Oprah (55 page)

She spent the summer of 2002 choosing presents for the children. “I got a thrill out of seeing 127 sample dolls filling my office. After I’d picked the one I would have wanted when I was a girl, I called up the manufacturer and asked that its barely brown dolls be double-dipped to darken them. We chose soccer balls for the boys, solar-powered radios for the teens and jeans and T-shirts for everyone. And I wanted every child to receive a pair of sneakers. In South Africa, where many of the children walk around barefoot in the blistering sun, shoes are gold.”

Oprah financed the flights for herself, Stedman, Gayle, and thirty-seven employees, with all their technical equipment to film the events for future shows, plus three hundred thousand Christmas presents that her staff had spent months wrapping. Her first stop was Johannesburg, where she distributed presents to children in schools and orphanages. She traveled to Qunu, the rural village of Nelson Mandela, where he played the role of Father Christmas and helped her give gifts to sixty-five hundred children who had walked miles to meet the man they called Madiba, Mandela’s tribal name. At each stop Oprah’s staff set up party tents filled with bubbles, carnival music, jesters, and more food than these children had ever seen.

Oprah said her Christmas Kindness, which she filmed for her show, had transformed her life. “It cost me $7 million but it was the best Christmas I ever had.” During those three weeks she was overwhelmed by the number of orphans she saw who had become parentless because of AIDS, and before she left South Africa she had adopted ten children, ages seven to fourteen, who had no one to care for them.
“I knew I couldn’t save all the children, but I could manage to stay personally engaged with these ten,” she said. “I enrolled them in a private boarding school and hired caretakers to look after them.”

Oprah justified her long-distance parenting because of her career. “I didn’t bring these kids over here [because] my lifestyle is not such that I could devote all my time to them and that is what would need to happen.” A continent away, she could hardly be a mother, but she became a generous benefactor. “Every Christmas I returned with gobs of presents,” she said. In 2006 she bought her ten “children” a big house and hired a decorator to personalize each of their bedrooms. But when she returned the following year she was dismayed to find them riveted to their $500 RAZR cell phones and talking about their portable PlayStations, iPods, sneakers, and hair extensions. “I knew immediately that I’d given them too much,” she said, “without instilling values to accompany the gifts.” The following year she did not give them “gobs of presents.” Instead she made them choose a family as impoverished as they had once been and spend their holiday doing something kind for others.

Before Oprah left South Africa in 2002, she broke ground on the site that would eventually become the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. “This time I will not fail,” she said. She returned home and started to do her homework on how to build the finest girls’ prep school on the planet, for that’s exactly what she had in mind. “This school will be an example to the world,” she said.

Through her involvement with A Better Chance, Oprah sent her niece Chrishaunda Lee to Miss Porter’s School, an elite, almost all-white girls’ school in Farmington, Connecticut, that had graduated Gloria Vanderbilt, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, and Barbara Hutton, the debutante dubbed America’s “poor little rich girl.” Oprah had been so impressed by the change in her niece after Chrishaunda attended Miss Porter’s School that she established the Oprah Winfrey Prep School Scholars, and through the years contributed more than $2 million to scholarships.

To fund her own school she started the Oprah Winfrey Operating Foundation, later changed to the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy Foundation, which she financed herself. Initially she pledged $10 million, but by completion, the project would cost more than $40 million.
Plans escalated from “a nice boarding school to a world-class boarding school for girls,” said Dianne Hudson, who coordinated the effort.

Oprah continued researching other prep schools, including the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School of Chicago and the SEED School of Washington, D.C. She also sought advice from Christel DeHaan, a philanthropist from Indianapolis who quietly built schools for poor children around the world.

By this time Oprah had developed very definite views on education, especially in U.S. public schools, which she was not shy about sharing. After doing two shows on the country’s troubled educational system, one titled “Oprah’s Special Report: American Schools in Crisis,” she considered herself well versed in the subject. So much so that on a visit to Baltimore, she pronounced that city’s school system an “atrocity.”

In an interview with WBAL-TV, Oprah said, “What is going on [here] is a crime to the children of this city. It’s a crime. It’s a crime that people can’t figure out.” She added that she had considered making a
charitable donation to Baltimore’s public school system but decided it would be throwing good money after bad. “What I’ve learned from my philanthropic giving is that unless you can create sustainability, then it’s a waste. You might as well pee it out.” She also said she had discussed the city’s “atrocity” with Nelson Mandela. “I was actually sitting in his house telling him about the black male situation here in Baltimore,” she said, citing (inaccurately) a 76 percent high-school dropout rate among black males. “He did not believe me.”

