FORMER First Lady Grace Mugabe is a hard worker who is prepared to roll up her sleeves any time and dirty hustling for her family, at least that’s what her son Bellarmine Chatunga thinks.
Chatunga says her mom “grinds” for every penny the family earns.
The spectacular rise and fall of Zimbabwe’s uncompromising First Lady, Grace Mugabe, had an unusual beginning: an office affair.
It was the early 1990s when President Robert Mugabe’s eye fell upon one of his shy young typists.
She would become his wife, a ferociously ambitious politician and, more than two decades later, a contributor to the downfall of her 95-year-old husband in November 2017.
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In 2013, Robert told interviewer Dali Tambo, flamboyant son of South African liberation hero Oliver Tambo that he was really attracted to Grace.
Asked what attracted him to Grace, who was a typist in his office, Mugabe blinks often as if holding back tears and offers a most unorthodox reply: “It was not just the fact that one was attracted.
“After Sally was gone it was necessary for me to look for someone and, even as Sally was still going through her last few days, although it might have appeared to some as cruel, I said to myself well, it’s not just myself needing children, my mother has all the time said, ah, am I going to die without seeing grandchildren?
“So I decided to make love to her. She happened to be one of the nearest and she was a divorcee herself, and so it was. We got our first child when my mother was still alive.”
Tambo asked if Sally, who died from kidney failure in 1992, accepted the new relationship. “I did tell her and she just kept quiet and said fine but she did ask, ‘Do you still love me?’ I said yes. And she said, ‘Oh, fine’.”
Mugabe has also praised his wife as a hard worker on many occasions.