Meet Graça Simbine Machel, The Only Woman In Modern History To Have Married Two Presidents

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There are many things Africa has given the world which is why it’s such a wonderful place to live. Having two presidents in a country at a time is extraordinary, but the motherland has also had the only woman to have become the First Lady of two different countries – Mozambique and South Africa.

Meet 73-year old Graça Simbine Machel, the only person in the history of the universe to have been married to two different democratically elected African leaders.

“It’s not two leaders who fell in love with me, but two real people. I feel privileged that I have shared my life with two such exceptional men.”- Graça Machel

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Born in Gaza, Mozambique; on October 17, 1945; Graça Simbine Machel was the last child in a family of six. Her father who died three weeks before her birth, had left the instruction that Graça must be educated through high school; a will that was carried out by her older siblings.

(Graca Machel and Nelson Mandela pictured above)

After completing high school, the Methodist church granted her a scholarship to study at Lisbon University, Portugal where she chose to major in languages.

Due to Surveillance from the Portuguese secret police, she was forced to abandon her education and fled to Switzerland.

In 1973, she returned to Tanzania and joined the FRELIMO where she met her first husband, Samora Machel – the first president of Mozambique.

On June 25, 1975; Mozambique gained independence and Samora Machel was made the first president of the new country.

(Samora Machel and wife –Graça pictured above)

Samora Machel was a widower as his wife, Josina, had died of leukaemia in 1971. In September of 1975, Graça married Samora Machel and became the First Lady of Mozambique, a position she combined with her cabinet portfolio as Education minister till 1986.

Samora Machel died in a plane crash on October 19, 1986, and this made Graça resign her post as the country’s Minister of Education.

The mom-of-2 who had spent the first 10-years of Mozambique’s independence in unflagging efforts to reduce the population’s 93% rate of illiteracy, after resignation, began to focus on the terrible toll that 20-years of unrest and economic stagnation had exacted from her country.

Everywhere, there were ruined schools awaiting reconstruction; dilapidated clinics in need of rejuvenation, and overgrown fields to be cleared for the subsistence agriculture upon which most rural Mozambicans depend. And these were just the first few items on the long list of Mozambique’s woes. As an uneasy, tense peace came at last in the early 1990s, there were more than one million refugees to be coaxed home from neighboring countries, as well as a tragic tally of 250,000 war-damaged children to nurture and to rehabilitate.

(Graça and Mandela pictured above)

A pragmatic woman who firmly believed that education is an essential first step to progress, Graça has spent a lifetime teaching as she dispensed information and advice to school-children, to rural Mozambicans bent on improving their communities, and since the start of the 1990s, to an international community appalled by the toll that adult warfare had taken on the world’s children.

To all Mozambican women and to many in foreign countries, the self-confident, compassionate Graça Machel is a revered role model—the quintessential Woman of 1990s Africa

Her marriage to Mandela was dramatic as it was announced at the 80th birthday of the late icon. This was in the presence of over 2,000 international guests in 1998.

Having tied the nuptial knots with Mandela, Graça assumed the position of the First Lady of South Africa at age 52, a position that was not new to her. About her union with Mandela, Graça had postulated: “We were grown up; we were settled; we knew the value of a companion, of a partner.”

Graça, who was married to Mandela till the latter passed on in 2013; has two children- Josina Z. Machel, 42, and Malengani Machel, 40, with her first husband, Samora Machel.