In this article: Oprah recoils at African mayhem in "Blood Diamond."

"This time, I won't fail"

In an exclusive interview, Oprah Winfrey recounts a rare personal setback -- and how it inspired her to help others on an even grander scale.
By Patricia Edmonds

She wants Americans to understand why she built the school -- and why she built it there, not here.

Oprah Winfrey sheds her chic-but-painful platform heels, then walks up the Harpo Studios stairs from the set of her TV show to her office, where cocker spaniels Sophie and Solomon greet her. The program she just taped, her second of the day, was tough: a discussion with Leonardo DiCaprio about his new movie, "Blood Diamond," a tale of African conflict and the diamond trade.

"I came upstairs, and I said, 'Too much -- it's too much,' " Winfrey declares of the bloody, desperate scenes of Africa that were woven through her show. But even as she admits it's emotionally draining, Winfrey stays focused on Africa. In an exclusive interview with USA WEEKEND, the talk-show host is intent on discussing her newest project, a $40 million school for girls in South Africa.

She wants Americans to understand why she built the school -- and why she built it there, not here. She's concerned that "Africa is popular for the moment ... but I'd like to see how many people really have done something."

Winfrey thinks most Americans don't "get" Africa, and she believes she knows why. "People who just came in from the soccer game or the ballet class or the Wal-Mart," when faced with African civil wars and genocide, desperate poverty and rampant AIDS, "they think that is so disconnected, so foreign, so removed from their lives that they think those kids are different from their children," she says. "What you should be trying to do with your power and influence" -- in Winfrey's case, an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion, with 48 million weekly TV viewers in America and countless more in 123 countries -- "is to show the connection and not the disconnection."

Winfrey has no patience for criticism of people who do try to help in Africa, whether it's DiCaprio making a movie, or Madonna or Angelina Jolie adopting a child. Her eyes, still perfectly ringed with TV makeup, flash as she says that critics of celebrity adoptions "get me all riled up ... I think they can stick it -- you can quote me on that," she says.

"You know why? Because it takes a lot to take another child into your home, a child of a different race. I daresay none of us should stand in judgment of what that is," she continues, exhorting like the preachers of her Mississippi childhood. "It's a miracle when a child gets saved. And I don't care if it's Brad Pitt and Angelina or somebody down in Mobile, Ala., we have not even heard of. When I see them carrying around that little black baby, that is so OK with me. The people who criticized Madonna don't know what the hell they were talking about, because she saved a child."

Winfrey contends that Americans can be only part of Africa's solution and that the continent's leaders must take responsibility "for the welfare of its people." She believes that ultimately "women are going to save Africa" -- and that's where she comes in.

A few weeks from now, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls will welcome its first 150 students. Winfrey built the state-of-the-art school for poor girls with potential; she personally interviewed every finalist (from a pool of more than 3,000 applicants) and plans to teach classes there via teleconference. She speaks derisively of the architects whose bare-bones designs "looked like chicken coops!" Instead, for the girls who were used to sleeping in huts, Winfrey built 28 "aesthetically, beautifully inspiring" buildings full of art.

Winfrey loves to talk about the young students, often with tears in her eyes. The eager girl who walks 2 miles to the library. The frail girl who says she goes without food, "but only three days a week." The earnest girl who lost her father, sister, grandfather and aunt to AIDS in one year. When these girls leave the academy, she believes, they will become the doctors, educators and leaders who will "turn that continent around."

Winfrey speculates, "I perhaps will get criticism about, 'Why didn't you do this for children in America?' "

Her reply: "Because we have a school system in America. ... There's no 12-year-old girl in America that you're going to find crying because this is the last year for her education because nobody can afford to send her to school. You want to give the gift to the person who's going to love it the most."

Winfrey says candidly that when she has tried to help kids in this country, "I have failed." Attempting to mentor a group of girls from her adopted hometown of Chicago, "I took them on ski trips, we had etiquette classes ... you'd teach them how to do their makeup, we'd read and talk about books. And when they went home, they were criticized and beat up because their families said, 'Who do you think you are?' " The failure taught her "you can't just give people money, new homes, new stuff and think that you're giving them a new life."

Winfrey says she also has learned a lot from trying to remotely parent 10 school-age South African children, whom she has supported and overseen since 2002. Beyond a mention in the December issue of her magazine, "O", she has said little about it publicly, believing the children are safer and happier out of the public eye. She says her partner, Stedman Graham, was supportive when she called from South Africa to report 10 new dependents. She bought the children a big house, hired caretakers and sent them to boarding school. She visits several times a year.

"If I didn't have a day job, I absolutely would have made a different decision," she says of her long-distance parenting. "I didn't bring these kids over here [because] my lifestyle is not such that I could devote all my time to these children, and that is what would need to happen."

But a continent away, Winfrey says, she couldn't apply the stern hand needed to keep them on track. On a visit this summer, when she found the kids more absorbed with their cellphones than their school work, she scolded them in language she won't offer for publication.

But she paraphrases, her voice rising to a frustrated growl as she acts out the lecture: " 'Everybody talks about unconditional love. My love has some conditions. I showed my love for you by providing you a home, by providing somebody to take care of you, putting you in private schools. ... So this is the condition: You have to give me what I've given you. I've given you my best, and that's what I want from you. I want your best. And turn off your cellphones when I'm speaking to you!' Everybody's sitting there with their heads down. They got it."

She's as animated as on the air, trim and fit-looking in an olive-and-brown pants ensemble. But as the interview winds down, Winfrey declares, "I'm about as tired as a human being can be." Too many 23-hour trips lately, to and from South Africa. And she hasn't chosen an Oprah Book Club selection in nearly a year: She has been far too busy reading curriculum for her new academy.

But she is determined. "This time," Winfrey says, "I won't fail."

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Oprah recoils at African mayhem

Our interview with Winfrey took place soon after she taped a show featuring graphic scenes of African violence from the film "Blood Diamond" and an independent documentary.

She was clearly upset.

Grisly depictions from Africa are "too much," she says, and leave people "gasping for what to do. You can't beat them over the head with it because then they think, 'OK, every time I turn around there's another crisis in Africa.' I feel what the viewer feels ... I'm a soccer mom in Indiana, Boston, Rhode Island, Mississippi. And it's too much."

Instead, Winfrey says, she tries to make people understand that "the mother in Sudan feels the same as the mother in South Dakota and the mother in the Hamptons."

-- Patricia Edmonds

Cover photograph by George Lange for USA WEEKEND