Mandela’s ‘sparkle’ is fading, his wife admits

Remains in hospital for lung treatment

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA — Nelson Mandela’s wife has described how the former president’s “sparkle” is gradually fading, as South African officials disclosed he is suffering from a recurring lung infection.

The authorities added Mandela, 94, was “responding to treatment” in a military hospital in Pretoria where he has spent three nights.

Graca Machel, whom Mandela married on his 80th birthday in 1998, told of her pain at having to watch her husband “aging” before her eyes. “I mean, this spirit and this sparkle, you see that somehow it’s fading,” she said Monday.

Graca Machel, the widow of a former president of Mozambique, is Mandela’s third wife. He divorced his second wife, Winnie, in 1992, while his first wife, Evelyn, died in 2004.

Ndileka Mandela, a granddaughter, said Mandela seemed to have accepted his condition. “I think he takes it in his stride, he has come to accept that it’s part of growing old, and it’s part of humanity as such,” she said.

Mandela has been prone to lung infections ever since he caught tuberculosis as an inmate at Pollsmoor prison in Cape Town at the age of 70 in 1988.

He later described his good fortune that the disease was diagnosed and treated before it reached an advanced stage. “I went to my friends in prison … and told them that I was found to have the TB germ,” he told an international Aids conference in 2004.

“There were long faces drawn. My friends objected to me sharing my personal affairs. But I consoled them and told them that the doctors and hospital staff knew about my status and I therefore had no reason to hide this information from those close to me.”