Graca Machel, the widow of former South African president Nelson Mandela, has said that she is yet to get over her “huge loss” of him not being around anymore.
In her first TV interview after a six-month period of mourning, given to senior CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour, Machel said that till two years before his death, Mandela was aware of South Africa’s struggles, and that she decided then “to save him, to protect him, from getting involved and knowing in depth what was going on, because he was such a sensitive person.”
She told Amanpour: “He wouldn’t be able to act on those issues. And, I felt, why to keep him with a heavy heart where he is not able to make a difference to change the situation?”
It maybe recalled that Mandela was laid to rest in Qunu, his ancestral village, on December 5, 2013, and Graca Machel, who withdrew from the world to mourn her loss for six months, has now emerged publicly to speak about him, his achievements and life after his passing.
Thanking everyone for sharing their feelings over Mandela’s loss, Machel said that she and the Mandela knew that the people loved him, but it was beyond her imagination to see that love in all its expression when he was sick.
“I was consumed with my sense of loss. But I have been told that for days every single TV station, every single radio would be talking about him, celebrating his life,” she said.
She described Mandela as a very towering person who filled every detail of her life, and added that it would take time to articulate the meaning of this huge loss.
Machel said that she was beginning to engage with causes which both Mandela and she cared about, and added that she will carry on, as Mandela would have expected her to carry on.
When she was asked what it was like to be married to two of the greatest liberation fighters of the African continent and in the world, Nelson Mandela and Samora Machel, she said: “it is the incidents of life which we never plan for it. It just happens. If you ask me how I ended up being loved and loving these two extraordinary human beings, I wouldn’t be able to explain. But it did happen. And somehow it gives you a sense of humility.”
She said that it was humbling to have had the opportunity to share a life with people who are referred as examples of the best human beings this region has produced.
She further stated that while thes two were icons to the world, the relationship she had with them, was that of husband and wife.
“They were the head of our families. We shared any detail of life as any other family, ” she said.
Asked what she thought she had given Mandela, Machel said that she felt she had given him a sense of family again, and to have an opportunity and the joy of having his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren under one roof.
“I did definitely give him space and opportunity to enjoy his family, to mentor them in a way he had not been and he had not had an opportunity to do it before. He was calm, he was not under the pressure of huge responsibility, both of us, we just enjoyed to be together, spend time together as human beings,” she said. (ANI)