Tributes to anti-apartheid fighter Sisulu

Anti-apartheid campaigners were paying tribute today to Walter Sisulu, one of the top leaders of the African National Congress, who died at the age of 90.

Sisulu, who died yesterday, had been suffering from a long illness, according to the ANC.

As a founding member of the ANC’s Youth League, Sisulu, along with Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo helped convince the party to adopt active protests against the white apartheid government.

He was banned by the government in 1954, detained without trial in 1960 and repeatedly arrested and harassed by the government in subsequent years.

Sisulu was sentenced to life in prison along with Mandela and other ANC activists on charges of sabotage in 1964 and served roughly 26 years in jail before being freed in 1989.

He was elected the party’s deputy president in 1991, a position he held until after South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994.

“His absence has carved a void. A part of me is gone,” Mandela said in a statement sent to the South African Press Association.

Throughout the fight against the racist white regime, Sisulu and Mandela stood together. They went on trial together, went to jail together and worked together to transform the organisation from a banned liberation movement to the nation’s governing party.

“Together we shared ideas, forged common commitments,” Mandela said in the statement. “We walked side by side through the valley of death, nursing each other’s bruises, holding each other up when our steps faltered. Together we savoured the taste of freedom.”

While Mandela became the public face of resistance – and eventually the nation’s first black president – Sisulu, perhaps his closest confidant, remained the clear-thinking strategist in the background.

“(Sisulu) stands head and shoulders above all of us in South Africa,” Mandela told a group of South African children recently. “You will ask what is reason for his elevated status among us. Very simple, it is humility. It is simplicity. Because he pushed all of us forward and remained quietly in the background.”

Sisulu’s entire family threw itself into the anti-apartheid struggle and suffered deeply for it. His wife Albertina’s movements and speech were restricted from 1964-81, and she spent 10 years under house arrest. Four of their five children have spent time in exile or in prison.

“This government doesn’t feel comfortable unless it has a Sisulu in jail,” his son Zwelakhe once joked.

In a sign of the huge change in South Africa, Zwelakhe became head of the state broadcasting corporation after apartheid and Sisulu’s daughter Lindiwe became the country’s intelligence minister.

In a 1994 interview with Associated Press Television, Sisulu welcomed the end of apartheid but said much more needed to be done.

“I can never be satisfied until we have consolidated the unity of the people of South Africa, until the economic position has been radically improved and ... we are able to meet the aspirations of our people,” the white-haired, bespectacled Sisulu said.

More than any other black leader, Walter Max Ulyate Sisulu’s life mirrored the history of his beloved ANC. They were born the same year, 1912, and the young Sisulu developed a deep-rooted militancy because of his mixed-race ancestry and hatred of his family’s deference to whites.

The son of a poor family in the Xhosa homeland of Transkei, Sisulu left home at 15 to seek work in Johannesburg. He worked as a baker’s assistant, domestic servant, dairy worker, factory labourer and gold miner – and often found himself leading labourers in disputes with bosses.

After quarrelling with employers over wages and work conditions, Sisulu set up his own real estate business, which lasted only a few years.

He joined the ANC in Johannesburg in 1940, and became known as the person young men from rural areas should see to get a start in the big city. He gave advice and help to Mandela and Oliver Tambo, both of whom would become ANC presidents. Tambo died in 1993.

Sisulu married Albertina, a nurse, in 1944 and she became a prominent anti-apartheid activist in her own right while her husband spent more than 25 years in prison.

Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu formed the ANC Youth League in 1944, hoping to press the older leadership to adopt more aggressive tactics. With the league’s backing, Sisulu was elected ANC secretary general in 1949 and he helped organise the 1952 “defiance campaign”, a programme of civil disobedience against apartheid laws.

Initially a staunch black nationalist, Sisulu began softening his views after groups representing other races helped the ANC with the defiance campaign. Following a tour of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1953, he officially advocated the ANC philosophy of non-racialism.

Sisulu was charged in December 1956 with treason, along with Mandela and 154 other South Africans of all races who had supported the Freedom Charter, calling for a non-racial democracy and a socialist-based economy. All were acquitted in 1961 after a five-year trial considered a failed effort to paralyse the ANC leadership.

Sisulu was convicted in March 1963 of furthering the aims of the ANC, which had been banned three years earlier, and encouraging blacks to strike to protest at the 1961 declaration of the Republic of South Africa. He was sentenced to six years in prison and placed under house arrest while appealing.

He went underground and joined the ANC’s guerrilla wing, exasperating the government when he used a secret ANC transmitter to send a pirate radio message exhorting the nation to unite to overthrow apartheid.

In July 1963 he was arrested with others at the ANC’s secret headquarters in Rivonia, outside Johannesburg. Police found documents in which Mandela, already in prison on another charge, and Sisulu discussed sabotage strategies and guerrilla action.

Sisulu and Mandela were convicted in 1964 of plotting anti-government sabotage in a highly-publicised trial that for the first time revealed to the world the extent of South Africa’s racial discrimination.

The death penalty was expected, but under international pressure, the judge gave the defendants life sentences, and Sisulu and Mandela were sent to the notorious Robben Island prison off Cape Town.