Oprah’s Retreat From South African School Spotlights Larger Questions About Celebrity Philanthropy

Oprah Winfrey is handing over the boarding school she built from scratch outside Johannesburg two decades ago, ending one of the most closely watched experiments in celebrity philanthropy on the African continent.Ms. Winfrey confirmed late last month she is shutting down the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls at the end of the 2027 school year, when the campus will be turned over to the Gauteng provincial education department — 19 years after it first opened its gates to South African girls in 2007.The venture stands apart from the usual pattern of outside largesse, according to someone who spent a year at the academy as a resident adviser and knows Ms. Winfrey personally.“It is one of the boldest education innovations on the continent, and is different from any other model where a wealthy outsider drops money on Black education and leaves,” the distinguished professor of education at Stellenbosch University and former president of the Academy of Science of South Africa, Jonathan Jansen, tells The New York Sun.Is this a philanthropist quietly making good on a two-decade-old promise to a liberation icon, or a high-cost model that has run its course?A Promise Made to MandelaThe academy was never meant to be permanent. Ms. Winfrey has said the idea was born out of a conversation with the former South African president, Nelson Mandela, in December 2000 — two years before she selected the site outside Johannesburg. He was among the guests at the school’s opening ceremony in 2007.The campus was built with more than $400 million raised through the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy Foundation, including personal donations. But from the outset, the agreement called for the campus ultimately to be handed over to the provincial education department.Ms. Winfrey has characterized the closure as an evolution rather than an exit.“The dream was never simply to build a school,” she said in a press release announcing the shift, noting that her foundation’s commitment to South African girls would now flow through an expanded national scholarship program rather than a single campus.In a video shared by Oprah Daily, Ms. Winfrey struck a personal note about the students who have passed through the academy’s halls, saying she is “dazzled and in awe of them.” A representative for Ms. Winfrey says the new scholarship structure is designed to “double the number of girls who will have access to education through this model.”Mr. Jansen, for his part, sees the handover as consistent with what Mr. Mandela intended all along.“She always promised to hand over the school to the education authorities in South Africa and this she did, true to her word, since it now becomes a South African institution fully, as it should by virtue of public-school ownership,” he says. “When Mandela asked her to build a school, he did not mean run it as a wealthy American forever.”The residential program has already changed the lives of hundreds of girls from poor and working-class communities, Mr. Jansen notes. From his purview, the scholarship pivot isn’t a step back.“Even more will benefit from the next phase,” he stresses.A Reckoning That Almost Ended It EarlyThe academy’s history, however, has not been without controversy.The school drew unwanted attention shortly after opening in 2007 when several students accused a dormitory matron of physically and sexually abusing them. Ms. Winfrey traveled to South Africa to meet with students and parents, publicly apologized, and commissioned an independent investigation.The matron was ultimately acquitted of criminal charges in 2010. It was a painful reckoning for a philanthropist who’d staked her personal reputation on the project, and the fallout changed how the academy handled child protection for years afterward. Still, the school kept going for another decade and a half as hundreds more girls graduated. That is why this closure strikes more of a chord than a typical program wind-down.On the flipside, the episode points to a broader weakness in how celebrity philanthropy is often built, argues a political strategist and the managing director of Nestpoint Associates.“It underscores the fundamental weakness of highly personalized, single-donor models,” John Thomas tells the Sun. “When a school depends almost entirely on one celebrity’s brand, money, and ongoing attention, it is inherently fragile. Once the founder’s priorities shift, the institution often struggles to stand on its own.”Whether the scholarship model can actually serve girls as well as the boarding school did is a separate question, Mr. Thomas insists.“A well-designed scholarship program will almost certainly reach more girls and is more scalable,” he continues. “However, something meaningful is lost in the trade-off. A residential academy can create a strong culture, intensive mentoring, high academic standards, and a protective environment that day scholarships often cannot match. Scale comes at the cost of depth and formation.”That leaves South Africa holding the keys to a campus built to elite specifications.What South Africa InheritsThe physical footprint Pretoria is inheriting is not modest. The 52-acre campus in Henley-on-Klip, near Meyerton in Gauteng, includes 21 classrooms, six science and computer laboratories, a 10,000-volume library and a 600-seat theater — infrastructure that took years and tens of millions of dollars to build.What South African officials do with those assets once Ms. Winfrey’s foundation steps back has not been spelled out publicly, though Forbes Africa reports the building will stay tied to education under the terms of the original partnership agreement.Enrollment figures vary by source and cutoff date. The academy’s own foundation counts more than 500 girls who have graduated and gone on to top universities in South Africa, the United States and Europe, while news reports on the July 29 announcement put the total closer to 1,000 graduates since 2007.Whatever the true figure, the roll call speaks for itself: a generation of girls from poor and working-class families who went on to Ivy League and Oxbridge-caliber campuses, medical and law schools, and careers that few of their families could have imagined for them.Gauteng’s provincial education minister, Lebogang Maile, has said that current students will complete their education with uninterrupted financial support, and the academy will graduate two more classes before the structure winds down.The onus now falls on the Gauteng education department.“The government should prioritize maintaining rigorous academic standards and protecting the campus from becoming a politicized or underperforming state facility,” Mr. Thomas says. “The worst outcome would be allowing a high-performing private school to decline into just another poorly managed public institution. Clear performance metrics, accountability, and a focus on excellence should come first.”The academy has stood for years as a case study in a certain kind of celebrity philanthropy: heavily funded, built around one boarding campus, and dependent on one wealthy backer staying involved. Now that it’s closing, the bigger question isn’t really about Ms. Winfrey. It’s whether a model this expensive and this hands-on can ever scale up to move girls’ education across the continent, or whether the scholarship route Ms. Winfrey is betting on now works better.“Philanthropists should prioritize local partnerships, measurable outcomes, and exit strategies that leave behind capable institutions rather than monuments to their own generosity,” Mr. Thomas says. “Long-term impact matters more than short-term visibility.”

Oprah’s Retreat From South African School Spotlights Larger Questions About Celebrity Philanthropy

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