Albertina Sisulu’s Story of Persecution And Suffering, Love And Triumph

Pippa Green

9 June 2011

Albertina Sisulu, the South African liberation struggle icon who died at 92 last week, was the matriarch of a political family whose influence on South African life is widely felt.

Sisulu was co-president of the biggest internal anti-apartheid grouping of the 1980s, the United Democratic Front (UDF). Her husband, Walter, the man who brought Nelson Mandela into politics, served as secretary-general of the African National Congress (ANC) before going underground and hiding out at a farm at Rivonia, near Johannesburg, then being captured and sentenced to life imprisonment with Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders.

Her son, Max, is the current Speaker of South Africa’s Parliament, and her daughter, Lindiwe, is Minister of Defence. Daughters-in-law Elinor and Sheila are, respectively, a Zimbabwean democracy campaigner and deputy executive director of the World Food Programme in Rome.

Soon after Walter Sisulu emerged from prison, the South African journalist Pippa Green told the family’s extraordinary story in an extensively-researched article. Ahead of MaSisulu’s official funeral, which takes place at Soweto’s Orlando Stadium on Saturday, AllAfrica publishes excerpts from the article which highlight her role:

The story of the Sisulu family is [one] of imprisonment, persecution, exile and suffering. But it is also a story of love, and of personal and political triumph. There can be a few families in the history of South Africa that have been torn apart as relentlessly by the political struggle, and few that have survived it so intact. “I have always admired the unity of the family,” Walter Sisulu told me. “It was a tower of strength to me.”

The story is [also] so closely intertwined with South Africa’s political history that it is almost possible to measure the political climate by the family’s suffering, its fears, and its hopes. Between 1984 and 1986, for instance, tough years when the black townships exploded in anger and government repression was most harsh, no less than six Sisulus spent time in prison. “The government doesn’t feel comfortable unless it has a Sisulu in jail,” [son] Zwelakhe quipped at the time to his elder brother Mlungisi.

That jail-time would form such a central part of their married life was hardly something the young Albertina Thethiwe could have anticipated when she first met Walter Sisulu in 1942. A nursing sister recently arrived in Johannesburg from Tsomo in the Transkei, Albertina was not politically involved, but “found Walter in politics”. Since then, she has risen to become a co-president of the United Democratic Front.

The couple married in 1944. Over the next 14 years they had five children – Max, Mlungisi, Zwelakhe, Lindiwe and Nonkululeko; and adopted three – Gerald and Beryl, the children of Walter’s deceased sister, and Jongi [the son of Walter’s cousin].

It was an unusual and close marriage. The young couple’s outings were mainly to meetings of the ANC Youth League, and later to meetings at which the defiance campaign of the 1950s was planned. Albertina, who had not been interested in politics before her marriage, quickly became inspired by the struggle for equal rights.

In 1946, she joined the local branch of the ANC Women’s League. Eight years later, she was on the national executive of the Federation of South African Women [Fedsaw]. She eagerly volunteered to join Lilian Ngoyi in her bid to defy post-office apartheid in 1952, but the ANC office said she could not take part. “They said if one of the members of the family was already defying, we couldn’t all go, because there were children to be looked after,” she explains. “So I missed that one.”

She did not miss the march of 20,000 women to Pretoria, though, to protest against the government’s new ruling that African women had to carry passes; nor did she miss a chance to defy the new pass laws in 1958. She was arrested as a result, and held for six weeks while awaiting trial. Her first spell in jail gave her a taste of what was to come – the regular separations from her children. Nonkululeko (Nkuli, as her mother calls her) was 10 months old. “She was on the breast, but they wouldn’t let me take her with me,” she recalls. “I had to suffer, you know; my breasts were so full.”

At the trial, Albertina and the others were found not guilty of refusing to carry a pass and were discharged: “We were lucky – our lawyer was Nelson Mandela.”

By this time, Walter, now secretary-general of the ANC, had been arrested five times – three times for political offences – and banned twice. He knew then that there would be worse times ahead. “To me, my husband was a prophet,” says Albertina. “He told me all that was going to happen. In fact, he prepared me. He told me about Robben Island, long before I could even think of it, as early as when he was still in the Youth League. He would say, ‘You know, the stand we are taking is going to take us to Robben Island.’ I said, ‘Listen, it’s only Makana (the rebel Xhosa chief who was the first inmate) who went to Robben Island and I don’t think other people will go there.’ But he replied; ‘Be prepared. We will go there one day.'”

Walter prepared his children, too. “We used to lecture to our children together,” recalls Albertina. “Each time he would come back from a meeting, in the evening he used to gather all of us around the table and tell us everything that had happened. That is why our family is so intact – politically, too.”

Albertina’s marriage was unusual in another respect. Walter, a fierce believer in the equality of the races, held a more uncommon conviction in the equality of the sexes. Unlike many young African brides of her generation, Albertina was not relegated to the kitchen; nor did Walter expect her to become his political shadow. “As much as he didn’t force me to join any organisation, he also allowed me to go wherever I liked.

And during the time he was banned and under house-arrest, he used to do all the house-work when I’d go out for our meetings.

“I must say, of all the men, he’s the man who gave me freedom. I never had a problem with him as a woman, ” she says now. “I got my freedom the day I got married, really.”

In May 1982, five months before she was killed by a parcel bomb, [activist] Ruth First paid tribute to her old friend and comrade Walter Sisulu on his 70th birthday – by then, the 19th he had spent in jail.

“Albertina Sisulu is a fine leader in her own right,” First told a gathering of ANC cadres in exile. “But her capacity to lead and her political strength is also the product of a good marriage – a good political marriage, but a good marriage, one that is based on genuine equality and shared commitment. And this is why, though Walter Sisulu is absent… [we] can find a living reference point in Albertina Sisulu, and in Walter’s children.”

The security police probably understood this, too. In 1963, after Walter had disappeared underground, they detained both Albertina and her son Max, then 17, who, with Thabo Mbeki, played a prominent role in the African Students’ Association. The police fetched Albertina from the Soweto surgery where she worked as a nursing sister and took her home to change out of her uniform. Her younger children had just returned from boarding schools in Swaziland for the holidays. “When I came home I found the children’s suitcases in the passage. As the police took me away, the children all stepped outside and saluted me. The police said, ‘But they are so young!'”

Albertina spent 90 days in solitary confinement. Perhaps it was a blessing that she did not know that Max had been detained until shortly before she was due to be released.

However, her husband knew and spent three anguished months in his Rivonia hideout. “I knew that the aim was to ferret me out of hiding,” Walter remembers. “They knew how I’d feel about their detention.” Did he ever consider coming out of hiding then? “No, no,” he insists. “My political activities were planned. Even when I married my wife, I told her it was useless buying new furniture – things like that. I was going to be in jail.”

His political commitment gave shape to his activities, but it did little to lessen his concern for his family. The first thing he said to the police, when they arrested him at Rivonia on July 1, 1963, was: “Where’s my son? Where’s my wife?” … .

The [1960] state of emergency effectively ended the Sisulus’ family life; 30 years would elapse before they could all relax together again in the same house. After Walter was acquitted of treason [after a trial lasting from 1956 to 1960], he went underground to continue his ANC work. With Mandela, he organised the 1961 strike to protest against the founding of the South African Republic.

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