Nelson Mandela’s stepdaughter beaten by boyfriend, blinded in one eye

Nelson Mandela’s stepdaughter said her boyfriend viciously beat her on her mom’s birthday — a ruthless attack that left her blind in one eye.

Josina Machel — the daughter of the late South African revolutionary's widow, Graça Machel — said her beau was furious that she wanted to sleep over with her mother on the matriarch’s 70th birthday.

“I’m still going through myriad feelings. To be honest, I have not been able to grieve. I have not been able to cry. I have not been angry. I have not been able to feel all those emotions that happened because I’ve been concentrating on my eye,” she told South Africa’s City Press.

Machel’s boyfriend, who cannot be named under South African law because legal proceedings have begun, has been charged in the Oct. 17 attack.

Machel said she started fighting with her boyfriend that night when she asked him to drop her off at the family’s Mozambique home so she could ring in her mom’s birthday with the rest of her loved ones.

“I wanted to be with my mother,” she said. We were going to celebrate her birthday the following day and so I just wanted to feel my mum around me. That is why I was so adamant about going home,” she said.

Her boyfriend refused and started to verbally attack Machel.
“He expressed his unhappiness about me wanting to go home,” she said. “They are just not words that I expected to hear from anyone. They were demeaning of any woman and of me.”

Soon, the hurled insults turned into physical punches. The first hit shocked Machel — so she turned toward her brawling boyfriend and asked, “What?”

“That is how I got the second jab that blinded me, which ruptured the eye almost immediately. I felt the third one coming and that’s when I ran out of the car, ran away from him,” she said.
Machel screamed for help as she ran, she said. Eventually she tripped and blacked out. The next thing she remembers was waking up in the hospital.

Doctors determined that the man’s strong punch ruptured her retina, blinding her. Weeks after the attack, the medical team said Machel’s vision will likely never come back.

“At this point, all I know is that this has changed my life. It has gutted my mother. She is at the sunset of her life,” she said. “If I start crying, I say to myself: ‘Josina, don’t cry because this might affect your eye. Don’t put pressure on your eye.’”

NYDaily