DIANA’S SADDEST LEGACY
Her courage touched the world. So how tragic that the landmine victim comforted by Diana – who’s soon set to meet Harry – had her dreams dashed the day the princess died
With her single red shoe and stoical smile, she was the girl who melted Princess Diana’s heart and brought global attention to her crusade to ban landmines.
When Diana visited a centre for amputees in Angola, early in 1997, and the world saw an emotive photo of her tenderly stroking the cheek of Sandra tigica, who had lost her left leg after straying into a minefield, its effect was little short of seismic.
Swayed by an outraged public, sceptical politicians in Britain — who had dismissed Diana as a meddlesome ‘loose cannon’ for taking up the campaign — changed tack. Dozens more nations also fell into line, and within months of the princess’s African visit they signed up to a treaty outlawing these most indiscriminate weapons of war.
Understandably, though perhaps naively, Sandra, who was then 16, and had been waiting for nine years to have a prosthetic limb fitted, was convinced her brief but famous encounter with Diana would transform her fortunes, too.
having lost aunts, uncles and cousins in the protracted civil war between the Communist MPLA government and the West-backed UNitA rebels, having seen her 15-year-old sister carried off as a ‘trophy’ by marauding soldiers, and having endured years of pain and poverty, she says she was promised a fresh start after meeting the princess.
She claims she was led to believe she would receive financial help and even an educational scholarship. As she later reflected: ‘i thought if i was friends with a British princess, then my life had become a fairy tale.’ Regrettably, however, it has not. indeed, as Prince harry will discover, doubtless to his surprise and dismay, when he visits Angola in two weeks’ time to continue his mother’s unfinished landmine campaign, Sandra’s life today is every bit as grim and difficult as that which lay behind her winning smile, 22 years ago.
this week, speaking via an interpreter, Sandra, now 38, told me how Angolan government officials plan to pluck her from her ramshackle, sparsely furnished home in the town of Saurimo, in the far north of the country, and fly her hundreds of miles south to meet harry.
though they have been introduced once before (in 2007, when Sandra was invited to the ten-year memorial concert for Diana at Wembley), their reunion will doubtless create more headlines for harry’s work, and for the halo trust landmine charity, of which he is patron.
Particularly as Sandra will have some touching news for the prince. She has named the fourth of her five children Diana, ‘in honour of the princess’, and she is eager to relay this to him.
Assuming arrangements can be made, Sandra hopes her six-yearold daughter — who has learned much about her famous namesake from scrapbooks and a dog-eared Diana biography — will travel with her to see harry. he will also greet other landmine victims who met his mother.
HOWEVER, when he and Sandra come face to face, she plans to tell him candidly how she and her family, abandoned by her husband, eke out an existence on the £171 a month she earns as a local government office worker and badly need his help. ‘i will request some support,’ she said. ‘i’m suffering and i’m concerned for my children’s studies.’
Sandra’s appearance will alert harry to the fact that her life has gone awry. For although she was being measured for an artificial limb when she met Diana, she no longer uses one — and we found her struggling to do the household chores using a crutch.
‘the prostheses they give you here are too short and don’t fit properly,’ she explained with a resigned shrug.
‘You can just about walk on them but they disengage (from the socket) and i had to keep stopping to pull it back into place. it is not suitable to wear in the street. i feel embarrassed, so i prefer to walk with a crutch.’
in Angola, the prince will follow his mother’s path, visiting the orthopaedic centre she toured, and the minefield through which she daringly
tiptoed wearing body-armour — another powerful photo-op choreographed by the British Red Cross, whom she represented — and which has since been cleared to become a busy street with schools, shops and houses.
As the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s private secretary, Samantha Cohen, remarked last week when announcing the itinerary for the couple’s ten-day visit to southern Africa, which begins on September 23, it will be ‘a particularly significant and poignant journey’.
Not only will ‘he see first-hand the legacy of his mother’, harry will take it further by highlighting the halo trust’s new ‘de-mining for conservation’ programme, which aims to safeguard a nature and wildlife-rich area of south-eastern Angola, boosting its potential for eco-tourism.
those unfamiliar with this vast Western African country, three times the size of France, might wonder why landmines still pose a threat more than two decades after Diana’s historic intervention, and 17 years after the civil war ended.
Yet during the bloody conflict, which claimed half a million lives, it became the most heavily mined nation on earth, its farming fields, roads, hills and forests carpeted with 76 types of anti-personnel boobytrap, made in 22 countries.
SOME were designed ‘only’ to maim, by blowing off the bottom half of a leg; the most lethal explode twice: once at ground level and again when they leap three feet in the air like jumping-jacks, spraying shrapnel.
According to the halo trust, which has destroyed 100,000 mines there since 1994, it is impossible to say how many were laid, but some estimates are as high as 20 million, and the Angolan authorities say 1,200 minefields in 26,000 acres remain active.
