by Audrina Kingston

Created on: February 16, 2009   Last Updated: March 02, 2009

Her South African daughters call her Mama Oprah.

What an honor to be called Mama by such an extraordinary group of young women. It's a fitting tribute to pay the honorary mother figure who has become the girls' hero.

In 2007, at the age of fifty-three, Oprah Winfrey, became mother to one hundred and fifty

daughters. Two years later, she invited twice the number of girls to The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa. The Leadership Academy came to fruition after Oprah pledged to former South African Prime Minister, Nelson Mandela, that she would build a school in South Africa.

Oprah speaks often about having Aha! Moments'. That moniker is widely used by many in pop culture today when referring to ones own personal revelations, acts of self-discovery, or spiritual awakening.

Conceiving The Leadership Academy concept was perhaps Oprah's brightest Aha! Moment,' and she turned it into something big. Having no biological children didn't stifle one of her biggest dreams, which was to help other women help their own children. Asked on numerous occasions why she didn't start a family of her own, Oprah's response has always been reflective, that she had a belief in something greater than herself.

The Leadership Academy expresses what that belief entailed. In her daughters, Oprah recognized herself in their faces and stories. These daughters experienced the same fractured, less than ideal, home environment that Oprah grew up in. Many girls, orphaned early in life, were being raised by older siblings; others were looked after by aunties and grandmothers who desperately struggled to support them.

Perhaps the need to help her daughters (who lived in impoverished circumstances as she herself did in childhood) might have been less important to Oprah had she borne her own children. Ultimately, she chose to become the girls' surrogate mother.

How curious is it that the unlikely figure who has never raised a child of her own can become the mother to so many?

For starters, Oprah tapped into something that was missing from her own life motherhood. And, like mothers everywhere, she wears many hats. She is also everything a mother is. Oprah teaches, she mentors, she nurtures, she liberates, she entertains, she gives, she embraces, and she loves. Being a talk show host, she's also mastered the art of listening.

Like her daughters, Oprah has felt the painful sting from being shuttled from one home to another. She has lived with her struggling mother, her strict father, and

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