It's not her world famous talk show, or her TV channel, but her South African school for underprivileged girls which media mogul Oprah Winfrey now calls her "greatest reward".
With a programming block of her Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) kicking off this evening on TLC Entertainment (DStv 172) on MultiChoice's DStv platform which will run on Thursdays and Sundays and which will include her highly rated weekly talk show Oprah's Next Chapter, Oprah Winfrey jetted in to South Africa to talk to her magazine readers at the first-ever African O You event on Monday - and to attend the graduation ceremony of the third class of matric girls at her Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls (OWLAG) this last Saturday.
Oprah Winfrey says 16 of the girls are currently studying in the United States and the rest are studying at tertiary institutions across South Africa. Oprah Winfrey funds the tuition fees and tertiary education of the underprivileged girls from across South Africa.
"Opening the school has been one of the greatest rewards of my existence and in my life," says Oprah Winfrey, adding that "I've felt super challenged by it."
"Everybody who comes in your door say they know how to do it. They say they want to do it. But you have to look at the track record," says Oprah Winfrey, talking about the lessons she's learned in leadership and management from starting both her South African school and her TV network.
"Surround yourself with really good people. It's far better to have a person who is a really good person that you can train than have somebody who is a toxic person and actually doesn't know how to do their job. Toxicitiy drags everybody down."
"When I was four years old I realised that my life will be different than that of my grandmother," says Oprah Winfrey. "We didn't have a washing machine and one day my grandmother was boiling clothes in a big iron pot outside."
"She was boiling clothes and hanging them on the line. It was cold outside because I could see her breath. I was watching her do this and she said: 'Oprah Gail' - which is my middle name - 'You better watch me because one day you're going to have to learn to do this for yourself."
"And in that moment, standing here on the back porch looking through the screen at her, an inner voice inside me, God, said: 'No gran'mamma, I won't. And I have followed that feeling, that instinct to here."
"As I was driving through places like KwaZulu-Natal it looked very much like a hilly Mississippi where I grew up as a poor child working hard with my grandmother. I saw poor women who looked like my grandmother. And I saw little girls who looked like me. And I wanted to be able to take girls like that, who wouldn't have had the opportunity, but given the opportunity, could blossom," says Oprah Winfrey.
"And so that was the whole design for the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. On Saturday I attended the third graduation ceremony of matric girls. And every single girl who has gone to the school has gone to college. Every single one."
"The thing I love the most about my school is that the girls are brilliant. They're just so brilliant and vibrant, but I love the sisterhood that we've created. They support and love each other within a sisterhood where they support each other."
"When I was going through the building of the school, I consulted my inner voice. You can't try and come to Africa and build a school if you don't ask: 'God, is that okay?' And I've been given the go-ahead. So then came all the difficulties and challenges, and I was confused by that. I thought: 'You said yes?! You said it's okay? Why is this happening?"
"I can tell you that all of my lessons - the greatest challenges that I've had, the school before the years of Ann van Zyl [current headmistress, set to retire soon] and in building the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), they were literally parallel".
"We were going through the crises here at our school at the very same moment that Discovery had come to me and had asked me if I would be interested in partnering with starting a TV network. And I remember saying to David Zaslav who's my partner at Discovery: 'You know, I'm going through this crisis at my school and I don't want to make the same mistake."
"He asked what does the school have to do with starting your own TV network?And I said it is the same because it is about leadership. And I won't be able to be in California. I'm only one person and I can only be in one place at a time. And so I understand very clearly that you need to have the right people if you're to succeed," says Oprah Winfrey.
"That' what the lesson of the school was for me. It was a lesson in responsibility. Those of you running businesses, those of you who want to start a business, it's about who you get to help support you because everything is about leadership."
"I ended up making the exact same mistake, again," says Oprah Winfrey. "It came in wearing a different set of pants with OWN."
"It didn't look like the same mistake but it was the same mistake. In the beginning of starting OWN I was trying to end The Oprah Winfrey Show and I couldn't be also in California and also do my own show."
"And so I wasn't until we got the right team of people in place who also literally didn't just talk the vision but walked the vision and executed it that you started to see the vision that you will see on TLC Entertainment starting this Thursday night."
