Nelson Mandela: open letter to South Africa from the foreign media

Journalists wait outside Nelson Mandela's home in Johannesburg as he remains in a critical condition in hospital. Photograph: Carl De Souza/AFP/Getty Images

Dear South Africa,

Please get the fuck out of the way.

Wait, that probably came out wrong. Let us explain.

As you may have noted, we're back! It's been four long months since the Oscar Pistorius bail hearing thing, and just as we were forgetting just how crappy the internet connections are in Johannestoria, the Mandela story breaks.

We feel that it is vital locals understand just how big a deal this is for us. In the real world – far away from your sleepy backwater – news works on a 24-hour cycle. That single shot of a hospital with people occasionally going into and out of the front door, while a reporter describes exactly what is happening – at length and in detail? That's our bread and butter. It's what we do.

And you need to get out of the way while we do it.

It's nothing personal. In fact, we couldn't do this successfully without you. In many cases, our footage is made more compelling by your presence. Specifically, we are fond of small black children praying and/or singing in unison. Equally telegenic are the Aryan ubermensch blonde kids also praying/singing, who help underscore the theme that Mandela united people of all races under a Rainbow umbrella.

Also very important, thematically speaking, are Mandela's successors. We very much like the idea that your ex-president was "one of a kind", and that despite his best efforts, the current batch of idiots prove that he was an exceptional presence, sui generis, and we don't have to worry about someone else like him coming along in Africa ever again. We enjoy your leaders' bumbling ways, their daft non-sequiturs, the glint of their Beijing-bought Breitlings. That "Vote ANC" truck parked outside the hospital? If that doesn't speak to moral degeneration of the first order, what does? In other words, this story would lack a tragic arc without Jacob Zuma. May he keep on keeping on.

Then there's Mandela's family. Really, where would we derive our soap operatic undertones if it weren't for the infighting and the blinged-up brashness of that clan? We love subtly implying that a saint sired a generation of professional shoppers and no-goodnicks. In our biz, we call that "irony". Makes for great copy.

In fact, we love everything about the country that doesn't live up to Mandela's legacy. We will take every opportunity to mention how everything you do flies in the face of everything Mandela would've wanted from his people – how you're basically a nation of under-achieving screw-ups. All of this is fantastic, we thank you profusely for your individual and collective contributions to this essential storyline, and urge you to keep squandering your potential.

But like we said, we're busy.

We need to be fed, constantly and without respite, big juicy mouthfuls of new information regarding every aspect of the story. Each piece of data, no matter how seemingly trivial or inane, is to us the rich, fatty gravy that we will slather over this one essential fact: the father of your nation is gravely ill, and we're banking – literally, banking – on his not making it. The geraniums in the hospital planter, beating the chill of winter? Metaphor. Again – no detail too small.

Indeed, you need to brace yourselves. We're about to engage in the single greatest orgy of industrial-grade mourning porn the world has ever known. Your little country will forever be honoured as the site that made the Princess Diana thing look like a restrained wake for a loathed spinster who perished alone on a desert island. Oh man, this is going to be big.

But that's then. For the meantime, we need you to behave yourselves. We're going to be pushy, and we make no apologies for it. This is the news – and news, after all, is the concrete foundation of democracy, a principle Mandela was willing to die for long before he was dying.

Note the solemn tone of our television reports. Ken the funereal passages published in our great papers. At times, the scramble for information may seem like a pursuit entirely free of dignity. But remember that watching a sausage get made can be a grisly process.

We would like to respect the fact that you're going through a period of great sadness and protracted grieving. But we all need to be grown-ups about this.

So, we ask again, and this time with feeling:

Please. Get the fuck out of the way.

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Nelson Mandela's family lash out at 'vultures' in foreign media

Family members of Nelson Mandela say they feel there is a 'racist element' to how they have been treated over recent weeks. Photograph: Foto24/Getty Images

It was the day the pressure became too much to bear. As Nelson Mandela clung to life in hospital and hundreds of people gathered to pray for a miracle recovery, his family lashed out at the foreign media for "a racist element" and behaving like "vultures".

Thursday began with knife-edge anxiety over the 94-year-old's deteriorating health and concern about what news the day would bring. After visiting him in hospital in Pretoria, South African president Jacob Zuma reported that Mandela was "much better" than the night before and "remains critical but is now stable".

