Oprah at 40: How a Poor Girl from Kosciusko Became the Queen Who Crowned Herself.

Forty years ago this week, a woman with a name nobody could spell correctly walked onto a television set in Chicago and, without quite meaning to, rewired how the whole world talks about pain, money, books, and second chances. I am talking, of course, about Oprah Gail Winfrey — a name so powerful that even autocorrect has learned to leave it alone.

I do not write this piece as a distant admirer scrolling through old clips at 2am, though I confess I have done that too. I write it as a man who has, more than once, borrowed her posture — the calm authority, the willingness to sit with someone's story instead of rushing past it — for my own columns and my own quiet ambitions. Oprah Winfrey is not just a broadcaster to me. She is a syllabus.

A Grandmother, a Bible, and a Little Girl Who Could Talk

Our story begins not in a boardroom but on a farm in Kosciusko, Mississippi, in January 1954, where a teenage mother gave birth to a girl she named after a woman in the Book of Ruth — Orpah — a name the midwives promptly mangled into "Oprah," and it simply stuck. Ghanaians will understand this instinctively: we, too, know what it is to be named one thing on the birth certificate and answer to something entirely different for the rest of our lives.

Raised in her early years by a strict grandmother who taught her to read by age three, young Oprah became something of a local sensation, reciting Bible verses and poems to church congregations who nicknamed her "The Preacher." Any Ghanaian who has ever been dragged in front of a congregation to recite a memory verse on Children's Day already senses where this story is headed — some of us peaked at that pulpit; Oprah simply kept going.

But childhood, for her, was not gentle. She was sent to live with her mother in Milwaukee, where poverty was constant and, far more devastatingly, she endured sexual abuse at the hands of relatives and family acquaintances for years — a trauma she would not speak of publicly until she was an adult, and one she later used, with tremendous courage, to help millions of other survivors find their voice. By fourteen she was, in effect, without a stable home. It was her father, Vernon Winfrey, a barber and city councilman in Nashville, who finally gave her the structure she needed — strict, no-nonsense, and utterly transformative. He did not accept excuses; he expected excellence. If you have ever had a Ghanaian father check your report card with the seriousness of a Supreme Court judge, you already know this energy.

From Beauty Queen to Baltimore's Youngest Anchor

At seventeen, she won a local beauty pageant and an on-air radio job in Nashville in the same year, then earned a scholarship to Tennessee State University, where she studied Speech and Performing Arts. By nineteen — an age at which many of us were still deciding whether to attend our own lectures — she was already a television news anchor, becoming one of the first Black women to hold that position in Nashville. She later moved to Baltimore's WJZ-TV, where she discovered that reading the news in a detached, neutral anchor voice simply was not her gift; empathy kept leaking through. A less imaginative station might have fired her for that. WJZ, sensibly, moved her instead to daytime talk, pairing her on a show called People Are Talking — and something clicked.

Here is a fact many people do not know: before Chicago made her a household name, Oprah was demoted from her anchor desk for being "too emotionally invested" in her stories. Today we would call that emotional intelligence and charge a consulting fee for it.

Chicago, A.M. Chicago, and the Woman Who Beat Phil Donahue

In 1984, Oprah took over a struggling, low-rated Chicago morning program called A.M. Chicago. Within months, she had overtaken Phil Donahue — the reigning king of daytime talk at the time — in the ratings, in his own city. The show was renamed in her honour, and on September 8, 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show went into national syndication. It would run for twenty-five seasons, becoming the highest-rated program of its kind in American television history and turning its host into the first Black woman billionaire in the world.

A fun piece of trivia for the copy-and-paste crowd: Oprah nearly did not get the audition that changed her life. The Chicago station's general manager, Dennis Swanson, has said he almost passed on her tape entirely before deciding to gamble on her. Every mentor I have ever respected, including the ones I have never met, seems to have a story like this hidden somewhere — one person who almost said no, and one moment where somebody said yes anyway.

