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Nelson Mandela and Graca Machel in 1998.Mike Hutchings/Reuters

After a lifetime of struggle and suffering and isolation, there came in Nelson Mandela's 76th year an unexpected twist: He fell in love.

And he fell like a teenager. He pursued Graca Machel, the object of this new affection, with daily phone calls. He cajoled her to go to Johannesburg and see him, bargaining with her on how many days she would stay. And when he finally persuaded her to travel with him, he held her hand through summits and international tours, and planted a kiss on her at an official function in Zimbabwe that revealed their secret to the world.

She was 27 years younger than he, a foreigner, a busy professional with little patience for the global spotlight in which he now lived. But like him, she had known struggle and immense suffering; she too had an unswerving dedication to the cause of justice.

When he fell for her, Mr. Mandela was in the second half of his presidency, newly and bitterly divorced from Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. His second wife, the firebrand African National Congress activist who waged the fight for his release during his 27 years in jail, had become a woman he could not bear to be around, corrupt, autocratic and shadowed by murder allegations. He was resigned to being alone – and bitterly lonely, a space he tried to fill with time with his children, although after so long away from them those relationships were not easy either.

And then he met Ms. Machel – copper-skinned, much shorter than he, a woman of crystalline integrity and immense vivacity, whose hands flew when she described new ideas, in English that lilted with the inflection of her native Portuguese. And he fell hard.

"Madiba would just light up, stop what he was saying, when Graca walked in the room," recalls Anurita Bains, a Toronto global health advocate who worked in Johannesburg as their assistant at their children's foundation, early in their relationship. "They were a genuine, sweet, lovely couple in love."

The focus on Mr. Mandela sometimes obscured how proud he was of Ms. Machel's achievements, she said. "Of course, he's Nelson Mandela – but she's an incredible, powerful advocate in her own right, and they just found a way to be together and support each other in whatever the other was doing."

No one but her

Mr. Mandela's first wife was Evelyn Mase, a nurse, and like him a Xhosa from a village in the Eastern Cape come to Johannesburg for work. They had four children, but early on the joy drained from their relationship. She resented his political activity with the African National Congress, became a devout Jehovah's Witness, and divorced him in 1957.

Within a year, he had married the fierce and breathtakingly beautiful Winnie Madikizela. They had two daughters, but just four years later Mr. Mandela was sent away from them, to life imprisonment for treason. Ms. Madikizela-Mandela was his voice through all the years that the apartheid government would not let any image or word from Mr. Mandela be distributed, and the Afrikaner regime punished her harshly for it, with solitary confinement in jail and with house arrest in rural villages.

She and Mr. Mandela had just a handful of visits over the 27 years he was in jail. She was there holding his hand when he finally walked out of Victor Verster Prison, both of them with a clenched fist raised in the ANC salute, but he would say later that he felt she was a stranger. And she became a remorseless fighter, accused in the murder of young people suspected of collaborating with the government. They separated before he was elected in 1992.

Mr. Mandela and Ms. Machel met for the first time five months after his release, when he travelled to Mozambique in July, 1990. But they had been linked long before they met.

Mr. Mandela served as godfather to the children of another African resistance leader, Samora Machel of Mozambique. President Machel died in a mysterious plane crash over South Africa in 1986 – and from his prison cell on Robben Island, Mr. Mandela wrote his widow, Graca, an oddly prescient letter.

"Throughout the day we shall mourn with you a mighty soldier, courageous son, a noble statesman. We must believe that his death will strengthen your and our resolve to be finally free. … Our struggle has always been linked and we shall be victorious together."

Ms. Machel was born in a village to illiterate parents, was a guerrilla in her country's liberation war, and was named its first education minister (when the Portuguese colonizers left, illiteracy was at 96 per cent). She went on to a career at the United Nations, doing pioneering work on the impact of armed conflict on children.