Every such statement, along with countless rumours and tweets, only adds to the jumpiness of media organisations seeking any scrap of information. The anti-apartheid hero's relatives in particular have come under intense scrutiny.

On Thursday the situation reached boiling point as his eldest daughter Makaziwe, who has emerged as the senior member of the Mandela family, launched an emotional attack.

"There's sort of a racist element with many of the foreign media, where they just cross boundaries," she told the national public broadcaster SABC.

"You have no idea what is happening at the hospital. In the middle of Park Street they just stand. You can't even get into the hospital. It's like truly vultures waiting when a lion has devoured a buffalo, waiting there for the last carcasses. That's the image that we have, as a family."

It is understandable that journalists are interested in Mandela's health, she added, "but they are going overboard".

Makaziwe contrasted the situation with the death of Margaret Thatcher earlier this year. "Is it just because we're an African country, that they feel they don't have to respect this? I just think it's crass. If people think they really care about Nelson Mandela, they should respect that. Part of him should be respected, not everything of him should be out in the public."

Makaziwe and other family members are regularly filmed as they visit the hospital on a daily basis. When Makaziwe called a family meeting in Mandela's ancestral home of Qunu on Tuesday, its content was the subject of wildly conflicting reports. Recently Makaziwe has been the subject of unwanted headlines .

Mandela's eldest grandchild Ndileka Mandela, who was at the meeting in Qunu, endorsed Makaziwe's comments. "I didn't see this with Margaret Thatcher or when George Bush was in hospital," she said. "The manner in which it's covered makes us incensed. Why don't people think, 'If it was my loved one, would I want all these details made public?'

"We appreciate all the love and support but the way it's done makes our blood boil. It's not been like this anywhere else. You guys want a pound of flesh. In the absence of details you speculate. We are going through a difficult time as a family and this doesn't make it easier."

Ndileka said she held media responsible but added: "I don't think the South African media would go to London and camp outside Buckingham Palace."

Mandela's eldest grandson, Mandla, also spoke out against the intensifying speculation. "I call upon those responsible to desist from spreading mischievous rumours about Madiba's state of health," he said, using Mandela's clan name. "Our government has been keeping all of us informed in this regard and there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the information they provide to the public.

"At the end of the day my grandfather's fate like that of everyone else lies with God and our ancestors. However, many of us will continue to pray and hope for his recovery."

Mandela has spent 20 days in the hospital with a recurring lung infection – his fourth hospitalisation in six months. Many South Africans appear to be slowly coming to terms with the prospect of losing the father of the nation, who spent 27 years in prison resisting white minority rule.

How to cover Mandela's declining health has been a fraught topic in recent years. There was a lack of official information when he was hospitalised in January 2011. Later that year it emerged that two international news agencies had pointed hidden cameras at the former president's home, prompting headlines such as "Madiba spied on". A mutual distrust lingers between presidential spokesperson Mac Maharaj and some local and foreign journalists.

William Bird, director of Media Monitoring Africa, said: "Some media, and international media in particular, have revealed details that might be of interest to the public but are not in the public interest. This is understandable but not ethical. Against that, the kind of official information we've been getting is very limited. At least say, 'We saw him, he was awake or he wasn't.' They should have been trying to communicate a lot more."

He added: "The hype around it is pretty extraordinary. It's not comparison between Mandela and Thatcher, it's a comparison between Mandela and Princess Diana, and in that case there was a frenzy. At that time you saw similar rumours not about Diana's health but about how she died."

What was officially disclosed on Thursday yesterday gave a new flicker of hope. Zuma had cancelled an official trip abroad to visit Mandela at the Mediclinic heart hospital for the second time in less than 24 hours. He was informed by the medical team that Mandela had stabilised.

"I cancelled my visit to Mozambique today so that I could see him and confer with the doctors," Zuma said. "He is much better today than he was when I saw him last night. The medical team continues to do a sterling job. We must pray for Tata's health and wish him well. We must also continue with our work and daily activities while Madiba remains hospitalised."

The presidency added that it was "disturbed" by rumours being spread about Mandela's health and appealed for respect for his privacy.

