Great lovers

Anyone can catch your eye, it takes someone special to catch your heart.-Anonymous

Some wag said that when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness. It’s called love.

Well, it’s Valentine’s Day. Love is in the air and you can smell and catch it, like a cold.

Of course to the unloving, unlovable or the blithely unconcerned, today might as well be the National Tree Planting Day.

But presidents, kings, queens, emperors, scientists, artists, novelists, Nobel laureates, philosophers, and world class twits have all experienced what love is:

“That wildly misunderstood but highly desirable malfunction of the heart, which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle and the lips to pucker.”

Just like you and me, the high and mighty knotted with heartaches, headaches, lust, laughter, adultery, idolatry and migraine from love’s labour lost.

Nelson Mandela and Winnie: How can my spirits ever be down when..?

He settled down to a life of solitary confinement after he was jailed for life at Robben Island in 1962. The dreary timetable of manual labour was mercifully broken by love letters to Winnie Mandela— and her visits twice a year.

Sample this one contained in Fatima Meer’s 1988 biography, Higher than Hope.

April 15, 1976

My dearest Winnie,

Your photo still stands about two feet above my left shoulder as I write this note. I dust it carefully every morning, for to do so gives me the pleasant feeling that I’m caressing you as in the old days. I even touch your nose with mine to recapture the electric current that flushes through my blood whenever I do so.

Nolitha stands on the table directly opposite me. How can my spirits ever be down when I enjoy the fond attentions of such wonderful ladies?

“Nolitha” was the nickname of a photo of a nude pygmy he tore from National Geographic magazine.

Mandela wrote many letters over the 27 years he served his sentence telling Winnie that if he didn’t hear from her “I will remain worried and dry like a desert,” and that “Whenever I write to you, I feel that inside warmth, that makes me forget all my problems. I become full of love.”

Their 38-year marriage weathered the storms of apartheid, but ended in divorce in 1996. Winnie was accused of keeping lawyer Dali Mpofu as her side mattress.

The thrice-married Mandela, now 92, married former Mozambican First Lady Graca Machel, 27 years his junior in ‘98.

Hastings Kamuzu Banda: He never married but there was Kadzamira

He was Malawi’s first president. Kamuzu means “little root” and Banda is “little hut” while Hastings was the missionary he admired in his Kasungu village. But Malawi’s Ngwazi (Conqueror) was eccentric beyond sporting dark three-piece suits (even in the hottest of weathers), dark glasses, homburg huts and a flywhisk.

He banned women from bearing their thighs and wearing trousers. It was profitable to become a barber there as Banda also banned long hair and beards deeming them “signs of dissent.”

Kissing in public and screening films and programmes depicting “doing with the mouth what the hands do” were outlawed by The President for Life.
Dr Banda never married.

But he had a 16-year affair with Merene French, a tall sensual nurse when he was a practising doctor in England, Robert Barret informs us in The Despot and his Sunburn Mistress.

Merene had been married to the dour and emotionally remote William French for a decade when Banda happened into their lives in 1944.

The man who decided to become a doctor after a stint sweeping hospitals in South Africa was the personal physician of Merene’s ailing mother in-law; and a paying guest of the Williams.

When Merene’s husband was serving in World War II, Banda began a fling. When William returned, Merene had taken off her wedding ring. William sought divorce on grounds of infidelity.

Peter French, Merene’s son (with William) told Barret that “There were no hugs or kisses from him (Banda)… he was aloof as most people who have their country’s destiny in mind.”

Banda left Britain for Africa in 1953, and Merene followed him six months later, leaving Peter behind. But the affair, infused with love letters signed “with sweetest love, Hastings” waned when Banda prepared to take power in 1962.

Merene died in 1976. His son sent a letter to Banda with the news. He received no reply.

As president, Banda maintained Cecilia Kadzamira as his official mistress and hostess of Malawi. The powerful “Mother of the Nation” met Banda when she joined his medical practice as a nurse in Limbe, 11 kilometres east of Blantyre, before becoming his private secretary when Banda became president in 1966.

Banda and Cecilia were inseparable, according to biographer, Philip Short.

When rift grew between them in the 1980s, he banned the Simon&Garfunkel song, Cecilia, from Malawian radio. He thought the lines: “Cecila/I’m down on my knees/I’m begging you please to come home” were a reference to their estrangement.

Banda, was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Massachusetts in 1967 with the citation that he was a “...paediatrician to an infant nation.”

He died in 1997.

Robert Mugabe: There was Sally and then South African secretary Grace

His relationship with first wife Sally Hayfron, inspired his early years and rise to power as president of Zimbabwe… and, some say, hatred for the British.

Mugabe could as well be an international hate-figure, but letters released under the UK Freedom of Informational Act in 2009, show that the battle to save Sally from deportation in England may have sowed seeds of xenophobia against the British.

The Independent reports that the two met in 1958 when both were teaching in a college in Ghana, Sally’s homeland. A bookish and lonely Mugabe had an absentee carpenter father. Cute and bubbly Sally was from a political family. But their attraction was “immediate and mutual.”

They wedded in a simple ceremony at St Peter’s Catholic Church, Harare in 1960. Four years and a son later, (Michael died of cerebral malaria aged three), Mugabe was arrested for “subversive speech” and jailed for 10 years.

