A lone beacon of dignity in family farce
AS the family of Nelson Mandela tears itself apart, one woman is keeping her silence — and with it her dignity.
Graça Machel, the 67-year-old third wife of the stricken former president, has kept vigil by his bedside at a hospital in Pretoria for the past month, saying almost nothing to the outside world.
Reports of her husband’s condition vary wildly, with court papers suggesting that Mandela was in a “permanent vegetative state” and members of the family had been advised to switch off his life-support machine.
However, this has been denied by President Jacob Zuma, who continues to insist that his predecessor’s health is “critical but stable”.
He is urging South Africans to prepare to celebrate Mandela’s 95th birthday on July 18.
But even as the mound of floral tributes outside the hospital grows every day, Mandela family members have chosen to fight each other in court and in the media for the right to control his name, legacy and final resting place.
Tribal elders say they are upsetting the ancestors. Former allies in the ANC accuse them of undermining all that the great leader stood for.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu said Machel was “a strong woman of enormous stature. But graciousness is the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of her: gracious wife, gracious feminist, gracious human being. Gracious, but not to be trifled with or underestimated.”
She has rarely been seen outside the hospital since her husband was admitted with a lung infection on June 8. Indeed, she did not even feel able to leave his side to meet President Barack Obama who was in town last week.
Machel is a formidable political operator. She served as a minister in Mozambique for many years and was married to President Samora Machel before his death in a suspicious aircraft accident in 1986.
When she married Mandela in 1998, Machel became the first person to act as first lady to two presidents.
So it may not have been coincidence that she chose to make a rare public appearance on Thursday, with a few words about charity and unity, just as the Mandela family row over graves was reaching a bizarre climax.
Machel took to the podium briefly at the launch of a sporting event for the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
“Although Madiba sometimes may be uncomfortable, very few times he is in pain, but he is fine,” she said. “I think the best gift which he has given this nation again is the gift of unity.”
The background to the family feud is a fortune at stake for whoever controls the Mandela name, but Machel needs no part of it. She is a wealthy woman, with her own home and a stake in an investment company in Mozambique.
Born in rural Mozambique, she was the daughter of a farmer and miner. She escaped poverty through a Methodist education, studying philosophy in Portugal and then a law degree.
After independence in 1975, Graça became the country’s first education minister and married Samora Machel, its new president. Among the letters of condolence that she received after his death was one from Mandela, who was still in jail. She wrote back: “From within your vast prison, you brought a ray of light in my hour of darkness.”
The relationship became serious after his divorce from Winnie. They were married on his 80th birthday. She was 52.
Lately, she has also begun to assert her political views. In March she warned that South Africa was an “angry country” being brought to the brink of “something very dangerous” by increasing levels of violence.
Now the nation feels for her. There is growing respect for her, even as there is growing dismay at the way the Mandelas are behaving. She has nothing to prove to anyone.
Few of the Mandelas can say the same. —