In her SABC interview, Makaziwe acknowledged that "anything is imminent. I can also state that God only knows when it is the time to go."

She continued: "We will live with hope until final end comes. I don't want to lie. He doesn't look good. But he's still opening his eyes. He might be waning off, but he's still there. I think for us as his children and grandchildren, as long as he's still there, we want to give him the positive support, the positive energy."

Officials did not deny claims that the statesman is on a life support machine. "Yes, he is using machines to breathe," Napilisi Mandela, a relative, was quoted as saying in media reports after visiting the hospital on Wednesday. "It is bad, but what can we do."

Mandela's grandchildren gathered up cards, flowers and toys outside the hospital on Thursday and took them inside.

They gave thanks for the public's support. Members of a Salvation Army choir prayed and sang outside the hospital and the African National Congress (ANC) youth league paid tribute.

Crowds from South Africa and around Africa and the world gathered at the site as well as outside Mandela's former home in Soweto.

As many, including the government, continue to live on their nerves, there is little prospect of the media winding down. The US president Barack Obama arrives on Friday.

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Obama is visiting a very different Africa than former US presidents | Yolaan Begbie

US President Barack Obama looks down from the Door of No Return on Goree Island, in Dakar, Senegal. Photograph: Rebecca Blackwell/AP

South Africans have had a rough week. It started on Sunday with news that our former president Nelson Mandela's health had gone from serious to critical. And we've been hanging on to every update since. On Wednesday morning, as I watched reports on the hundreds of people who gathered outside the hospital where Mandela was being treated, I glanced over at a picture on the White House Instagram feed of Marine One leaving Washington, DC – America's first family had left for Africa.

As the first images of the Obama's on the continent emerged, I thought it was fortunate that his three-country Africa tour had started in Senegal. There he received a warm welcome. Locals lined the streets holding boards printed with welcome messages, and waving American flags as his convoy made its way to the Presidential Palace. I wonder if he'll get the same reception in South Africa. I just can't imagine that the streets will be filled with people cheering on his arrival. It's nothing personal. Our thoughts are simply elsewhere.

It is with the father of our nation, Nelson Mandela, the man Obama first met, briefly, in 2005 at the Four Seasons hotel in Washington, DC. The same man Obama has often been compared to. There are certainly similarities, sure. Both worked as lawyers. Both list Mahatma Gandhi as a personal inspiration. Both made history as their respective country's first black presidents. Both represent what is possible when people believe, when they unite, when they act.

I watched, as most of the world did, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States in 2009. It was the kind of historic moment we, as South Africans, were familiar with. We were captivated, more so perhaps because of Obama's African heritage. Those close ancestral ties are why many had high expectations of what Obama could, and surely should, do for Africa. His predecessors had left a strong legacy on the continent, what will he do?

Bill Clinton was the first US president to visit South Africa. He came in 1998 when our Rainbow Nation was barely four years old. We had just come out of our toddler phase – we were young, not yet able to walk steadily and trying to grapple with the new-found acceptance into the global community. Like excited kids, we gave Clinton a warm welcome, and he came bearing gifts. He pledged to increase aid to the continent, allocating more than $60m to South Africa that year. He also gave us the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which he signed into law in 2000. It is an important piece of legislature that till today allows us preferential access to the US market, with duties and tariffs on thousands of products being dropped to zero.

George W Bush walked into a very different South Africa when he met with our then-president Thabo Mbeki in 2003. We were on the brink of celebrating our 10th birthday. We were more stable and confident of our place in the world, we even started playing with new friends, but there was still a lot of growing up to do. That same year Bush launched the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), committing $15bn over five years to fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa. At that time, the United States was South Africa's largest trading partner. Today it is China.

That relationship is of course part of the reason why many of the reports I read leading up to Obama's visit said it's too little, too late, that the US was just trying to catch up, even questioned if it is worth it to spend so much money just getting to Africa. Yes, we are worth it.

The country Obama will visit is very different to the one Clinton or Bush engaged with. At 19, we have reached the age of majority – a milestone where, according to South African law, you are no longer considered a child. During Clinton's address to South Africa's parliament in 1998, he announced:

"Simply put, America wants a strong South Africa, America needs a strong South Africa, and we are determined to work with you as you build a strong South Africa."

