TWO weeks after her move to adopt a Malawian baby provoked widespread disapproval, Madonna finally answered her critics yesterday, courtesy of a satellite link and an exclusive chatshow interview.

Having chosen the sympathetic stage of The Oprah Winfrey Show to air the first public defence of her actions, she responded to accusations that she used her wealth to “buy” David Banda, aged 13 months, regardless of adoption rules and the apparent wishes of his surviving parent.

In the interview, broadcast yesterday, the singer admitted that she had been warned by social workers that the lack of adoption laws in Malawi would create difficulties.

Madonna, whose fortune of £248 million is nearly equivalent to one quarter of Malawi’s annual gross domestic product, said that she and her husband decided to try to overcome the difficulties after being drawn to David. She told Winfrey: “There are no adoption laws in Malawi. And I was warned by my social worker that . . . they were more or less going to have to make them up as we went along.

“She did say to me, ‘Pick Ethiopia. Go to Kenya. Don’t go to Malawi because you’re just going to get a hard time.’ ”

Child-protection agencies criticised Madonna for the apparent speed with which she secured an interim adoption. In Malawi adoptive parents usually have to have been resident there for 18 months. Then Yohane Banda, David’s father, claimed to have misunderstood the agreement, believing that Madonna would be a temporary carer. But she told Winfrey that Mr Banda had understood fully what he was doing.

“I sat in that room, I looked into that man’s eyes. I believe that the press is manipulating this information out of him. I believe he’s been terrorised by the media. They have asked him things, repeatedly, and they have put words in his mouth. They have spun a story that is completely false.”

During the emotional interview, which was recorded at the Sanderson Hotel, in London, on Tuesday, Madonna, who is 48, addressed the studio audience from a large screen above Winfrey’s sofa. She said: “Here’s what I knew: David had been living in this orphanage since he was two weeks old. He had survived malaria and tuberculosis, and no one from his extended family had visited him since the time he arrived. So from my perspective, there was no one looking after David’s welfare.”

Wealth and status had played no part in the procedure, she said. “I assure you it doesn’t matter who you are or how much money you have, nothing goes fast in Africa.”

She said that she had first seen David in the footage of a documentary that she was financing. She had been “transfixed” by his image and, after learning that his mother had died, decided to try to give him a better life. She had not expected the subsequent outrage.

“I understand that gossip and negative stories sell newspapers. But I’m disappointed because it discourages other people from doing the same thing — anybody who had the idea that they, too, would like to open their home and give a life to a child in an orphanage who might not live past the age of 5 . . . I feel like the media is doing a great disservice to all the orphans of Africa.

“I beg all of those people to go to Africa and see what I saw. To see 8-year-olds in charge of households. To see mothers dying, with Kaposi sarcoma lesions all over their bodies. To see open sewages everywhere . . . they’d want to bring one of those children home with them and give them a better life.”

She said that David was recovering from pneumonia and bonding well with her two children, Rocco, 6, and Lourdes, 10. Madonna has pledged a £1.6 million donation to set up a charity in Malawi.