Tributes
Fellow leaders tributes
“ Our country and our people have lost one of our architects of our democratic order … an architect of non-racist, non-sexist democracy who has been at the centre of it for many decades.... Not many people realize his contribution. Walter Sisulu was a giant among our people.”
- President Mbeki [Kalideen, N. (2003). ‘Nation joins hands with Sisulu family’, The Star, 7 May, p.1.]
“Many of us have gained positions, received accolades and have been acclaimed, but none of us match the leadership and humility of a great man – Walter Sisulu …. None of us can match the leadership and humanity of this man. Tonight this building is named after one of us. Walter deserves this acclaim more then all of us put together.”
- Nelson Mandela (At the opening of Nelson Mandela Foundation House in Houghton) [Wa Sepotokele, T. (2003). “Foundation’s new home honours Sisulu”, The Star, 7 May, p.3.]
“We struck up an easy relationship and I got to know him as a simple, unpretentious man with great humanity that shone through. I knew him as a man with no racist views. He wanted the country to be one whole for everyone, and his goodness shone through.”
- Helen Suzman
“He will always be known and remembered as one of the great sons of our land. He succeeded in combining intellect with a common touch.”
- Marthinus van Schalwyk
“We thank him for his contribution in the struggle, particularly in recruiting and nurturing Nelson Mandela. Had he not done so we would not have had a person of Mandela’s stature to lead the country from the quagmire it was in.”
- Bantu Holomisa
“He was smiling. He was forever smiling.”
- Ahmed Kathrada (Reflecting on his last meeting with Sisulu)
“Few visionaries are able to see their dreams fulfilled. Sisulu was fortunate enough to enjoy the new South Africa he had worked so hard and sacrificed so much to bring about.”
- Tony Leon
“We are now free, thanks to the man of steel, Walter Sisulu. Hambe kahle Xhamela. Lala ngoxolo qhawe la maqhawe. (Go well Xhamela. Rest in peace, hero among heroes)"
- Umkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans’ Association
“Tata Sisulu gave his all for the liberation of this country, and became an example to many of what leadership is and is not. He never hankered for positions but never shunned responsibility.”
- SA National Editors’ Forum
“He was known and loved by people far beyond South Africa’s borders for his humility, integrity, intellect and vision.”
- Kofi Annan (UN Secretary-General)
“ I know the House will join me in mourning the death of Walter Sisulu, one of the founders of the African National Congress and of modern South Africa.”
- Jack Straw (British Foreign Secretary)
“I am saddened by Sisulu’s death which is not only a great loss to South Africa but to the entire African continent.”
- Kenyan President, Mwai Kibaki
“An outstanding stalwart of our struggle has fallen … We are where we are today because of this great man, whose name will for ever be blazoned in letters of gold in the annals of our beloved land and mother continent”
- Desmond Tutu
“We have to be grateful as a community, as a people, for such leaders. I wanted to go on my knees and thank God for what He has given us … I have tremendous hope for the future, if we could have leaders like Nelson Mandela and Walter.”
- Beyers Naude (anti apartheid cleric) [(2003). “Accolades for a South African Hero”, The STAR, 7 May , p.3.]
“South Africa has lost a great man. He has left us with a legacy of what it means to be a great citizen. Walter was devoted to the cause of freedom. He risked his life in the defiance campaign. He was accused number two in the Rivonia trial. Nelson Mandela was accused number one. As a man of enormous lateral intelligence, he was the best witness we had. He went into the witness box to defend the history, aims and decisions of the ANC. He was the one who explained to the judge why the ANC had decided to form the military wing in the organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe. He was committed to the ANC. He took an active part in transforming it from a supplicant to a protest organization and to challenging the authority of the state. He did this in association with Nelson Mandela and others in the late 40s, 50s and early 60s. As a leader of the Defiance Campaign, Sisulu declared to a magistrate that he was prepared to offer his life for the freedom of all the people of South Africa. We in the legal team who defended him believed that it was his forthright manner, bravery and sincerity which persuaded a judge, who had no real feeling for the African people, that a death sentence was avoided".
