Graça Machel: The Heroine to Mandela's Hero
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The heroine who guided Nelson Mandela through his last years -- the woman that gave him great happiness -- is Graça Machel. In the past seven days, first in Soweto then in Pretoria and finally in Kumo, even while tortured by grief, she stood tall, brave and dignified. In the last few months she has been at Mandela's side night and day as his health failed. She was with him as he died -- and her commitment to the same ideals that Mandela held dear ensures that the causes he held dear will live on.
When I was writing a book of essays, entitled Courage, highlighting the lives of people of outstanding bravery to raise funds for our children's charity, I talked to Nelson Mandela and to Graça and explained that I was planning to write a chapter on the two of them. Both had shown extraordinary fortitude and taken great risks for what they believed. Both had suffered greatly for their commitment. Both had endured years when their very lives were in jeopardy, both had lost loved ones as they pursued their cause. And both epitomised to me the virtue of courage, that what we admire is not just the daring and the willingness to risk all, qualities Mandela and Graça had in abundance but matching that strength of will strength of belief in something far bigger than yourself.
We all now know of Mandela's strength of will and belief: his defiance facing possible execution, his resilience even faced with a 27-year prison sentence often in solitary detention, his insistent demand from which he would not be moved that until everyone else went free he would remain in jail. But I wanted also to tell the story of Graça, the young leader who went into the bush in support of Mozambique's liberation, the teacher who schooled war ravaged kids in camps, the revolutionary who married the President of Mozambique, and then had to cope with his death, his aircraft shot down in suspicious circumstances in 1986. And the leader who was the country's Education Minister before and after he died, and who, even after her pain and suffering, had become the worldwide champion of children brutalised by conflict.
But it was, as always, Graça who insisted that it was not her who should be featured or receive attention -- and so the chapter on Graça is yet to be completed. But it needs to be written. Educated in a missionary school, she went to Portugal for her teacher training before realizing that there was no future for the children of her country unless they were truly free of Portuguese rule. After building the schools of an independent Mozambique, Graça -- using her experience as the teacher -- had compiled a major UN report demanding Security Council action to prevent violence against children. But Graça always stayed in the background and never pushed herself forward despite all her talents and skills. And throughout the 15 years since her marriage to Mandela in 1998 she chose to make her contribution at his side, Graça giving him, as he volunteered every time we met, the happiest of retirements. Meeting the two together you sensed the pleasure they had in each other's company, the warmth and tenderness to each other they shared, that was a joy to behold and of course, as time went on, the growing dependence that in his ailing health he had on her that was touching.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gordon-brown/graca-machel-the-heroine_b_4453925.html
