Graça Machel

Graça Machel DBE was born in Gaza, Mozambique. She is an African stateswoman, a former freedom fighter and Mozambique’s first minister of education. She is the widow of Mozambican president Samora Machel and of former South African president Nelson Mandela. Among numerous awards, Machel has received the United Nations’ Nansen Refugee Award and is an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She is the founder of the Graça Machel Trust and several other organisations through which she advocates for women’s economic empowerment, food security and nutrition, education and good governance.

Graça Machel was interviewed about her life, career and hope for the future for 200 WOMEN, a book and exhibition project founded on the principle of gender equality comprising original interviews and accompanying photographic portraits. This landmark project is the realisation of an epic global journey to find two hundred women with diverse backgrounds, and to ask them what really matters to them.

Q. What really matters to you?
What matters to me is protecting women and children, and allowing them to flourish. But, I never sat down to choose a cause or purpose, rather, I was confronted by situations in which the causes chose me – and I embraced them. I’m a village girl, who was very fortunate to be born to a loving, caring and protective family. I was nurtured, I was allowed to build my inner strength and I was told to take up my dreams and fly with them, with no limitations. I was the last of six children and my father died seventeen days after I was born. He was at home when he sensed he was going and, because he didn’t want my mother to take in the shock alone, he called my eldest sister to join them. He asked my mother and sister to make a pledge to him that none of the children would be allowed to grow up illiterate. So, these two women are the pillars I built my character on.

My mother was left with six children to raise on her own, with very, very limited material resources. People would have called us poor, but we weren’t, because we had a very strong sense of dignity in our family and we could live with what we had. This built our characters to be resourceful in any situation. My mother fought to give us the best tool in life: an education. We all managed to go to school, and, although we each have different levels of accomplishment, we all have a profession and are able to make a living.

All my life, I’ve had opportunities to be of service on different levels in the community – from my church work through to when I joined the liberation struggle that continues to liberate my country, Mozambique. When I was twenty-nine, I was made minister of education. I had to tap in to my inner strength to discover the best ways of providing education to millions of young minds, to enable them to take up their own dreams and fly. In that process, I learned about the very severe injustices that are inflicted on children and women – and that’s when those causes chose me.

The foundation that I received growing up allowed me to be free throughout my life; by acknowledging that, I am able to understand how important it is for every single woman in the world to have the freedom to make choices and to do whatever it is that she desires. My mother and my sister certainly informed my deep belief in the ability of women to regenerate, to rediscover inner strength and new energies, even when faced with challenges. In the nineties, I was given the opportunity to lead a study for the United Nations and visited many, many camps for refugees and displaced persons in desperate situations. I was inspired when I sat down and heard women’s stories, because I came to understand that they never gave in to despair. I marvelled at how women could hold on to their dreams, and at their determination to build something for themselves and for their families. They could see a future in which all the challenges they were faced with were meaningless. My belief and trust in the capacity of women has come from those face-to-face conversations.

I do feel that things are getting better for women and children, because we have this big push from humankind to acknowledge their rights; we have very well-developed treaties and protocols in place that are aimed at protecting women and children, and millions of people around the world are working towards this end. We shouldn’t say that things are getting worse, just because there are challenges. Rather, we should celebrate the numbers of young people who give up the comforts of their places of origin to provide help to those facing challenges in situations of conflict. There are millions of people who are consciously committed to goodness and to the protection of human rights – including the rights of women and children – and that is progress.

Still, there are millions of children not in school and millions of women who are illiterate; children and women are dying unnecessarily when the capacity, the knowledge and the tools exist to prevent this. Many of the issues will continue beyond my lifetime, but I strive to go to bed every day knowing I’ve done my best to make inroads. Yes, there are times when we make remarkable progress and there are other times when we have serious setbacks. You just have to make sure for yourself that you did your best – then you can be at peace.

Q. What brings you happiness?
Looking into the eyes of a happy child – those eyes speak volumes and give me joy. When I can embrace a child who is healthy and happy, and who has the full potential to become whatever they want, that makes me happy.

Q. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
It’s when a human being becomes dehumanised to the point of being unable to recognise the humanity of others. Yes, there are people in desperate situations who are capable of anything when they’re looking for something to eat. But, if you give them a loaf of bread, you will see their humanity – it has not been killed. There are people living in abundance, however, who have managed to kill their own humanity and who therefore are not able to recognise it in others – they’re not able to recognise suffering. That is the absolute lowest depth of misery.

Q. What would you change if you could?
I would love for people’s hearts to recognise the spark of life that exists in each one of us and the fact that this is what makes us equal. And to recognise that, because we are equal, no one has the right to humiliate, degrade or kill another. The mind is unlimited in its capacity, so I don’t think it is a stretch to imagine this. I want everything that we do to be directed towards valuing, protecting and caring for life. Achieving this is not complicated – we have the means to reach hearts and minds – but the problem is that the means has been appropriated to speak to people’s materialism; people have become slaves to money. Instead, our primary concern must become the quality of who we are as human beings. We must bring to light the people who serve, who are defining their lives on the basis of the concept ‘I am because you are.’

Q. Which single word do you most identify with?
Service.