- George Bizos (Walter’s advocate at the Rivonia treason trial)
“He has committed all his life to the struggle for liberation - in the legal days, in the days underground and now in prison on Robben Island and in Pollsmoor. … He uses no devices to overwhelm others. He has pride but no false pride. He has no arrogance. He has no malice. He is a plain and a straightforward man, he is a soft-spoken man, but he is a committed man, a man who makes no concessions when questions of principle are at stake. He is a decisive man but he is not an authoritarian leader. Politics is his life and he believes in people.... He is committed to the liberation of all people. He is committed to the liberation of the African women. In his family, Albertina Sisulu is a fine leader in her own right, but her capacity to lead and her political strength is also the product of a good marriage, a good political marriage that is based on genuine equality and on shared commitment. And this is why, though Walter Sisulu is absent, when people need to refer back to the history of Walter Sisulu, they can find a living reference point in Albertina Sisulu and in Walter’s children.”
- Ruth First (to Albertina and Walter Sisulu on the occasion of his 70th birthday in May 1982)
ANC veteran Walter Sisulu dies
African National Congress veteran Walter Sisulu, born in 1912, the year the ANC was founded, has died, the ANC said on Monday.
He was to turn 91 this month.
"You, Walter, are indeed like a miracle that God has made."
These were the words of President Thabo Mbeki, quoting from An African Elegy written by Nigerian poet Ben Okri, paying tribute to Sisulu at his 90th birthday celebrations in May, 2002.
Former president Nelson Mandela at the same ceremony saluted him for the life-long work he did for the ANC.
"Walter Sisulu is a humble and selfless leader who taught us that wisdom comes from sharing insight," Mandela said.
He came to Johannesburg from Engcobo, Transkei in 1929.
He was only able to attend school until Standard Four (Grade Six) after which he studied on his own to improve his education.
Sisulu became a mineworker in Johannesburg, working a mile underground in arduous and dangerous conditions, sleeping in the grim barracks in one of the Reef compounds.
His next job was in East London as a "kitchen boy".
He then returned to Johannesburg to work in a bakery for 18 shillings a week.
He picked up some information about trade unions and ended up leading his fellow workers on a strike for higher wages. The strike was defeated and he was fired.
Sisulu joined the ANC in 1940 and was among the group of radicals who formed the Youth League in 1943 to 1944.
The organisation's leadership had, in the late 1920s, split over whether to co-operate with the Communist Party, and the ensuing victory of the conservatives within the ANC left the party small and disorganised through the 1930s.
In the 1940s the ANC revived under younger leaders who pressed for a more militant stance against colour bars in South Africa.
The ANC Youth League attracted Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and Nelson Mandela, who in turn displaced the party's moderate leadership in 1949 at what many view as the party's watershed conference.
Under Sisulu, Tambo and Mandela's leadership the ANC began sponsoring non-violent protests, strikes, boycotts, and marches, in the process becoming a target of police harassment and arrest. By the end of World War II the ANC had begun strong agitation against the pass laws, and when the largely white electorate voted in the National Party in 1948, the ANC's membership grew rapidly, rising to 100000 in 1952.
In 1944, he married Nontsikelelo Albertina, with whom he was to have five children. Mrs Sisulu was a much-loved and internationally respected activist in her own right. Her work earned her the title Mama Africa.
Sisulu was elected ANC secretary general in 1949, a post he held until 1954 when banning orders forced him to resign the position.
He served on the joint planning council for the Defiance Campaign, and led one of the first batches of passive resisters when the campaign began in 1952. Campaigners refused to carry the notorious "pass book" all native South Africans had to carry by law and hundreds were arrested.
Sisulu was one of the accused in the Treason Trial, which began in 1956.
In 1960, during a State of Emergency, he was detained without trial. He was arrested six times in 1962 and placed under 13-hour house arrest on October 26 and under 24-hour house arrest on April 3, 1963.
Pending an appeal against a six year sentence, he forfeited bail of R6000 on April 19, 1963, and went underground. In July 1963, Sisulu was arrested and detained under the 90-day law.
At the 1964 Rivonia Trial, he was the main defence witness and was subjected to a fierce attack from the prosecutor, Percy Yutar.
Sisulu told him: "I wish you were an African. Then you would know..."
