Source: The Guardian
In a rare interview, Graça Machel, the humanitarian campaigner and wife of Nelson Mandela, talks about her lifelong commitment to children's and women's rights.

Graça Machel may spend a lot of time at high-level meetings discussing global action on poverty, but she is still haunted by the faces of the women and children she is fighting for. One image in particular has never left her.

"It was in Sierra Leone. It was a big sort of warehouse where there were more than 300 kids with mothers and nurses and people trying to help and this particular mother – we caught the eyes of each other and I looked at the child and looked at her and she looked at the child and looked at me. We knew that this child tonight is going to die. And we are two mothers and there is nothing we could do, because the child had come too late to the feeding centre. It was too late.

"I remember very well, I couldn't even get up out of the place. I leaned into the door and I was sobbing because I just couldn't take it."

Machel, former education minister of Mozambique, widow of the Marxist president Samora Machel and now wife of Nelson Mandela, was visiting refugee camps for her groundbreaking 1996 report on children in conflict, commissioned by the UN secretary general. As a young mother working to raise the desperate illiteracy rates in Mozambique she would visit villages and see suffering children, then go home and hold her own baby of the same age and ask herself why their prospects were so different. "I had to begin to ask questions and say this is not right. It can't be right. Something has to be changed. And then I became really engaged," she says.

"So, if you ask, why am I so passionate? For me, the real thing is because I look at that child – today it is not my child, it's my granddaughter. I remember those times, the difference between my child and other children. And now I have my granddaughter, who has what she has. And those children just continue to have the same. You can't stop."

Passionate about children and women's rights, Machel will not talk about Mandela, whom she married on his 80th birthday in 1998, partly, I suspect, because that could in a way diminish her own campaigns. During his recent spell in hospital, she was widely quoted as saying that it was sad to see her husband 'losing his sparkle'. The remark in fact came from a three-year-old CNN interview in 2009, the last time she spoke about him when she said it was painful although inevitable to see him ageing. She does not give interviews often, but she spoke to the Guardian in Tanzania at a meeting of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations, whose board she formerly chaired.

Her presence and entourage today is a far cry from her start in life: born in 1945, the youngest of six, in a rural part of Mozambique. Her father, a Methodist minister, died before her birth, but exacted from her mother a promise to give the child he would never see a good education. She eventually won a scholarship to study at university in Lisbon, Portugal. While there, she got involved in the liberation movement. When she returned in 1973, she became a teacher and joined Frelimo, a group headed by Samora Machel. They married in 1975, the year he became president and she became minister of culture and education. Machel died in a plane crash over South Africa in 1986.

Graça is now 67 and a recipient of prizes and honours for her humanitarian work. She has been back to her village to see what happened to other girls her age. "Most of them, actually, they died already," she says. "But some of them are still there of my generation. But if you see us sitting side by side you would think I am much, much younger than they are because of the hardship they have gone through. The only single difference which made my life different from them is because my mother and my siblings invested in my education."

As well as an education, women must be able to support themselves, or they must rely on men. "We have girls who are educated but they end up accepting polygamous marriages because they have no alternative," she says. She will have no truck with the quasi-defence that culture underlies women's low status in Africa. "Culture for me is when you sing or dance, when you have theatre, when you read a book, a beautiful poem. It doesn't matter whether it's Shakespeare who wrote it or whether it is an African poet – it is communicating with all of us, regardless of who you are, your colour, your social structure," she says.

No – the oppression of women is down to tradition, which is a construct of social norms by those who stand to gain from them. "These groups – it might be the patriarch of the family, it may be the religious leader and it may be the traditional leader of the place – but they have agreed and they understand that it's in their benefit and usually they are men.

"You ask who benefits really from child marriage, for instance. Those are the old men. And who negotiated [the marriage of] this child of mine who is 10? It is from father to father. And women don't sit in those negotiations. Many times they just end up supporting because they fear the patriarch of the house and once the patriarch has agreed with another patriarch then [the women say] "it's fine my daughter, just accept that this is destiny".

It is not just fear of a husband that makes a woman bow to these traditions, she says. They are ingrained in her from her upbringing. "The women learn to accept as if it's normal. Because those who will take girls to genital mutilation are not men. They are mothers, aunties and grandmothers."

Things have changed and yet not changed in her lifetime, she says. There are more women in powerful positions, more who are visible, more in business. Too little has happened for the poor, but she says she will not be despondent and revels in the achievements of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations, which is funding life-saving immunisation for poor children. She is on the board, and urging them on. Millions of women and children have escaped from suffering and discrimination. "It is those who are still there – we must continue to fight for them," she says.

• This article was amended on 18 December 2012. The original said Gracha Machel sat on the board of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations. She no longer does so.