Obituary: Albertina Sisulu / Repeatedly jailed, she helped fight S. Africa apartheid
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Albertina Sisulu, considered by many to be the mother of South Africa's liberation struggle, a woman who was hounded and jailed by the apartheid government but who lived to see her children assume leadership roles in a democratic nation, died June 2 in Johannesburg. She was 92.
The African National Congress confirmed her death.
Ms. Sisulu's passing extinguishes another light of a generation that fought one of the great moral battles of the 20th century. Since her death, virtually every one of South Africa's leaders have come to her home to offer condolences. Only Nelson Mandela has been conspicuously absent. He is increasingly frail, and members of the Sisulu family visited him instead.
A humble but forceful woman, Ms. Sisulu was the widow of Walter Sisulu, one of Mr. Mandela's earliest political mentors, who died in 2003. She kept her dignity through decades of government harassment. Walter Sisulu was imprisoned for 26 years, and Albertina Sisulu was repeatedly jailed, held incommunicado and "banned," a restriction limiting where she could go and how many people she could see.
"But try as they might, they could not break her spirit, they could not make her bitter, they could not defeat her love," Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said in one of the many tributes offered after her death.
Nontsikelelo Thethiwe was born into a poor farming family in the Transkei, a former British protectorate that is now part of Eastern Cape Province. When she enrolled in a school run by missionaries, she was given a list of Christian names to chose from and selected Albertina.
Her father died when she was 11, and poverty might have kept her from finishing her education had she not won a scholarship to a Roman Catholic secondary school. After graduation, she accepted the advice of an admired priest and moved to Johannesburg to study nursing, a career that offered a small salary as she apprenticed.
In 1941, she was training at the Non-European General Hospital when she met Walter Sisulu, a political activist with the African National Congress. Their courtship would be her political awakening. They married three years later. Mr. Mandela was best man at the ceremony.
In his autobiography, Mr. Mandela describes Albertina as a "wise and wonderful presence." At the Sisulus' wedding reception, he wrote, an ANC stalwart warned the bride, "Albertina, you have married a married man: Walter married politics before he met you."
First Published June 13, 2011 12:00 am
