‘Mama Oprah’ celebrates with 1st SA school grads
HENLEY-ON-KLIP — US talk show queen Oprah Winfrey cried yesterday as the first graduates of her South African girls’ academy thanked her for her effort to turn a handful of impoverished girls into elite leaders.
Beaming, in a turquoise dress, with the 72 graduates sitting behind her in white, Winfrey, whose rise to stardom and an estimated fortune of $2.7 billion followed a deprived childhood in Mississippi, spoke of why she decided to open the school with a $40 million investment in 2007.
“I know that education is the door to freedom. So I want to do that for girls who come from backgrounds like my own, who have disadvantaged circumstances but no disadvantaged attitudes or brainpower or spirit. I want to give them the chance that I was given.”
Winfrey, 58, told the story of how she mentioned to Nelson Mandela over tea at his house one day that she was interested in building a girls’ school in South Africa.
The country’s first black president jumped up and immediately called then-education minister Kader Asmal, she said. By that evening Winfrey was in a planning meeting with him.
“I really thought one day I would build a school — I didn’t mean that day,” she joked.
Speaking at the idyllic campus of the school, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls — which boasts computer and science laboratories, a 600-seat theatre and a 10,000-volume library — Winfrey defended the idea of investing lavishly in a small group of promising young women.
The school has faced criticism for focusing on a select few in a country that struggles to meet basic education needs.
“We are in the leadership building business. We are in the business of creating assets for girls so they don’t have to just use their bodies but they go out into the world and use their minds,” she said.
“The only way this country and developing countries throughout the world are going to have long-term sustainability, and not just sustainability but success, is through its women. Africa will be saved by its women,” she said.
All yesterday’s graduates passed their endof-year exams and will attend universities in South Africa, the US and other countries.
The campus was packed yesterday with celebrating families, journalists and VIP guests, including Mandela’s wife, Graca Machel, who gave the keynote address.
Visibly emotional throughout the ceremony, Winfrey cried as top-10 student Mashadi Kekana gave a commencement speech that thanked “Mama Oprah” for her investment in the girls.
But the school has gone through its share of crises to reach this day.
Soon after it opened in 2007, the academy was hit by allegations that a dormitory matron had sexually abused some of the girls. She was arrested and charged, but later acquitted in a decision Winfrey said at the time “profoundly disappointed” her.
Last year, the school was rocked by reports that a dead baby had been found in a student’s bag after she apparently hid a pregnancy and gave birth in secret.
Winfrey said her own experiences of being sexually abused as a child and hiding a teenage pregnancy — the baby died soon after birth, and she never had any more children — had helped her deal with the crises at her school.
“For me, the experience of child abuse as a child created a greater sense of empathy and strength for me to be able to deal with it when it occurred in this school. For me, the experience of being a 14-year-old girl hiding a pregnancy gave me the strength and the empathy to deal with it (here),” she said. — AFP