Up to 88,000 of the 30 million population have been maimed, many of them poor villagers who wandered off the beaten track and children who fell victim to natural curiosity.
thus Angola — whose ordinary subjects gain scant benefit from its vast oil and mineral wealth, while its ‘socialist’ elite weave along potholed roads in Porsches and Mercedes — has the unenviable distinction of being the country with the highest proportion of amputees. one of these shameful statistics is Sandra.
When Diana peeled back the curtain of a cubicle at the Neves Bendinha orthopaedic Centre, in Luanda, that day in January 1997, she found a tiny girl (mistakenly reported to be 13 years old, but actually 16) wearing a brightly patterned blouse and skirt, and a crimson trainer on her remaining foot. Yet her spirit and cheerfulness belied her disability.
As she recalled this week, she had lost her leg in 1981, when she was seven years old and attempting to flee a battle being waged in the midst of her village.
‘Bombs were raining from the sky and there was a lot of shooting, so i tried to run away across the fields with my uncle and aunt,’ she says, adding quietly: ‘But i was the only one who lived to tell the story.’
the mine destroyed her left leg up to six inches above the ankle and shattered what remained. But the fighting was so fierce that she couldn’t reach a hospital for three days and wasn’t expected to live. ‘Somehow i found the strength,’ she says.
When Diana gently introduced herself, Sandra — waiting to be
measured for her first prosthetic leg — had no idea who she was.
It was only after their ten-minute conversation that a reporter informed the bewildered girl she had just had an audience with a British princess; a woman who, while no longer a member of the Royal Family because she and Prince Charles had divorced the previous year, was the world’s most iconic figure.
Sandra could barely understand, not only because Diana wore little make-up and was dressed down, in chinos and a denim blouse.
‘She gave me some cuddles, and our time together gave me courage,’ she said this week, clearly relishing the opportunity to re-live the occasion. ‘She even had tears in her eyes, seeing a small girl without a leg.’ Diana stroked her face and arm, she remembers, and though Sandra couldn’t understand any English, she could tell ‘from the way she spoke that she was saying nice things’.
A translator told her what Diana was saying. Sandra was impressed by the sensitivity of her questions.
‘We were not together long but when she left I felt I was saying goodbye to a friend,’ she recalls.
‘I gave my daughter the name Diana because I loved her and she was such a good person. I loved her way with people. She was famous and she made me feel famous — I will never forget her.
‘I can see that her sons are the same as their mother. When I went to England (to the Wembley concert) they kneeled down when they spoke to me. I loved them for that. They are really good people — a good family.’
Diana, for her part, was equally impressed. ‘It’s horrific, isn’t it? It doesn’t bear thinking about,’ she mused to a reporter after leaving Sandra. ‘This puts everything in perspective.’
Only when she visited Huambo Central Hospital, where she was shown to the bedside of another victim, seven-year-old Helen Ussova, whose stomach had been blown away, did she realise that Sandra was relatively fortunate.
It is when we come to the question of the ‘promises’ which Sandra claims were made to her that this story becomes clouded. In her few, brief previous interviews, Sandra has said Diana asked her what she would like as a gift, and she asked for some ‘toys’. After Diana left Luanda, they were delivered.
However, this week she went further, saying Diana had ‘promised me some support’ — her expectation being that this would extend beyond a few presents to lifechanging assistance with her finances and education.
She is convinced it would have been forthcoming if Diana hadn’t been killed in the car crash in Paris, seven months after visiting Luanda. When she was told that the princess had died, Sandra asked, through her tears, whether she would now be ‘forgotten’ — and her fears have proved prescient.
‘I think, if I had only gone to the funeral, I would have got something,’ she says now. ‘Because when she visited here she promised me some support — but then she died.’
In consequence, she says, it took many years for her to muster enough money to finish her education and gain the qualifications needed to attend university and find a better-paid job. And now she has those qualifications, she can’t afford the college fees.
Sandra’s current travails were all too clear this week. Though she married a soldier — and has five children, the oldest aged 14, the youngest 14 months — she now has no idea where he is. So the family subsists on her meagre income.
AT DAWN, she rises to feed and dress her family, in a home whose only decoration is a portrait of Diana stuck to the bare concrete wall. She then limps precariously along the rutted road to her office in town, returning to make supper and collapse, exhausted, in her uncarpeted bedroom. Her one luxury is a flickering TV.
‘I’m happy,’ she insists, but then qualifies this by saying: ‘But it isn’t easy. I’m a public figure in Angola — in 2008, I was elected Miss Mine Survivor, in a national programme promoted by our First Lady — but in fact I survive from day to day. My entire salary goes on food and I can barely dress the children.’
When Sandra is asked how she would use any qualifications, she is quick to answer. ‘I would enjoy doing the same sort of work as the princess,’ she says, her smile returning. ‘Caring for the needy.’
Of course, it remains to be seen whether this ‘landmine girl’ will be given a chance to tell Prince Harry about the harsh realities of her life, as he picks up the reins of his mother’s humanitarian crusade.