Graça Machel

It was October 1945, in Incadine, in Gaza Province, Mozambique.

A baby girl was born. She was named Graça Simbine. She was the last of six children.

Her father, a Methodist minister, had died seventeen days earlier. He never saw her.

But before he died, he had left clear instructions. The older children were to make sure the little one went to school, all the way through high school.

Graça studied at Methodist mission schools. Then a scholarship sent her to the University of Lisbon, in Portugal, in 1968. She studied languages there.

At the time, Mozambique was a Portuguese colony. For her political activities as a student, the Portuguese secret police kept watch on her. She had to flee to Switzerland.

In 1973, she joined FRELIMO, the Mozambican Liberation Front. In Tanzania, she received military training. In 1974, she became deputy director of the movement's secondary school in Bagamoyo.

It was also during those years of struggle, in Cabo Delgado Province, that she met Samora Machel.

On June 25, 1975, in a Mozambique newly independent, Graça became the country's first Minister of Education and Culture. She was the only woman in the government.

That same year, they married.

At the start, about four children in ten went to school.

She set to work. In 1975, about 400,000 children were in school. By 1985, there were 1.5 million. Illiteracy fell by 72 percent.

The share of children in school climbed: more than nine boys in ten, three girls in four.

The little girl whose father had asked that she be sent to school had opened school to hundreds of thousands of children.

In 1986, Samora Machel's presidential plane crashed near the South African border. He died in office, at the head of the country.

In 1994, the UN Secretary-General gave her a mission: to study what war does to children.

She worked for two years. On November 11, 1996, the UN published her study on the impact of armed conflict on children.

In it, she asked that children affected by war be cared for and find their place in society again. She stressed education. She also asked that mine clearance be part of every peace agreement.

The year before, she had received the Nansen Medal for her work with refugee children.

On July 18, 1998, she married Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg. That day, he was turning 80.

In 2007, with Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, she co-founded The Elders, a group of elders. She later became its Deputy Chair.

She also founded organizations in Mozambique and across Africa, for communities, for women and for children.

One day, she summed up her faith in a single sentence:

Her way of acting echoes Ubuntu, without being the same: no child ever grows up alone, and a nation is measured by what it gives its smallest.

It all began with the instructions of a father she never knew. Send her to school. She turned it into the promise of a whole country.