Walter Sisulu

Gentle revolutionary of the ANC and mentor to Nelson Mandela

Walter Max Ulyate Sisulu, politician: born Qutubeni, South Africa 18 May 1912; married 1944 Albertina Totiwe (three sons, two daughters); died Orlando West, South Africa 5 May 2003.

Walter Sisulu was the most paradoxical of men: a politician who shunned the limelight, a gentle revolutionary, and a man of little education who became Nelson Mandela's mentor and most valued adviser.

Most remarkable of all, throughout his life he hid his true parentage, when disclosing it would have exempted him from the worst laws and harassments inflicted on black people in South Africa. For Sisulu's biological father was a white man, a magistrate in the tribal reserve of Transkei, which meant that at any time he could have claimed classification as a "coloured" or mixed-race person and been a rung higher on apartheid's ladder of racial status. But he chose instead to identify with his peasant mother's extended family who brought him up, and then to devote his life at enormous personal cost to the liberation struggle of his people.

He was a patriarch of the African National Congress, a dwindling club of men who turned the ANC from a deferential petitioning body into a mass protest movement during the 1940s, then into a revolutionary organisation in the 1960s, and who were incarcerated together for nearly half their adult lives on the windswept hell of Robben Island, Cape Town. But they finally triumphed in one of the most remarkable bloodless revolutions of the blood-soaked 20th century to earn the status of sainthood among their people.

There are few of them left. Four men in particular wrought those two watershed changes in the ANC: Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and Govan Mbeki. Tambo, who led the ANC in exile after it was banned and the other leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment, died in 1993, just three years after the ban was lifted and all the prisoners were released. Mbeki, the father of Mandela's successor as President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, and a doctrinaire Communist who clashed bitterly with Mandela while they were on Robben Island together, died in 2001.

It was Sisulu who was Mandela's closest soul-mate, in a friendship forged over half a century. The two men could hardly have been more different: the one tall and imposing, the other short and stocky; Sisulu brought up by illiterate relatives in a peasant village, Mandela in the royal household of the King of the Tembu tribe. One was a lawyer with a university degree; the other had just six years of primary schooling.

Yet it was Sisulu who became the mentor, who found Mandela his first job in a lawyer's office, who helped pay for him to complete his education, and who even bought him his first suit to attend his graduation ceremony. Mandela has paid handsome tribute to him. "Many people influenced me," he writes in his 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom,

but more and more I had come under the wise tutelage of Walter Sisulu. Walter was strong, reasonable, practical and dedicated. He never lost his head in a crisis; he was often silent when others were shouting. Sometimes one can judge an organisation by the people who belong to it, and I knew that I would be proud to belong to any organisation in which Walter was a member.

The friendship strengthened during the two decades that the men were together in the same cell block on Robben Island. The closeness revealed itself in a touching way at Mandela's inauguration as President of South Africa on 10 May 1994. As the new president concluded his moving inaugural address he turned to face Sisulu standing directly behind him and – in a brief moment of intimacy – clasped his old comrade's outstretched hands. Although Sisulu declined to take a seat in Mandela's cabinet, pleading that he was too old and wanted to retire (serving only as Deputy President of the ANC long enough to see it into power, 1991-94), colleagues say that Mandela never made an important decision without first consulting him.

It was the steadiness of the man, his practical wisdom, that Mandela valued. "I think his stability was the most striking thing about him," says his daughter-in-law Elinor Sisulu, a journalist who is writing a history of the family. "He was one of the most balanced human beings I have ever known." This is remarkable given the circumstances of a childhood that in any Western culture could only be described as highly unstable.

Walter Max Ulyate Sisulu was born in the peasant village of Qutubeni, in the Engcobo district of the Transkei tribal reserve, in 1912. His mother, Alice Manse Sisulu, a woman of strong character but no education, was a domestic worker who moved between jobs from one white household to another in the small towns of the Transkei. It is not clear when or how she met the magistrate, but it was not a fleeting relationship, for she bore two children by him, Walter and a daughter, Rosabella, born four years later in 1916.

Such cross-colour liaisons were not uncommon, especially in Transkei with its small and scattered white population, but they were socially taboo – though not yet illegal as they later became after the Afrikaner National Party came to power with its apartheid agenda in 1948. The result was that, although the magistrate acknowledged his paternity and apparently on rare occasions helped Alice with small sums of money, the relationship was never talked about on either side of the colour line and Walter's father never featured in his life.

Sisulu never discussed the matter with his mother and in fact only learned his father's name – Victor Dickinson – many years later after both had moved to Johannesburg. He once went out of curiosity to a meeting Dickinson was attending, but did not speak with him.

So Sisulu took his mother's surname and was brought up by her clan in Qutubeni. His eldest uncle, Dyanti Hlakula Sisulu, who was the patriarch of the clan and headman of the village council, became his official guardian. Although uneducated, Dyanti enjoyed a considerable reputation as a wise community leader and he seems to have had an important influence on the young Sisulu.

Walter lived with his mother in his grandfather Moyikwa's home until he was two years old. Then Alice left to take a job as a domestic worker with a white family and Walter was sent to an aunt in a town some distance from Qutubeni where he stayed until he was eight. And so he shuttled back and forth between relatives, with occasional visits from his mother. He attended the little village school in Qutubeni for five years, then spent a year at a nearby Anglican mission school. That was the end of his formal education. At age 13, with Dyanti dead and Alice away again, Walter was put to work on the family plot, cultivating crops and herding cattle.