Neither did the Baltimore City School Board, which tried to set the record straight. “We need to be Dr. Phil and counter with the facts,” said Anirban Basu, a school board member, who corrected the high-school dropout rate to 50 percent (not 76 percent) of Baltimore’s black males.

Oprah’s diatribe was met with a tepid response from city officials, who seemed afraid to tangle with someone of her wealth and high regard. “I think she’s not aware of the progress that has been made here,” said the mayor, Martin O’Malley. “I’m sure it was not malicious on her part.”

The Sun
was not so diplomatic. Stating that the problems of all inner-city schools are rooted in poverty, Dan Rodricks wrote, “High concentrations of poor children in schools is a formula for failure, and that’s been studied and proved. Poor families have few choices, so they’re stuck.” He suggested that Oprah, who got her start in Baltimore, “hock a couple of rings or some shoes” and donate to the local chapter of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which provides partial scholarships for poor children. “I think you know about this. If not, ask Stedman…he sits on the organization’s national board….Think Baltimore children are being deprived of a good education, Oprah? Write a check.”

But Oprah had already committed her millions to poor young girls in South Africa, where the high-school graduation rate was 76 percent in some places. She preferred to make a difference among high-achieving students there than to low-achieving students in America, where she said poor children did not appreciate education. “I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there. If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school.”

Through Oprah’s Angel Network she began directing more and more of the monies she collected from her viewers to South Africa. An analysis of IRS returns from 2003 through 2007 indicates that nearly 10 percent of the donations she generated from others went to that country:

Oprah had fallen in love with Africa, and the continent became her new criteria for judging people. When she and Gayle attended the wedding of Scott Sanders and his partner, Gayle offered a toast to the couple. She said Oprah had given her the invitation list for the opening of the Oprah Winfrey Academy in South Africa and mentioned she was inviting Sanders, the producer of
The Color Purple—The Musical.
Gayle said that she had asked, “Is he Africa-worthy?” Oprah assured her that Sanders was indeed “Africa-worthy.” Gayle’s compliment, well-meant, seemed awkward and unkind in front of Alice Walker, who wrote
The Color Purple,
and was officiating as the minister marrying Sanders, because she had not been deemed worthy to be invited to the opening of Oprah’s school.

Newly enthralled with her African roots, Oprah imagined herself a descendant of Zulu warriors. “I always wondered what it would be like if it turned out I am a South African,” she told a crowd of thirty-two hundred people attending her “Live Your Best Life” seminar in Johannesburg. “I feel so at home here. Do you know that I actually am one? I went in search of my roots and had my DNA tested, and I am a Zulu.” At that point she had not yet received the results from Henry Louis (“Skip”) Gates, Jr., who was having her mitochondrial DNA tested for a PBS show titled
Finding Oprah’s Roots.

“If you tell me I’m not Zulu, I am going to be very upset,” she warned him. “When I’m in Africa, I always feel that I look Zulu. I feel connected to the Zulu tribe.” Gates looked nervous when he had to inform her that her ancestors were from Liberia, and Oprah looked crestfallen. She took no pride in being associated with a country colonized by freed U.S. slaves. Gates had to stop filming for a few minutes, because he said Oprah needed to compose herself.

“Her face fell when she found out she was descended from Liberians and not Zulus,” said Badi Foster, president of the Phelps Stokes fund, which focuses on strengthening communities in Africa and the Americas. “She now needs to mend her fences with Liberia and not be so dismissive….She flew Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf [first woman elected president of an African nation], to do her show but then she ignored her and spent all the time interviewing Queen Rania [of Jordan], the gorgeous young wife of King Abdullah.”

From 2000 to 2006, Oprah battled South Africa’s government to build her school on the twenty-two-acre site outside Johannesburg, on Henley-on-Klip, that had been recommended by the South African Department of Education. She did not like the initial designs because she said they looked like chicken coops or barracks. “Why would I build tin shacks for girls who come from tin shacks?” The government planners told her that African children sleep on dirt floors in huts with no water or electricity, or share mattresses with relatives, so even the simplest environment would be a luxury for them. Oprah rejected their attitude as well as their plans, and hired her own architects. “I am creating everything in this school that I would have wanted for myself so the girls will have the absolute best that my imagination can offer….This school will be a reflection of me.” And so would its students—all little Oprahs. “Every girl has some form of ‘it,’ ” she said, “some form of light that says ‘I want it.’ ‘I can be successful.’ ‘I’m not my circumstances.’ ”