Evelyn Mandela, the first wife of South Africa’s anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela has died at the age of 82 after a respiratory illness, the Sunday Times newspaper reported. Evelyn Mandela, who was a cousin of the late leading anti-apartheid figure Walter Sisulu, a close comrade of Mandela, died on Friday, the newspaper said.
The deeply religious daughter of a mineworker, Evelyn Mandela married Nelson Mandela in 1944.
She bore him four children, one of whom died after nine months, but in 1955 she gave him an ultimatum to choose between her or the African National Congress, the continent’s oldest liberation movement. She then raised her children largely on her own.
Mandela thereafter married his flamboyant second wife Winnie. He is currently married to Graca Machel, the widow of former Mozambican president Samora Machel.
Writing of his first wife in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela described her as a ”quiet, pretty girl from the countryside”.
In 1994, the year South Africa held its first democratic polls which led to Mandela’s accession as the country’s first black president, Evelyn Mandela broke her silence on her former husband.
”I doubt very much that we would have voted today if it were not for Nelson Mandela,” she said.
In 1998 she married a retired businessman Simon Rakeepile. The couple lived in Soweto, a sprawling black township south of Johannesburg. – Sapa