A year later he left for Johannesburg, 600 miles away, to try to get work in the mines – but he was rejected as too young. Instead he got a job at a dairy, washing bottles and delivering milk with a horse and cart in the early hours of the morning, working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for one pound a month. He shuttled from one menial job to another, before finally getting a job at the mine, first sweeping floors in a compound, then going underground.

After returning home for a traditonal tribal initiation ceremony, Sisulu spent some years as a domestic worker for a white family in the coastal city of East London. They were a kind family who impressed Sisulu with their liberal ideas and the emphasis they placed on educating their children – something he was later to emulate with his own large family.

Then it was back to Johannesburg, where his mother and sister joined him. Alice took in washing for white suburban families, and on their meagre earnings they rented a tiny red-brick house in Orlando West, now part of Soweto, which has remained the Sisulu family home with only modest extensions ever since. While his ANC colleagues moved into grand ministerial and ambassadorial mansions, Walter Sisulu and his wife Albertina stayed on in the same little house in the teeming township.

Sisulu studied at night school and set himself up as a small-time estate agent. It was there that he first met Nelson Mandela, who with Oliver Tambo had been expelled from Fort Hare University for organising a student protest and had briefly taken a job as a policeman at a mine compound. Mandela gives an amusing account of the meeting. He wanted to complete his university degree and become a lawyer, so sought advice on how to get a job in a law firm. He was told to speak to Sisulu, so went to the estate agent's office in downtown Johannesburg.

"I was introduced to a man who looked to be in his late twenties, with an intelligent and kindly face, light in complexion, and dressed in a double-breasted suit," Mandela writes in Long Walk to Freedom:

Despite his youth he seemed to be an experienced man of the world. He was from the Transkei but spoke English with a rapid urban fluency. In those days I believed that proficiency in English and success in business were the direct result of high academic achievement, and I assumed as a matter of course that Sisulu was a university graduate. I was greatly surprised to learn after I left the office that Walter Sisulu had never gone past [primary school].

Sisulu introduced Mandela to a lawyer named Lazar Sidelsky, who gave him the articled clerk's job he needed to set him on the road to becoming a lawyer.

Sisulu's political development is hard to pinpoint. There was no moment of revelation, or any single individual who influenced and awakened him. It was a gradual process that evolved from his wide-ranging experience of life as a black person enduring the oppression and the slights of apartheid. Clearly Dyanti was an important early influence, and while in East London Sisulu came briefly into contact with Clemens Kadalie, a fiery orator who formed the first black trade union in South Africa. Back in Johannesburg, Sisulu became involved in union activity and organised several strikes. He also joined an organisation called the Orlando Brotherly Society, which promoted an interest in tribal history and encouraged economic independence from whites. Gradually he drifted into the ANC and became treasurer of its Youth League.

The Youth League was his university and the platform for his first revolutionary actions. Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo and several other young Turks formed the group in 1944, and after the National Party came to power in 1948 and began implementing its apartheid programme they became increasingly impatient with the old guard's ineffectual tactics. It was a time when Mahatma Gandhi was leading passive resisters to jail in India and the Youth Leaguers wanted to transform the ANC into a militant protest organisation.

They drafted a "programme of action" and at an historic congress in 1949 forced its acceptance. They also won a fiercely contested vote to elect Sisulu Secretary-General of the ANC, with a majority of one. Sisulu closed his estate-agency business and became a full-time party organiser.

From then on life was a head-on confrontation with the government for the next 30 years. The "programme of action" formed the basis of a nation-wide civil disobedience campaign that involved hundreds of thousands of protesters, 8,500 of whom went voluntarily to jail. As the chief organiser, Sisulu bore the brunt of the government's repressive action. He was arrested repeatedly and subjected to restriction orders.

In 1956 he was one of 156 dissident leaders of all races charged with high treason. The trial dragged on for five years, finally ending with the acquittal of all the leaders. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. Following the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960, in which police machine-gunned a crowd of demonstrators, killing 69 and wounding 180, the government banned the ANC and all other black political organisations.

The ANC took the fateful decision to turn to guerrilla struggle. On 11 July 1963 the police raided a secret hideout on a smallholding north of Johannesburg, capturing the entire high command. After a year-long trial, in which they faced the possibility of the death sentence, they were given life imprisonment. So began Sisulu's quarter-century in the maximum security section of Robben Island prison, a bleak and brutal penitentiary from which no one has ever escaped.

Sisulu and his colleagues were kept in tiny cells seven feet square with a single, minute, barred window. They slept on straw mats and were forced to do heavy manual labour, crushing stones and digging in a lime quarry under the eyes of racist warders who abused them constantly. Despite the harsh conditions, the prisoners thrived intellectually. The island became known as "The University", where the better- educated prisoners gave lectures to the rest. Despite his own meagre education, Sisulu ran what proved to be the most popular course of all – on the history of the ANC.

Sisulu and five others were released on 15 October 1989 by President F.W. de Klerk, to test public reaction, just three months before he made his historic announcement unbanning the ANC and releasing Mandela. The process of negotiating a new South Africa had begun.

Sisulu was a remarkable family man. Unlike Mandela's (for Mandela had two broken marriages), the Sisulu home was a rock of conjugal stability. Walter Sisulu had married Albertina Titowe, a nurse (and a relation of Mandela's first wife, Edith), in 1944. She was an orphan and their mutual backgrounds of childhood insecurity and extended family dependency generated in them an extraordinary commitment to family and community cohesion. The little Orlando house was always more of a community centre than a family home, with an endless stream of people calling for help, advice, or simply political conversation.

Allister Sparks