as the company recently acquired its own multi-million-dollar manufacturing plant at a two-story, 10,000-square-foot warehouse in San Diego, CA, VegNews reported. The company is eyeing a second location this year after exceeding $2 million in online sales since Torres appeared on the show.

Since the groundbreaking sales, the company now sells a range of vegan meat substitutes including deep-fried turkey, ribs, bacon, beef, and fried chicken.

Meanwhile, Torres has accused ‘Shark Tank’ of not fairly representing her on the show. “On [Shark Tank] there were many edits of conversations to make it appear that I wasn’t intelligent enough for obvious dramatic effects of the ‘shocking’ ending. I was completely blindsided when it aired and had no idea the effect it would have on my life,” the California entrepreneur told VegNews.

“I mean, if we are going to talk about it honestly, just imagine being a Black woman in America graduating high school at age 15 and receiving your first degree at 17 all to be made to look like an idiot on national television for the sake of views, when you were just trying to pursue your dreams—it was crushing, to say the least. I think God works in mysterious ways because what was meant to harm me propelled me to where I am today—the proud and sole owner of the world’s largest vegan fried chicken manufacturing company and 100-percent owner of a multi-million dollar manufacturing facility.”

According to CNBC, Torres was inspired to develop her plant-based food after her father was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. The move was to develop a healthy lifestyle among her family.

“My whole family and I went on a raw, vegan, and organic diet for 90 days. We grew really ‘hangry’ at each other from just eating salads and fruit salads,” Torres said. “After the 90 days, [my father] was completely healed. We vowed to stay organic, plant-based, and natural. We continued to experiment, and Atlas Monroe was born.”

Dr. Thakgalo Thibela is being hailed as one of South Africa’s youngest doctors, having graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery from the University of Witwatersrand. According to the Health Practice Council of South Africa, Thibela is the youngest active female doctor in the country.

The 21-year-old woman is living her lifelong dream of being a doctor. She is helping to put smiles back on the faces of her patients.

“The gratitude patients have after receiving help brings me so much joy,” she was quoted by The Saturday Star. “Seeing smiles on patient’s faces after consultation or when they get discharged from the hospital is why I love this job so much. I’ve always wanted to help people and medicine has given me the platform to do just that.”

Thibela grew up in Violetbank, a rural village in Bushbuckridge, in Mpumalanga in eastern South Africa. Coming from a middle-class family, her dad is a manager at a local municipality while her mother is a primary school teacher. Her parents valued education and instilled in her the power of education at a very young age.

Having been educated through the public school system, Thibela is proud of her achievements. She has always been the youngest person in her class since high school after skipping grades. Thibela skipped grade 7 in primary school and enrolled at Lehlasedi High School where she barely spent a week in grade 9 and was promoted to grade 10.

During her high school graduation, a then 15-year-old Thibela had distinctions in seven out of eight subjects.

“I was very fortunate that the schools I went to (public schools by the way) promoted students they felt were doing well academically, so as a result I didn’t do Grade 7 and 9 and I also started school a year early which enabled me to complete matric at 15,” she told The Saturday Star.

At 16, all Thibela wanted to do was to be a doctor. Thus, during school applications, she chose medicine as her first choice. She was subsequently admitted to Wits University at the age of 16 where she enrolled for a six-year degree in the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery.

Gaining admission to the university was her first time living away from her family and outside her village to the city. It was quite difficult readjusting and she had to deal with low self-esteem coupled with bullying from the city folks because of her thick village accent. She was also ridiculed by her university peers for not pronouncing certain English words the way most people pronounced them, a report by News24 said.

At a point, she felt out of place. Nonetheless, she had one goal and that was to finish medical school. She performed very well in school, earning her the Golden Key International membership, a recognition for students doing well academically. At 21, she has completed her Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, making herself and her family proud.

She has been instrumental amid the COVID-19 pandemic, working on the frontline with her colleagues at Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg, where she is doing her practical experiential learning.

Patients and doctors alike get fascinated by her skills and level of professionalism especially when they get to know she is 21 years old. In her second year of medical school, Thibela got intrigued by the human brain during a dissection practical and has hopes of specializing in neurosurgery sometime soon.

“The brain and nervous system have always fascinated me. If the brain stops working, whether your heart is still beating or not, you are considered dead.

“For me, the brain is the most important organ in the human body, and I would like to know more about it and help people who have a brain and nervous system lesions get better,” she said.

Thibela hopes to inspire others to chase their dreams as well, especially the young ones in her village.