#RIPNelsonMandela: Winnie Mandela was the #WIFE we all KNEW. She stood by him during long #imprisonment.

Winnie was the wife most of us knew as we too were still growing up knowing that she was the one who waited and stood by him those long years.Yet Mandela had his plentiful share of sorrows even after his release from prison and taking power.

Only one daughter survived from his first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1957.

Another daughter died as a baby, one son was killed in a car crash, and the other died of AIDS. He married his second wife Winnie, Johnannesburg’s first black social worker, in 1958.

During his imprisonment, she became famous and powerful as the voice of her absent husband. But following his liberation, her avarice and thuggery brought shame upon the ANC, and grief and embarrassment to her husband.

They were divorced in 1996. Two years later, on his 80th birthday, he married Graca Michael, widow of the former president of Mozambique.

With files from Telegraph UK