Grace Mugabe attending a first ladies’ conference in Italy. Photograph: Alessandra Benedetti
At the heart of Grace Mugabe’s extraordinary journey from struggling single mother to the most powerful woman in Zimbabwe is a love story.
从艰难度日的单身妈妈到津巴布韦最有权力的女人，格蕾丝·穆加贝非比寻常的逆袭说到底归功于一段爱情故事。
It was the early 1990s and she was a young divorcee who had secured a job in the president’s typing pool. The president himself came around to say hello. He kept coming round. “He came to me and started asking about my family,” she told South African journalist Dali Tambo in 2013, in a rare interview. “He just started talking to me, asking me about my life. Were you married before, things like that … I didn’t know it was leading somewhere. I was quite a shy person, very shy.”
九十年代初，她是个年轻的离婚女人，在总统的打字科谋了个差事。总统自己凑过来打招呼。他总来搭讪。“他来找我说话，开始问我家里的事，”她2013年对南非记者达里·塔博说，那是她为数不多的接访。“他就开始和我聊天，问我生活上的事，以前结过婚没有之类的……我不知道他对我有意思，我很腼腆，特别腼腆。”
The anglophile president wooed Grace over tea and scones, but there were a couple of obstacles to their relationship. One was the age gap – President Robert Mugabe is 40 years older than Grace. Another was the fact that the president was already married, to Sally Mugabe, who at the time had terminal cancer. “I felt a bit uncomfortable when he proposed to me since he was still married to Sally,” she said.
喝下午茶、吃司康饼时，这位亲英总统追求格蕾丝，但二人的关系有诸多障碍。首先是年龄差距大，总统罗伯特·穆加贝比格蕾丝大四十岁。另外，总统已经结婚了，萨里·穆加贝当时患有晚期癌症。“他向我求婚时，我有点不自然，毕竟他还和萨里有婚约，”她说。
Grace Mugabe, nee Marufu, after her marriage to Robert Mugabe in 1996. Photograph: Joao Silva/AP
Mugabe, never a great romantic, took a practical approach. “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 decided to make love to [Grace]. She happened to be one of the nearest and she was a divorcee herself. And so it was,” he said in the same interview.
穆加贝并不懂得浪漫，他选择单刀直入。“我需要再找个人，虽说萨里时日无多了，尽管这看起来有点残酷，我还是决定和她做爱。毕竟她离我最近，恰巧也离婚了，就是这样，”他在那次采访中说。
Sally died in 1992. Grace and Robert were married in 1996 in a lavish ceremony attended by 40,000 people, including Nelson Mandela. By then the couple already had two children and a third would arrive a year later.
萨里1992年逝世。格蕾丝和罗伯特1996年结婚，并举行了盛大典礼，有40000人出席，其中包括奈尔森·曼德拉。当时二人已育有两个孩子，第三个一年后出生。
At first, as she struggled to emerge from the popular Sally’s shadow, Grace was a quiet first lady. She appeared by her husband’s side for official functions but she rarely got involved in politics herself. Publicy she focused on charity work; privately, on legendary shopping expeditions. Nicknamed “The First Shopper” or “Gucci Grace”, she has a penchant for Ferragamo heels. On one spree in Paris she is widely reported to have racked up a £75,000 bill.
萨里受人喜爱，格蕾丝要设法摆脱萨里的阴影，但她很有第一夫人范儿。她在公务中出现在丈夫身边，本人却很少涉足政治。公开场合里，她主要参与慈善工作；私下里，四处扫货。她的昵称是“第一购物者”和“古琦·格蕾丝”，她尤其喜欢菲拉格慕的靴子。某次在巴黎扫货，据称她花了75000英镑。
But the seeds of the first lady that Grace would become – more involved, more powerful – were already being sown.
但格蕾丝注定要成为那种干政擅权的第一夫人。
In 2009 a British photographer, Richard Jones, tried to take her photograph outside a hotel in Hong Kong. She wasn’t happy. Jones alleges that he was chased down by her bodyguards, who pinned his arms back while she punched him repeatedly in the face. She has since been implicated in several incidents outside Zimbabwe: in Singapore, in Malaysia and most recently in South Africa, where she was accused of assaulting a young model with the plug at the end of an extension cord. She has previously been protected from investigation or prosecution by diplomatic immunity and is expected to be so again.