We are stronger. Obama will be meeting with a young adult. One that is part of the powerful BRICS club. One that is looked at as the as the gateway to Africa – one of the fastest growing regions of the world. And so we know why America wants to come to our party and we should welcome them to join us.

But right now, we are likely facing (or soon to face) another milestone, one without our beloved Mandela, the man who gave birth to our now-thriving nation. We are told he opened his eyes and smiled when his daughter said to him, "Obama is coming."

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Graça Machel: so much more than a first lady | Robert McCrum

The campaigner: Graça Machel, wife of Nelson Mandela, at a meeting last year seeking to end child marriages. Photograph: Stephane De Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images

Shakespeare, in one of Nelson Mandela's favourite lines, now strangely apposite, says that "the valiant never taste of death but once". As the world waits for Mandela to make his final rendezvous with history, one woman – his third wife – who has been at his bedside throughout his illness, and now keeps vigil there, is almost perfectly cast for her role. Graça Machel (pronounced Mah-shell) has, after all, been here before.

In 1986, Machel was tragically widowed when the Russian Tupolev jet carrying her husband, Samora Machel, the first president of independent Mozambique, ploughed into a remote hillside just inside the South African border. The apartheid regime denied involvement, but suspicions of a political assassination linger. As the nation rallied in grief, Graça Machel, a young mother, was dubbed Mozambique's Jackie Kennedy. It's not an implausible comparison. She has the same easy, cosmopolitan self-confidence, natural presence, and command of languages (English, Portuguese and French).

She has many weighty qualifications, too, including a law degree – combined with an impressive slate of global achievements in women's rights and humanitarian issues. "I'm not Samora's wife," she's been known to snap. "I'm me." In public, she's beloved for her ready smiles and self-deprecating humour, mixed with a steely determination. As Mozambique's first lady, she was widely credited with being a moderating influence over her firebrand Marxist husband.

And if Samora Machel's story is now part of African liberation folklore, and if Nelson Mandela is a figure for the ages, Graça Machel is close to the equal of her two husbands. Shy of publicity, she once said: "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."

She was born Graça Simbine on 17 October 1945 on the coast of Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. Her family were peasants. Her father, who was semi-literate, provided for the family by oscillating between the South African mines and farming, and would become a Methodist minister. When he died, weeks before Graça was born, family legend says that he made his wife promise that their unborn child would have proper schooling. Machel's mother kept her word. "We were a poor family," Machel has said, "but I had the best education."

When young Graça Simbine got a scholarship to high school in the capital, Maputo, she was the only black African in a class of 40 whites. Now her education as an African radical began. "Why is it," she said to herself, "that I'm made to feel strange in my own country? They're the foreigners, not me. Something is wrong here."

Machel remains formidably committed to asking awkward questions about the status quo, and following her own agenda.

In the beginning, like Mandela, she was an African freedom fighter with a mission to liberate, and educate, her people. After a spell in Portugal, Graça Simbine joined Frelimo (the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) as a courier, was trained as a guerrilla fighter (she can still strip an assault rifle) and met the movement's charismatic leader, Samora Machel. The couple became lovers during the revolutionary war, and married in August 1975, two months after Mozambique gained independence. Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia's first president, came to the wedding. Not for the last time, Graça Simbine, now Machel, found her life linked to a moment of history.

It was said that the union was as much a political partnership as a romance. When her husband became president, his new wife became minister of culture and education. Graça Machel now showed her true colours. Mozambique had one of the highest illiteracy rates in Africa. Within two years, she had boosted school attendance and lowered illiteracy. But any euphoria she might have felt was soon dashed by new crises. A CIA-backed counter-revolutionary movement (Renamo) plunged the new nation into civil war, causing chaos and wrecking the economy. Then – just as peace was being established – Samora Machel was killed in that mysterious plane crash. Graça was devastated. Pictures of the funeral show her bowed over her husband's casket, stricken with grief.

Winnie Mandela and her still-imprisoned husband wrote letters of condolence. To Nelson, Graça Machel replied, movingly: "From within your vast prison, you brought a ray of light in my hour of darkness." Solace was fleeting. For five years, Machel wore black. Finally, in 1991, prompted by her 12-year-old son, Machel started anew, launching a foundation to address poverty.

