by Donna Bryson

HENLEY-ON-KLIP, South Africa (AP)—Mpumi Nobiva was raised by her grandmother in a neighborhood beset by poverty and crime after her mother died of AIDS. Now one of the first to graduate from Oprah Winfrey’s school, she is headed to college in North Carolina.

FIRST CLASS—Student Mpumi Nobiva, front, attends a gathering with classmates in their last week at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy at Henley-On-Klip, South Africa, Nov. 30. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell)

Winfrey spent $40 million to give her girls a campus with computer and science labs, a library and a wellness center. None paid tuition. The students are high-achievers, often from communities where schools are struggling to overcome the legacy of apartheid.

JOHANNESBURG (AP)—Africa is the world's fastest growing mobile phone market and soon poised to have 735 million people using their phones for everything from transferring money to tracking animals for wildlife studies, an industry group said Wednesday.

Mobile penetration in Africa is now second only to Asia, according to the report by the industry group  Groupe Speciale Mobile Association. Its report found that subscriber levels have grown by almost 20 percent for each of the past five years, and the total is expected to hit 735 million by the end of 2012.

(NNPA/GIN)—The late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi believed he was headed for Karoo, a desert-like area in South Africa, where he would live in a tent under the protection of his allies, when he was fatally ambushed by joint NATO-Libyan forces.

REBELS REST— Rebels rest in the bed of late Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi in a palace in Sirte, Libya, Oct. 10. (AP Photo/Bela Szandelszky)

WINDHOEK, Namibia (AP)—Human skulls taken from Namibia by German colonizers returned home Oct. 4 after more than 100 years, but the reconciliatory gesture instead has ignited anger and renewed demands that Germany pay for its sins in this corner of Africa where more than 60,000 people were killed.

Tuesday’s return of 20 skulls taken to Germany more than a century ago for racist experiments also has fueled anger about current injustices by a people decimated when they rebelled against German colonizers.

HOLOCAUST REMINDER—A skull from Germany on display in the city of Windhoek, Namibia, Oct 4. (AP Photo/Schalk van Zuydam)