Mugabe used his sentence at the Salisbury Prison to acquire seven degrees including law and engineering via correspondence.

Fearing for her life, Sally exiled herself in Britain, but her visa expired three years later in 1970. A deportation was imminent.

Mugabe wrote to Prime Minister Harold Wilson explaining that: “My wife, whose health has never been satisfactory since the loss of our son is at present suffering serious emotional upset…and my detention is enough suffering already…” and pleaded that she be granted citizenship as “British Rhodesian” on grounds of humanity.

A memo from the [British] Foreign Office warned that if Sally were deported, Mugabe’s attitude to the British government could “change completely” if he became president.

Sally, the only person who could tell Mugabe “don’t be stupid” was unable to bear any children. As her health failed, their marriage floundered and Mugabe developed an interest in his South African secretary, Grace Marufu, 41 years his junior. She was then already married to a senior airforce officer Stanley Goreraza, who, was later appointed Zimbabwe’s defense attaché to China.

Sally died of kidney failure in 1992. Mugabe married Grace four years later.

In 2002, Mugabe ordered over 3,000 white farmers to vacate and redistribute their land to black Zimbabweans.

Grace is different from the restrained Sally.

Dubbed Zimbabwe’s First Shopper, “Gucci Grace” prefers to hide behind £180 (Sh25,200) Christian Dior sunglasses, a £25,000 (Sh3.5m) diamond encrusted Rolex on her 46-year old wrist… as Zimbabweans queue endlessly for insufficient supplies of bread and cooking fat.

Last year, The Sunday Times reported that “Dis Grace” was having an affair with Central Bank Governor, Gideon Gono, also Mugabe’s financial advisor and key political ally.

Talk show queen Oprah Winfrey and Otey: We both sat there and cried

Anthony Otey was her high school sweetheart who secretly knew Oprah Winfrey’s was destined for greater things in life, “Than I would ever provide. She told me she was breaking up with me because she didn’t have time for a relationship. We both sat there and cried. It broke my heart.”

The talk show queen ended the affair on Valentine’s Day in 1971. And started another with Bubba Taylor to whom she did everything to keep including literally begging him on her knees. She recalled in an Oprah Winfrey Show in 1995: “We really cared for each other. We shared a deep love. A love I will never forget.”

Oprah’s engagement to boyfriend Stedman Graham in ’92 was called off. They now have a “spiritual union.”

Ronald Reagan to Nancy: When you aren’t there I’m in no place

Reagan was the only divorced American President. First wife Jane Wyman couldn’t stand the political ambitions of the future 40th president. Their nine-year marriage went south in 1949, and three years later Reagan married Nancy Davis, now 89.

Here is a letter, fleshed from Nancy’s year 2000 book, I love you, Ronnie: that Reagan wrote the former Hollywood actress:

Aboard Air Force One

March 4 1983

Dear First Lady

I know tradition has that on this morning I place cards Happy Anniversary cards on your breakfast tray. But things are somewhat mixed up… Still this is the day, the day that marks 31 years of such happiness as comes to few men.

I told you once that it was like an adolescent’s dream of what marriage should be like. That hasn’t changed…when you aren’t there I’m in no place, just lost in time and space….You are life itself to me.

Happy Anniversary & thanks for 31 wonderful years.

I love you

Your Grateful Husband.

Reagan died of Alzheimer’s disease aged 93 in 2004.

Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun: Too young but she’s the only girl for me

The leader of Nazi Germany was a monorchid with a phobia for venereal diseases. Eva Braun, his mistress of 12 years was “the loneliest woman in Germany. She spent most of her time waiting for Hitler…contenting herself with his photograph when he left her alone at mealtimes,” Albert Speer, the former Nazi Minister for Armaments, informs us in his 1970 memoirs, Inside the Third Reich.

Hitler told Heinz Linge, his valet, that “Fraulein Braun is a young girl, too young to be the wife of one in my position. But she is the only girl for me. One day I shall give up my leadership of the Reich…then marry Fraulein Braun.”

In 1931, the 19-year old wrote to the Fuhrer, 23 years her senior:

Dear Mr Hitler,

I would like to thank you for the pleasant evening at the theatre. It was unforgettable. I shall always be grateful for your friendship. I count the hours until the moment we shall meet again…”

After Hitler survived an assassination attempt in July 1944 (the basis of the 2008 film Valkyrie), she sent him an emotional letter ending: “From our first meeting I swore to follow you anywhere-even unto death-I live only for your love.”

Yours Eva

In April 30, 1945, with the victorious Allied Forces closing in on the dictator, it was time to kiss life goodbye other than face humiliation of being captured.

The two bit into vials of the poison cyanide, with Hitler aiming a Walther pistol into his 56-year old head. They had been married by a magistrate the previous day.

Nasty lover Pablo Picasso: To the painter, women came into two types

“Women are machines for suffering” the Spanish painter told his mistress Françoise Gilot in 1943. Nine years and two children later the affair with the art student, 40 years his junior, ended in 1953.

In her 1964 memoirs, Life with Picasso, Gilot recalls his earlier warning: “For me there only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats.” Prodigious Picasso, the serial womaniser, died in ’73 at 92.