Once again, she demonstrated extraordinary gifts of leadership and imagination. In 1995, she won the UN's important Nansen medal for her work on childrens' rights in refugee camps. "Graça Machel is impressive," says the author of the book that inspired the movie Invictus, the Observer's John Carlin. "She has a different level of intelligence, clarity and charisma."

When, in 1996, she was urged to run for secretary general of the UN (a job that went to Kofi Annan), she declined with the strategic savvy characteristic of an ex-freedom fighter. "There is no political will," she said of the UN. "So what would I do there?" Besides, she had a new, even more demanding, role to explore. Machel was on the path to becoming Mandela's third wife.

Their first meeting had come, after his release from prison in 1990, at a very low point in the life of the ANC leader. "We were both very, very lonely," Machel has said. "We both wanted someone you could talk to, someone who'd understand." In private, Mandela was broken. His wife, Winnie, refusing him any marital relationship, had humiliated him in public during their celebrity divorce.

Once Mandela's marriage was over, Machel says: "We started to see each other more often." Their first significant public appearance was at the grave of Samora Machel. By 1996, rumours of a relationship had been confirmed: paparazzi shots of here a shy kiss, there some sheepish hand-holding. The president's office declared Machel to be Mandela's "official companion".

When she could be persuaded to say anything, the new "official companion" displayed her old romantic sang-froid. She told a Portuguese newspaper that, as with her first husband: "Nelson and I were together some time before love came. It wasn't love at first sight. No, with me, things don't happen like that."

Second chances: Nelson Mandela and his new wife, Graça Machel, on board the QE2 in 1998. Photograph: Louise Gubb/Corbis

There was no doubt who was playing hard to get. Machel remains devoted to Mozambique. They were living in separate cities, an hour's flight apart, and the president was telephoning twice a day.

Mandela, now eager to remarry, even enlisted the support of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who got himself into trouble with South Africa's feminists by saying that the president needed "someone to give him his slippers". When Machel finally agreed to marry the president on his 80th birthday (he is 27 years her senior), she said: "It took a very special person to change my mind." Winnie, meanwhile, raged ineffectually against the emotional cunning of the woman she called "that concubine".

It is a belated love match between two people who occupy a quite extraordinary place in contemporary Africa. Mandela has been the first to acknowledge Machel's role in the autumn of his life. "She is the boss," he said in 2007. "When I am alone, I am weak." For her part, Machel bats away any sentimental idealisation of her man. "People may say my husband is a saint," she told one English newspaper, "but … to me, he is just a human being who is simple and gentle. I wasn't prepared for Madiba (his clan name) coming into my life, but now we make sure we spend time with each other because we were so lonely before. You only live once."

Graça Machel knows what it means to be unique. She is the only woman to have been first lady to two separate presidents. Not since Eleanor of Aquitaine became first the queen of France, then queen of England, married to Henry II, has one woman occupied such a position. Her love story has a Shakespearean dimension. As Mandela's widow she will become an icon of South African sorrow, and an impressive mother-figure to a nation in mourning. Like her beloved Madiba, Graça Machel now stands in the antechamber of history, with yet another extraordinary future role almost the only sensible prediction.

• Comments will be turned on later this morning

Born Graça Simbine in Gaza Province, Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique) in 1945. Educated in Methodist mission schools and studied German philosophy at the University of Lisbon. Married Samora Machel in 1975; married second husband Nelson Mandela in 1998. She has two children by Machel.

Best of times As Mozambican minister for education and culture, she made huge advances in boosting literacy. In 1995 she received the Nansen medal from the UN in honour of her humanitarian work.

Worst of times Her first husband, Samora Machel, died in a plane crash – in suspicious circumstances – in 1996.

She says "I gave my youthful years to a cause that has not been completely fulfilled. I thought we'd have eradicated illiteracy by now. I thought every single child would be attending school by now. I thought there would be more women in top positions by now. On the other hand, when I look at how many young women are now at university, I think, OK, we've done pretty well."

They say "She has focused on the issues most critical to her home country, issues of development and particularly women's and children's rights, and she has widened her scope to effect change worldwide." African Law Review

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Nelson Mandela's village braces for hero's funeral

A new road is prepared in Qunu near the home of Nelson Mandela. Photograph: Rogan Ward/Reuters

On the road through the little hamlet of Qunu in South Africa's Eastern Cape, a local television crew is filming a group of boys playing with a home-made go-kart on a hill.