He was charged with sabotage and other offences in the Rivonia Trial and sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island. He was released in October 1989 after 26 years in jail.
He was elected ANC deputy president at its national conference of July 1991 and remained in that position until after South Africa's first democratic election in 1994.
In January 1992, Sisulu was awarded Isitwalandwe Seaparankoe, the highest honour granted by the ANC, for his contribution to the struggle for liberation.
Sisulu remained active in the ANC following the end of his term as deputy president in December 1994. For several years he maintained an office in the ANC's Johannesburg headquarters and undertook a number of responsibilities on behalf of the organisation. - Sapa
Published on the Web by IOL on 2003-05-06 00:12:02 © Independent Online 2002.
Walter Sisulu, Mandela Mentor and Comrade, Dies
By BILL KELLER
Walter Sisulu, one of Nelson Mandela's earliest political mentors and his closest collaborator for half a century in the campaign against South Africa's racist political order, died yesterday in Johannesburg. He was 90.
Mr. Sisulu's political career was less celebrated than Mr. Mandela's but not much less remarkable. Alongside Mr. Mandela he rejuvenated and led the African National Congress, twice stood trial on capital charges for his activities, served 26 years in prison and still emerged deeply devoted to reconciliation.
Weakened by age and illness, Mr. Sisulu declined to seek a position in the new, democratic government elected in April 1994, when Mr. Mandela became president after the first all-race balloting.
On Dec. 17 of that year, as 3,000 delegates to a party conference sang their reverence for him, he stepped down from his last formal position in the A.N.C., the largely honorary post of deputy president.
While Mr. Mandela was the public face of the African National Congress, by his own account he rarely acted without first consulting Mr. Sisulu.
"I've always said that one can't speak of Mandela without speaking of Sisulu," Ahmed Kathrada, a congress stalwart who was confined with the two men in Robben Island prison, said in an interview just before the elections. "They complement each other."
Walter Max Ulyate Sisulu was born into a peasant family in 1912 — the year the African National Congress was founded — in the Transkei, a former British protectorate in the south that was also Mr. Mandela's family home. Like many Africans of his generation, he was not sure of his birth date, although last year his 90th birthday was celebrated publicly on May 18.
He was of mixed race, but in his youth he identified fiercely with the Xhosa, and like Mr. Mandela he was for a time a devoted black nationalist. He studied at an Anglican missionary institute, but quit at age 15 and went to work in a Johannesburg dairy to help support his family. Over the years he labored as a gold miner, a domestic servant, a baker and a factory worker.
After being fired by several employers for trying to organize workers, he opened a real estate office in Johannesburg, helping blacks buy and sell property in the years before they lost that right under apartheid, the laws of strict racial segregation.
More important, he became the regional leader of the African National Congress in Johannesburg and the surrounding black townships. When Mr. Mandela arrived in Johannesburg in 1941, he was referred to Mr. Sisulu, described as a person of connections.
Mr. Sisulu said later that the moment he looked upon his visitor, tall and self-assured, he decided Mr. Mandela was the answer to his prayers.
"I had no hesitation, the moment I met him, that this is the man I need," Mr. Sisulu said in an interview shortly after the elections. Needed for what?" For leading the African people."
Mr. Sisulu's house in the Orlando section in Soweto was the social and political crossroads of the budding liberation struggle. He helped Mr. Mandela through law school, introduced him to his first wife (a Sisulu cousin) and brought him into the African National Congress.
Impatient with the seeming impotence of the liberation movement, Mr. Mandela and Mr. Sisulu joined with Oliver Tambo to create a youth league as a more militant wing of the organization.
Five years after organizing the youth league, the young rebels engineered a coup and took charge of the African National Congress. In the ensuing decades, they would be the congress's governing triumvirate — Mr. Mandela the articulate symbol of the struggle, Mr. Tambo (who died in 1993) the leader who kept the organization together in exile and Mr. Sisulu the behind-the-scenes counselor.
Mr. Mandela often credited Mr. Sisulu with being the voice of reason to his own sometimes impetuous man of action.
"He never lost his head in a crisis," Mr. Mandela wrote of his comrade in his autobiography, published in 1994. "He was often silent when others were shouting."
