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| Thursday, 8 May 2003 |
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Walter Sisulu: unassuming but giant pillar of the anti-apartheid struggle by Philippe Bernes-Lasserre (AFP) Walter Sisulu, who died Monday aged 90, was an unassuming but giant pillar of South Africa's bitter anti-apartheid war and respected as much as his long-time friend Nelson Mandela.
From the time he joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1940 until apartheid fell in 1994, Sisulu played a key leadership role in the struggle against the white suprematist regime which held the country in its grip for decades. Yet the public profile of the slightly-built and quiet man with a racially mixed ancestry never reached the heights of that of Mandela and he was far less well-known than the former president. Nonetheless, his influence on the ANC and its strategy was widely recognised. Mandela praised Sisulu's "wise tutelage" in his 1994 autobiography "Long Walk to Freedom." "Walter was strong, practical, reasonable and dedicated," Mandela said. "He never lost his head in a crisis; he was often silent when others were shouting." On learning of his death on Monday, Mandela put out a statement lamenting: "A part of me is gone" "Together we shared ideas, forged common commitments. 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. "In a sense I feel cheated by Walter. If there be another life beyond this physical world I would have loved to be there first so that I could welcome him." Sisulu was born on May 18, 1912 to a peasant family in the small town of Engcobo in the rural Eastern Cape province, where Mandela was born six years later. Sisulu moved in the 1920s to Johannesburg, working in a dairy, a gold mine, factories and a bakery, before setting up a short-lived estate agency for blacks. It was during this time he became politically active, organising a wage strike in the bakery, for which he was fired. He spent some time in jail for getting into a scuffle with a white ticket collector, and then again after organising a passive anti-apartheid resistance campaign. Sisulu's family was deferential towards whites, which the politician resented, perhaps because of an awareness of his mixed racial background and light complexion. He reaffirmed his Xhosa tribal roots by undergoing the traditional circumcision rite and pursuing an Africanist political line, which softened when he started working with other races within the anti-apartheid struggle. With Mandela and Oliver Thambo (who died in 1993 aged 75), he became one of the leaders of the ANC's Youth League in the early 1940s, later rising to the post of secretary general. He was with Mandela and Govan Mbeki (the father, deceased in 2001, of current President Thabo Mbeki) during a raid in July 1963 when the leadership of the ANC was arrested. Like the other leaders, he was sentenced in 1964 to imprisonment on Robben Island, from where he was released early with a handful of others on special orders from then president Frederik de Klerk in 1989. "I have been through thick and thin with Walter," Mandela wrote, saying that Sisulu was the first person he consulted in prison about political developments, such as the approach by the then government for talks. "He was a man of reason, of wisdom, and no man knew me better than he did. There was no one whose opinion I trusted or valued more." Sisulu was the first person to meet Mandela when he walked from prison on February 11, 1990 after 27 years in apartheid jails. Sisulu's home, shared with his wife Albertina "Ma" Sisulu, in Johannesburg's sprawling township of Soweto, was a haven for young activists in the 1940s.
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