The journalists gather them together and ask them to raise their fists and shout for the camera "Dalibhunga!", the name given to Nelson Mandela on his circumcision.

Behind them, hidden by a red brick wall and a screen of trees built on the N2, which passes south from Durban to East London, is Mandela's compound.

On Friday bulldozers were busy carving out a pair of access roads behind the house, both rising up to a ridge of pale yellow grass overlooking the village, converging on a rocky shoulder dotted with brilliant orange flowers.

The residents of Mandela's home village, where he arrived as a young child and returned to after his 27 years in prison, understand well what these preparations mean. The roads, which construction workers began after his first serious bout of ill health, will carry mourners to Mandela's grave site.

Indeed, the journalists who have arrived to interview locals in Qunu, the bulldozers, police and figures in plain clothes surveying the shallow gulley running through the village all point to a thing that most in the village do not want to talk about too openly but that they still acknowledge: soon, too soon for them, Qunu's most famous son will be interred on a hill overlooking the scattering of pastel-coloured houses.

If villagers are cautious about discussing the implications of the activity in Qunu, it is because in Xhosa custom, as in many other African cultures, it is taboo to discuss a person's death while they are still alive.

Tension in the village has risen because Mandela has never given exact instructions for his funeral. Instead, South Africa's government has been forced to rely on indications he made 20 years ago – including in an interview with the country's Guardian and Mail newspaper – insisting in the most general terms on his desire for the simplest of ceremonies in Qunu.

And like most people in South Africa, residents of Qunu, including relatives, have been forced to rely on sparse information from television and radio, even while watching preparations for an event they hope might no happen just now.

"There's no right time to discuss the death of a person who's still alive," Penuel Mjongile told the South African Press Association as he watched over his cattle. "That is taboo. It's not done."

However, the mortality of Africa's most celebrated figure has for years imposed itself on the lives of the residents of Qunu. International media companies long ago bought the rights to pitch their equipment on plots of land attached to the houses along the main road close to Mandela's house.

In the nearby town of Mthatha, where family disputes over where Mandela should be buried reached a courtroom on Friday, guesthouses and hotels have been block-booked long in advance. For now, however, the media is camped out en masse outside the hospital in Pretoria where Mandela is being treated – Qunu and nearby Mthatha will be their next stop.

Opposite Mandela's house, a young woman sells fruit from the back of her car. She is happy to talk but prefers not to be identified by her Xhosa name and asks to be called Amanda instead, complaining she has already been misquoted.

"Madiba's family needs the space and time to grieve for him," she says, using the clan name for Mandela, by which he is affectionately known. She says she understands the concern of the family – not least his daughter Makaziwe, who condemned the media gathered outside the hospital as "vultures" on Thursday – but says she believes there is "never a right way".

Asked how much the funeral should be a private family affair or a matter of international interest, Amanda answers that he is a global figure. "He's an international icon. People here understand that the world is interested in Madiba and cares about him," she says.

She recalls being invited to his house as a child for a "Christmas feast" soon after he was freed from prison. "I was very small but I remember the year he was released. It was the year my grandfather came back from exile," she said.

At her house across the road from where Mandela will be buried, the former president's granddaughter Nosiphelo cradles her seven-week-old son. "They just started again in the last few days," she said, indicating the earthmovers busy on the slopes above, the new roads guarded by police cars.

Amid reports that a large area around Qunu might be cordoned off for a funeral, she added: "I don't think that would be right." She agreed with Amanda that "Madiba is for everyone.

"I remember him most as a kind man. We would go to his house for Christmas. When I was young I didn't really know that much about his life," she said.

At the nearby Nelson Mandela Museum, Nokuzola Tetani, 52, who has always lived in Qunu, is anxious that Mandela's legacy is carried on by his family.

"I last saw him in October. I went to a function with the family. He was so full of love and life. When he saw his wife Graça Machel arrive, he said: 'Hello, my life,'" she adds, touched by the recollection.

It is also unclear is whether Mandela's final resting place in Qunu will be a public or a private location.

