Lelo Boyana full name is Nombulelo Boyana but popularly known as Brown Shuga, she is a South African celebrity blogger, columnist and television presenter. Born in Thabong, Welkom in the Free State she began working for a mining company right after completing her matric and while working for the company was trained in Human Resources while she studied part time.
In 2001 Lelo moved to Johannesburg and is currently employed as a Human Resources Practitioner in an earth moving equipment company in the east of the city.
On 2 May 2006, TVSA was launched – South Africa’s first television website that was not owned by a broadcaster.
Exactly one week later, on 9 May, a new user registered on the site called Brown Shuga (the online nickname used by Lelo Boyana). She spent about a month acclimatising to the site, posting a few replies to articles, until 13 June when she created her own blog called Big Brother Nigeria.
She started writing regular articles despite the fact that the show had ended, and soon found that there were thousands of other fans like her who needed a place to express their feelings about the show once it was over.
Ex-contestants on the show soon found her blog and she started interviewing them, in particular when the whole cast paid a visit to Johannesburg and she met with several of them.
Eventually interest in the show faded as the contestants shifted out of the limelight, but by then Shuga’s fanatical BB community had dubbed her blog “Blogiwood”.
Her last article in her BB Nigeria blog was posted on 24 August, and one week later – on 30 August – she started a brand new blog called Shuga’s Blogiwood.
Many of her BB fans started drifting off, only to be replaced by a new readership of fanatical, hardcore fans.
Her third article in Blogiwood – a review of the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards – was read 60,000 times, and firmly put the new Blogiwood and its author on the map.
Since then Brown Shuga has blogged on TVSA almost daily, achieving record page views and replies along the way. She is well-loved for her gossipy take on local celebs and the music and television industries in particular.
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She started a third blog – Shuga’s G Spot – which is dedicated to the SABC1 soapie Generations, and it too has broken readership records. She started a “celebrity snapshots” blog called Shuga Snaps in 2007, which features pictures taken by her of South African celebrities.
Blogiwood has gone on to become a powerful entertainment medium in its own right. Of her own accord, and in whatever spare time she had, Shuga started interviewing some of the biggest players in South African entertainment for TVSA, from producers to directors to the very stars of the shows themselves. ( (according to TVSA).