When the congress set up a military wing to harass the apartheid state, Mr. Sisulu was part of its three-man high command.
With Mr. Mandela and 154 others, Mr. Sisulu stood trial for treason. The defendants were acquitted in 1961, but the top leaders of the resistance were arrested again in 1963 at a farm hideout in Rivonia, near Johannesburg, and convicted of conspiring to overthrow the state. Although the government demanded the death penalty, the men were sentenced to life in prison.
Mr. Kathrada, another of the Rivonia defendants, said Mr. Mandela was the undisputed leader in prison, but people took personal problems to the more approachable Walter Sisulu.
"Mandela was highly respected, highly admired," Mr. Kathrada said. "But I would not be able to say he was as loved as Sisulu was. You know that difference between a father and a leader? That was the big difference between them."
Mr. Sisulu was set free in October 1989, a precursor to Mr. Mandela's release four months later.
While Mr. Mandela and most other top leaders moved to the comfort and security of affluent white neighborhoods, the Sisulus were among the last to remain in their modest house in Soweto, the vast black metropolis south of Johannesburg.
Compounding his own isolation, Mr. Sisulu's wife and children suffered arrests, banning orders, exile and official harassment. His wife, Albertina, and eight children survive him. Although Mr. Sisulu did not continue into the
government he helped create, his survivors make a virtual dynasty in the new South Africa.
Mr. Sisulu emerged from prison as lacking in vengefulness as Mr. Mandela, and filled with optimism. He said the nonracial philosophy of the African National Congress had trained them not to demonize their enemies.
"Bitterness does not do your cause any good," Mr. Sisulu said. "That doesn't mean you don't get angry. But you don't let it get in the way of your policy."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
Email tributes
Send your own tribute to Tata Sisulu
Dr. Walter Sisulu was such an inspiration to many of us , especially those of us who are genuinely concerned about the future of our country and the continent at large.May his soul rest in peace. - Makhoathi Mantsoe
In paying tribute to Mr Walter Sisulu, I salute the man whose life illustrates in the best possible way that two skins of different colours can indeed harmoniously fuse. - Prof Jacqueline Machabéïs University of Natal
French and South African citizen
Its a painful thing to lose a loved one, especially one so valuable to the Country at large. I would like to thank God for having given us Honorable men such a Walter Sisulu and others like him. Old man, you have left us a lot of courage to continue running RSA in such a way that other countries, especially developed ones, can learn from us.
Your loving sister, Nthabiseng Seperepere
What Tata Sisulu did for the liberation of our country (South Africa ) shall
remain with us always. Tata Sisulu's legacy shall be passed on to posterity.
Rest in peace our humble hero.
- Daniel Thobejane
I salute Walter, Our Hero Among Heroes.
My sincere condolences to the Sisulu Family. May you go from strength to strength in this time of bereavement.
I'm sincerely grateful for what you fought for: a democratic, liberated nation and after ten years of FREEDOM we can only salute you.
Hamba Kahle Xhamela
- Yolanda Sheldon
Statement of thanks by Albertina Sisulu
Issued by: Mrs Albertina Sisulu, 20 May 2003
On behalf of myself and my family, I wish to extend our deepest gratitude to the people of South Africa, and to many others around the world, for the support and comfort they have given us over the last two weeks.
We have been overwhelmed by the warmth and goodwill we have experienced since our dear husband and father passed away. It has been both a source of solace and strength.
We say thank you to the many thousands of people who sent us messages of condolence. Thank you also to the many people who worked so hard to give Tata such a fitting and moving farewell - to the many companies and
individuals who provided material assistance; to the volunteers who gave their time and energy; and to the public servants and officials who achieved much in a very short time.
We are particularly greatful to the tens of thousands of people who joined us in memorial services around the country, and at the funeral in Soweto, to celebrate the life of a devoted South African and together to mourn his
passing.
A special word of thanks is extended to the leadership and members of the African National Congress who, like an extended family, supported us and consoled us throughout this time.
We have been touched and humbled by the high regard in which Tata was held by so many people, and the depth of affection which so many people felt for him.
More information: Smuts Ngonyama 082 569 2061