2009年，英国摄影师理查德·琼斯在香港一家酒店外拍到了她。她很不高兴，琼斯称自己被她的保镖追上，将双臂反剪，她不停地劈头打他。后来她多次在津巴布韦国外犯事：在新加坡、马来西亚，最近又在南非。在南非，她被控用插线板的插头攻击一名年轻模特。她此前通过外交豁免权得到保护，免遭调查或起诉，这回同样如此。
Richard Jones, photographer, was assaulted by Grace in Hong Kong in 2009, after he photographed her leaving the Shangri-La Hotel. Photograph: Sinopix/Rex/Shutterstock
Outside her role as Zimbabwe’s first lady, she has also run several failed mining businesses and built her own dairy farming empire on five previously white-owned farms. The former owners had been evicted during Zimbabwe’s controversial “land reform” process.
除了是津巴布韦第一夫人，她还运营了几家失败的矿业公司，在五个曾经由白人所有的农场上建立q其自己的奶业帝国。在津巴布韦饱受争议的“土地改革”中，那些曾经的农场主被驱逐了。
Grace was learning from her husband, she explained. “I was very young when I started living with President Mugabe. But he was patient with me and took time to groom me into the woman that I am now,” she said in a 2012 speech.
格蕾丝不断向丈夫学习，她解释说。“我很年轻时就和总统穆加贝一起生活了。但他对我很耐心，花时间培养我，成就了我，”她2012年在一次演讲中说。
In 2014 she was slowly unveiled as a potential successor to her husband. She became head of the ruling party’s women’s league, a position which gave her a seat on the party’s all-powerful decision-making body, the politburo.
2014年，她慢慢被视作丈夫潜在的继承者。她成为执政党妇女联盟主席，该职位让她成为党内全权决策机构政治局的一员。
She was awarded a doctorate from the University of Zimbabwe, although she was only registered at the institution for three months, giving her the necessary academic background (her thesis, on the changing structure of the family, has never been publicly released).
她被授予津巴布韦大学博士学位，尽管她只学了三个月，有了些学术背景，她的论文有关家庭结构的变化，从未发表。
The state propaganda machine began talking up her political acumen – and so did she. She started holding rallies where she would rail against the president’s perceived enemies. “They say I want to be president. Why not? Am I not a Zimbabwean?” she said at one, held just outside Harare.
国家宣传机器开始吹捧她的政治能力，她也开始自夸。她开始主持集会，痛骂总统的敌人。“他们说我想当总统。为什么不行呢？我不是津巴布韦人吗？”她在哈拉雷郊外举行的一次集会上如是说。
Grace Mugabe is not the only contender for the throne, of course. Another faction within the ruling party, led by the vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, is strongly opposed to her political activity, viewing it as a brazen attempt to keep power within the Mugabe family.
当然，格蕾丝·穆加贝并非宝座唯一的竞争者。执政党中另外一个派系是副总统埃默森·姆南加古瓦，副总统强烈反对她参加政治活动，认为这一做法是穆加贝家族在无耻地护权。
But the first lady’s proximity to the president gives her a major advantage, especially as he becomes more and more frail. He now conducts much of his business not in State House but from his private mansion in an upmarket Harare suburb. The opulent mansion – its grounds contain not one but two lakes – was decorated by Grace with marble columns, faux-Louis XIV furniture and lots of gold leaf.
但作为第一夫人，能接近总统是她的主要优势，尤其考虑到总统身体越来越差。总统现在不大在国务院办公，总统在哈拉雷郊外高档的私人庄园办公。奢华的庄园里有两个湖泊，格蕾丝用大理石柱、仿路易十四风格家具和大量金叶装修了庄园。
Robert and Grace Mugabe at a youth rally in Marondera Zimbabwe this year. Photograph: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP
When visitors come to visit the president, they usually find Grace there too. “In many ways she’s the unofficial prime minister of the country,” said a source close to the first family.
来访者觐见总统，通常会发现格蕾丝也在场。“在许多方面，她是非官方的国家总理，”第一家庭身边的人说。
He added that despite her increased profile, it is still far from clear how much Grace actually wants to be president – or how much is about positioning herself and her family to survive in the aftermath of her husband’s death. The president is 92 years old and requires frequent medical treatment abroad.
该消息人士称，尽管格蕾丝越来越多地抛头露脸，她是否想当总统，丈夫死后她自己和她的家庭如何存活，这还远不清楚。总统已经92岁了，不时需要赴外治病。
“Today Grace is viewed as an opportunistic, greedy, selfish, aggressive woman motivated by fear of her husband’s death,” Andy Moyse, a veteran Zimbabwean journalist, told the Guardian in 2015. “She’s going to be terribly exposed once he’s gone because there’s no political structure to save her. She’s trying to entrench her position and her assets.”
“今天，格蕾丝被视作机会主义者，贪婪，自私，好斗，都因为她担心丈夫死去，”津巴布韦老记者安迪·莫伊斯2015年对《卫报》说。“总统一死，她就没有靠山了，没有政治组织能救得了她。因此她试图巩固自己的地位和资产。”
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