NONTOBEKO MTSHALI

IT STARTED over a cup of tea in Nelson Mandela’s living room in Qunu and ended in Meyerton, south of Joburg, with 72 girls dressed in white.

The girls were celebrating their academic achievements.

Oprah Winfrey, founder of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, held a graduation ceremony for her school’s first group of matriculants at the weekend.

Mandela’s wife, Graça Machel; Minister of Basic Education Angie Motshekga; Her Royal Majesty, the Queen Mother of the Royal Bafokeng Semane Molotlegi; and tycoon Patrice Motsepe and his wife Precious Moloi were some of the dignitaries who attended the ceremony.

Speaking to The Star a day before the graduation at the school’s campus at Henley-on-Klip, Winfrey said seeing off the first group of her pupils to tertiary education felt like finishing a marathon.

“I’d say it feels like relief, but more like triumph. It feels like rounding the last lap of a marathon and having to start the marathon over,” she said.

Winfrey said the fact that all the girls had been accepted at universities proved that with the right teachers, a strong leadership and a solid support system, pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds could thrive.

“The biggest mistake I see being made in schools around the world is that if you’re dealing with girls who come from challenged backgrounds, not having the financial ability to get the best education, people treat the disadvantaged (pupils) as though they have disadvantaged minds, and they lower the bar because they don’t expect much from them.

“The big difference that this school has made is that we literally turned that on its ears. I wouldn’t hear of it, I wouldn’t hear of girls being cuddled because they come from difficult circumstances.

“The fact that you come from difficult circumstances to me says you stand a better chance of enduring and succeeding because you’ve already proven you have strength... you’ve already been through it,” said Winfrey.

She said she would continue supporting her pupils after their basic schooling.

Winfrey has established a team of people who will help the girls, many of whom are the first in their families to go to university, with “all the stuff that normally a mom who would be taking her child to college” would do.

At the ceremony, a proud “mom Oprah” had tears in her eyes as the graduates walked onto the stage. She said the ceremony was the fruition of a dream she shared with Mandela at his birthplace in Qunu.

“I’m grateful to everybody who has allowed this to be possible. This is a day that fills me with overwhelming pride. I’ve been on a mission my whole life to give back what was given to me. Today, I see the fulfilment of that mission in white dresses.

“I was a poor girl who grew up in a rural area with my grandmother... it was only because somebody saw in me what I later saw in these girls that I am standing here today. I know that education is the door to freedom.”

During her keynote address, Machel, who is also a board member of the school, urged the pupils to develop the values they had been taught at the school and to be drivers of social change.

“You are a group of young women who have been groomed and mentored by one of the best, the absolutely best woman of our times... If there’s anything this privilege has given you, it’s responsibility. Become social-change makers; never turn a blind eye to social injustice, it must revolt you,” she said. “Make sure that history… registers the class of 2011.”