Indeed his His eldest daughter, Makaziwe, indicated on Thursday that the grave – far from being a public monument – would probably be considered private.

"Family graveyards … they're not for public," she told the state broadcaster. "They are for public once when you've buried a loved one and you invite people to that. And that is the end. After that it becomes strictly a family sacred place."

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Nelson Mandela's condition has 'greatly improved', says ex-wife Winnie - video

Nelson Mandela's wife draws strength from Barack Obama's words of comfort

US president stays away from hospital out of deference to Mandela's 'peace and comfort', but meets family members who praise the Obamas' personal warmth and sensitivity

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Graça Machel: so much more than a first lady | Robert McCrum

The campaigner: Graça Machel, wife of Nelson Mandela, at a meeting last year seeking to end child marriages. Photograph: Stephane De Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images

Shakespeare, in one of Nelson Mandela's favourite lines, now strangely apposite, says that "the valiant never taste of death but once". As the world waits for Mandela to make his final rendezvous with history, one woman – his third wife – who has been at his bedside throughout his illness, and now keeps vigil there, is almost perfectly cast for her role. Graça Machel (pronounced Mah-shell) has, after all, been here before.

In 1986, Machel was tragically widowed when the Russian Tupolev jet carrying her husband, Samora Machel, the first president of independent Mozambique, ploughed into a remote hillside just inside the South African border. The apartheid regime denied involvement, but suspicions of a political assassination linger. As the nation rallied in grief, Graça Machel, a young mother, was dubbed Mozambique's Jackie Kennedy. It's not an implausible comparison. She has the same easy, cosmopolitan self-confidence, natural presence, and command of languages (English, Portuguese and French).

She has many weighty qualifications, too, including a law degree – combined with an impressive slate of global achievements in women's rights and humanitarian issues. "I'm not Samora's wife," she's been known to snap. "I'm me." In public, she's beloved for her ready smiles and self-deprecating humour, mixed with a steely determination. As Mozambique's first lady, she was widely credited with being a moderating influence over her firebrand Marxist husband.

And if Samora Machel's story is now part of African liberation folklore, and if Nelson Mandela is a figure for the ages, Graça Machel is close to the equal of her two husbands. Shy of publicity, she once said: "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."

She was born Graça Simbine on 17 October 1945 on the coast of Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. Her family were peasants. Her father, who was semi-literate, provided for the family by oscillating between the South African mines and farming, and would become a Methodist minister. When he died, weeks before Graça was born, family legend says that he made his wife promise that their unborn child would have proper schooling. Machel's mother kept her word. "We were a poor family," Machel has said, "but I had the best education."

When young Graça Simbine got a scholarship to high school in the capital, Maputo, she was the only black African in a class of 40 whites. Now her education as an African radical began. "Why is it," she said to herself, "that I'm made to feel strange in my own country? They're the foreigners, not me. Something is wrong here."

Machel remains formidably committed to asking awkward questions about the status quo, and following her own agenda.

In the beginning, like Mandela, she was an African freedom fighter with a mission to liberate, and educate, her people. After a spell in Portugal, Graça Simbine joined Frelimo (the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) as a courier, was trained as a guerrilla fighter (she can still strip an assault rifle) and met the movement's charismatic leader, Samora Machel. The couple became lovers during the revolutionary war, and married in August 1975, two months after Mozambique gained independence. Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia's first president, came to the wedding. Not for the last time, Graça Simbine, now Machel, found her life linked to a moment of history.

It was said that the union was as much a political partnership as a romance. When her husband became president, his new wife became minister of culture and education. Graça Machel now showed her true colours. Mozambique had one of the highest illiteracy rates in Africa. Within two years, she had boosted school attendance and lowered illiteracy. But any euphoria she might have felt was soon dashed by new crises. A CIA-backed counter-revolutionary movement (Renamo) plunged the new nation into civil war, causing chaos and wrecking the economy. Then – just as peace was being established – Samora Machel was killed in that mysterious plane crash. Graça was devastated. Pictures of the funeral show her bowed over her husband's casket, stricken with grief.

Winnie Mandela and her still-imprisoned husband wrote letters of condolence. To Nelson, Graça Machel replied, movingly: "From within your vast prison, you brought a ray of light in my hour of darkness." Solace was fleeting. For five years, Machel wore black. Finally, in 1991, prompted by her 12-year-old son, Machel started anew, launching a foundation to address poverty.