The Colour Purple, Hollywood, and an Oscar Nomination

Even while dominating daytime television, Oprah pursued acting seriously. Director Steven Spielberg, after watching tapes of her talk show sent to him by producer Quincy Jones, cast her as Sofia in the 1985 film adaptation of Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple. Her performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress — on her very first film role. Imagine failing upward that spectacularly. Most of us are still trying to nail our first job interview.

Philanthropy, Properties, and an Empire Built on Books

Through Harpo Productions, the company she founded and fully owned — a rarity for any television host, let alone a Black woman in the 1980s — Oprah built a media empire spanning magazines (O, The Oprah Magazine), a cable network (OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network), film production, and one of the most commercially powerful book clubs in publishing history. An Oprah's Book Club selection could turn an obscure novel into an overnight bestseller — a phenomenon publishers still refer to, with equal parts gratitude and terror, as "the Oprah Effect."

Her philanthropy has been just as ambitious as her business ventures. She founded the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa, a boarding school for girls from disadvantaged backgrounds, and has given away hundreds of millions of dollars over the decades to causes spanning education, disaster relief, and women's empowerment. She owns properties across the United States, including a estate in Montecito, California, but has always insisted — repeatedly, publicly — that her truest wealth is measured in the lives she has touched, not the square footage she owns.

Relationships and the Life She Chose

Oprah's decades-long partnership with businessman Stedman Graham, whom she has never formally married despite their long engagement, has long fascinated the public. She has spoken candidly about choosing a life without biological children, framing her audience, her mentees, and the causes she champions as the family she built by design rather than by default. In a culture — ours included — that often measures a woman's worth by marital status and motherhood, Oprah quietly wrote her own definition of a fulfilled life and dared the world to keep up.

The Steel-Man Case Against the Oprah Mythology

Now, in fairness, not every voice in this conversation sings from the same hymn sheet, and an honest columnist owes his readers the counterargument, not just the applause. Critics have long argued that Oprah's empire of self-help, wellness gurus, and "you create your own reality" philosophy occasionally strayed into pseudoscience — her platforming of certain controversial medical and spiritual figures over the years drew real scrutiny from doctors and journalists alike. Others argue that her book club, for all its power, sometimes crowned commercially safe choices over genuinely challenging literature. And some scholars of media caution against over-personalising systemic issues — poverty, trauma, health — into individual journeys of "healing," when structural change is what is truly required. These are fair critiques, and a mentor worth having is one whose flaws you can name honestly, not one you worship blindly.

What This Means for Us, In Ghana

We are, as a nation, no strangers to the girl who rises from nothing. We tell these stories at funerals, at durbars, in church testimonies — the trader's daughter who becomes a surgeon, the fisherman's son who becomes a professor. Oprah's story belongs in that same oral tradition, except she told her version to the entire planet, every weekday afternoon, for twenty-five years. For a Ghanaian broadcaster, columnist, or young woman starting a business from her mother's kitchen table, the lesson is not "go to America." The lesson is simpler: your beginning does not get a vote on your ending.

A Word From Chief Tutu

I will confess something to you, reader, in the spirit Oprah herself made fashionable: I have studied her interviews the way some men study football tactics. Her patience with a guest's silence. Her refusal to fill every pause with her own voice. Her willingness to say "I don't know" on camera, which — trust me — takes more courage than most politicians possess. As I built my own platform, column by column, I have borrowed more from her posture than from any journalism textbook. She taught me, from a distance of continents, that the interviewer's real job is not to be clever. It is to be quiet enough for someone else's truth to arrive.

Forty years on, we are not merely celebrating a television anniversary. We are marking the survival, against considerable odds, of a girl the world nearly overlooked — and the discipline, patience, and generosity with which she made sure it never overlooked anyone like her again.

Happy 40th, Oprah. Kosciusko sent you into the world with almost nothing. You sent almost everything back.

About the Author: Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian author, columnist, and filmmaker, and the founder of Brownsy Silva Company, a multi-disciplinary creative platform spanning novels, films, and opinion journalism. He writes on global culture, media, and society for Modern Ghana and other outlets, with a readership spanning Ghana's diaspora communities in the UK, USA, Canada, and Germany.