Mandela Inspired Oprah To Change The Lives Of South African Girls

Television personality, media mogul, actress and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey is always in the media for the right reasons. She is not only the richest black woman but also one of the top philanthropist.

She revealed how she was inspired by Mandela to change lives of South African girls. Initiated a $100 million-plus quest to build her ambitious school. The decision started out as a rather outlandish promise to a man who became her friend, confidante and mentor: Nelson Mandela, the late anti-Apartheid icon, who passed away at age 95.

The stunning campus just outside Johannesburg and the school’s rigorous academic programming are unprecedented, serving the best and brightest but also the most underprivileged South African girls, many of them AIDS orphans and all from households surviving on less than $950 a month.

In 2000 Winfrey and long-time boyfriend Stedman Graham were invited to stay at Mandela’s home on the country’s Western Cape for a vacation of sorts. “I was at first very intimidated,” Winfrey said of the event during our 2012 interview.

Unsure of what to talk about with the legendary Mandela for such a long stay, she probed Graham for input. His advice to a woman arguably more used to holding court: “Why don’t you try listening?”

For those 10 days Winfrey and the former South African president swapped stories, exchanged ideas and passed newspaper sections back and forth. When the topic turned to poverty, Winfrey spoke up. It was a subject she knew something about.

Growing up in Kosciusko, Miss., Winfrey’s childhood wasn’t far removed from the average South African. She lived on a farm without indoor plumbing and watched her grandmother, who largely raised her, hand-wash her clothes. At 9 she was raped by a cousin; at 14 she gave birth to a son, who died after childbirth.

Her way out came in the form of a federal program that gained her access to a rich suburban school, where she was one of only a handful of African-Americans. Each day she bounced between a home of poverty and a classroom of possibilities. Here she discovered a knack for public speaking and debate, which earned her a part-time radio gig and, later, a scholarship to Tennessee State University.

When she started making real money-millions, then billions, from her eponymous talk show and subsequent media empire-she vowed to pay for other poor black kids to go to college. And she has: To date she’s shelled out well over $400 million toward educational causes, including more than 400 scholarships to Atlanta’s Morehouse College.

Sitting on the floor at Mandela’s house, in thrall to her hero and saddened as he described the state of schooling in his country, she vowed to take her giving a step further. She pledged $10 million toward a South African school then and there. “When you go to Nelson Mandela’s house, what do you take?”
she said, half-joking, of her gift that day. “You can’t bring a candle. I wanted to leave something that would be of value.”

When the school officially opened in January 2007, Winfrey’s celebrity friends including Diane Sawyer and Tina Turner flew in to see the magnificent campus and meet the inaugural classes of girls, many of whom are now at top U.S. universities including Wellesley and Mount Holyoke.

But the guest of honour? Winfrey’s inspiration, Madiba, of course.

Some extracts from a story published by
www.forbes.com