Mr. Mandela, by some accounts, began to woo her not long after their first meeting, although his divorce from Winnie was still pending. It was not a quick task. Ms. Machel was perhaps the only woman in the world who was able to look over her gold-rimmed glasses at this strikingly handsome, relentlessly charming, sharply funny global icon and say she was too busy to have dinner with him.

He wore down that resistance. But when their feelings were clear, they had a problem: Each was, in his and her way, married to their respective nation. Ms. Machel was sure that Mozambique would not tolerate the idea of Samora's widow marrying again, let alone a non-Mozambican; Mr. Mandela doubted that his citizens would approve of a foreign first lady.

So they introduced their relationship slowly – first appearing together at events outside Africa, and then holding hands and even once kissing at events they attended together in southern Africa. At last, in a carefully managed introduction, Mr. Mandela revealed the new developments in his love life to South Africans by taking a Sunday stroll in his neighbourhood with Ms. Machel, in which they held hands and he picked her a pink rose (or at least that's how the neighbours recalled it afterward). Soon it was clear that they were seriously involved, although both said they would not marry.

Far from being upset, though, most South Africans and Mozambicans were thrilled at this late-in-life romance. In Mozambique, Mr. Mandela was seen as perhaps the only man alive worthy to succeed Samora as Ms. Machel's husband. And South Africans, who had flinched at Mr. Mandela's raw testimony of his loneliness and misery in divorce court when he split from Winnie Mandela, were delighted to see the obvious joy in his face when he was with Ms. Machel.

In 1998, they were married, with 16 friends in attendance, at the house they bought in an upscale Johannesburg suburb, by a minister from their Methodist church, assisted by Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Mr. Mandela later joked that they made it legal just so that Archbishop Tutu would stop scolding them.

And a few months later, they celebrated at a massive party on his 80th birthday. It was obvious that night, and indeed whenever they were together, that they shared an intense physical attraction, that they never found anyone else in a room funnier or more interesting. "At times their intimacy seemed gloriously inappropriate, as if new love had caused even Nelson Mandela, that most studied of statesmen, to forget where he was," South African biographer Mark Gevisser once wrote about watching "Graca and Madiba," as they are almost always called in South Africa.

A blended family

Ms. Machel appeared occasionally in her new first lady role, but continued her own work. Mr. Mandela left office, and began a fruitless effort to retire – but found his most peaceful times when they flew across the border and stayed in her airy Maputo mansion, where a portrait of Samora still had pride of place, and no one was overly interested in him.

They presided together over a huge blended family – she had two children with Samora Machel, and was a mother to the five others he had with two previous wives. Mr. Mandela had four children still alive when they were married, and together they had a clutch of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a troubled and often troubling figure, was often around too; Ms. Machel was unfailingly welcoming, according to people who worked with the Mandelas, and handled Ms. Madikizela-Mandela gracefully. Mr. Mandela's children are a troubled lot, perpetually making headlines for marketing the family name and squabbling over their political inheritance. Ms. Machel's children were often the ones who sat with Mr. Mandela in his garden.

Meanwhile, Ms. Machel endeavoured to become an early riser for Mr. Mandela's sake. She made sure there were newspapers, slippers, comfortable chairs, lights that were not too bright for his eyes, damaged in the rock quarries of Robben Island. Mr. Mandela's old friend and lawyer George Bizos recalls that she schemed secretly with his friends to make sure that someone just "dropped in" every day at lunch time if she could not be there to sit with Madiba; she made it a mission that he would not spend another lonely moment. And she held his hand with a sort of ferocity, all through the funeral for his son Makgatho, who died of AIDS in 2005, a moment in which Mr. Mandela's usually stoic face was broken with grief.

Ms. Machel used to tell friends that she felt lucky to have found great love twice in her life. Mr. Mandela, for his part, told his biographer, Anthony Sampson, that he regretted nothing of what had come before, because "late in my life I am blooming like a flower because of the love and support she has given me."

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