Once again, she demonstrated extraordinary gifts of leadership and imagination. In 1995, she won the UN's important Nansen medal for her work on childrens' rights in refugee camps. "Graça Machel is impressive," says the author of the book that inspired the movie Invictus, the Observer's John Carlin. "She has a different level of intelligence, clarity and charisma."

When, in 1996, she was urged to run for secretary general of the UN (a job that went to Kofi Annan), she declined with the strategic savvy characteristic of an ex-freedom fighter. "There is no political will," she said of the UN. "So what would I do there?" Besides, she had a new, even more demanding, role to explore. Machel was on the path to becoming Mandela's third wife.

Their first meeting had come, after his release from prison in 1990, at a very low point in the life of the ANC leader. "We were both very, very lonely," Machel has said. "We both wanted someone you could talk to, someone who'd understand." In private, Mandela was broken. His wife, Winnie, refusing him any marital relationship, had humiliated him in public during their celebrity divorce.

Once Mandela's marriage was over, Machel says: "We started to see each other more often." Their first significant public appearance was at the grave of Samora Machel. By 1996, rumours of a relationship had been confirmed: paparazzi shots of here a shy kiss, there some sheepish hand-holding. The president's office declared Machel to be Mandela's "official companion".

When she could be persuaded to say anything, the new "official companion" displayed her old romantic sang-froid. She told a Portuguese newspaper that, as with her first husband: "Nelson and I were together some time before love came. It wasn't love at first sight. No, with me, things don't happen like that."

Second chances: Nelson Mandela and his new wife, Graça Machel, on board the QE2 in 1998. Photograph: Louise Gubb/Corbis

There was no doubt who was playing hard to get. Machel remains devoted to Mozambique. They were living in separate cities, an hour's flight apart, and the president was telephoning twice a day.

Mandela, now eager to remarry, even enlisted the support of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who got himself into trouble with South Africa's feminists by saying that the president needed "someone to give him his slippers". When Machel finally agreed to marry the president on his 80th birthday (he is 27 years her senior), she said: "It took a very special person to change my mind." Winnie, meanwhile, raged ineffectually against the emotional cunning of the woman she called "that concubine".

It is a belated love match between two people who occupy a quite extraordinary place in contemporary Africa. Mandela has been the first to acknowledge Machel's role in the autumn of his life. "She is the boss," he said in 2007. "When I am alone, I am weak." For her part, Machel bats away any sentimental idealisation of her man. "People may say my husband is a saint," she told one English newspaper, "but … to me, he is just a human being who is simple and gentle. I wasn't prepared for Madiba (his clan name) coming into my life, but now we make sure we spend time with each other because we were so lonely before. You only live once."

Graça Machel knows what it means to be unique. She is the only woman to have been first lady to two separate presidents. Not since Eleanor of Aquitaine became first the queen of France, then queen of England, married to Henry II, has one woman occupied such a position. Her love story has a Shakespearean dimension. As Mandela's widow she will become an icon of South African sorrow, and an impressive mother-figure to a nation in mourning. Like her beloved Madiba, Graça Machel now stands in the antechamber of history, with yet another extraordinary future role almost the only sensible prediction.

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Born Graça Simbine in Gaza Province, Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique) in 1945. Educated in Methodist mission schools and studied German philosophy at the University of Lisbon. Married Samora Machel in 1975; married second husband Nelson Mandela in 1998. She has two children by Machel.

Best of times As Mozambican minister for education and culture, she made huge advances in boosting literacy. In 1995 she received the Nansen medal from the UN in honour of her humanitarian work.

Worst of times Her first husband, Samora Machel, died in a plane crash – in suspicious circumstances – in 1996.

She says "I gave my youthful years to a cause that has not been completely fulfilled. I thought we'd have eradicated illiteracy by now. I thought every single child would be attending school by now. I thought there would be more women in top positions by now. On the other hand, when I look at how many young women are now at university, I think, OK, we've done pretty well."

They say "She has focused on the issues most critical to her home country, issues of development and particularly women's and children's rights, and she has widened her scope to effect change worldwide." African Law Review

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