Albertina Sisulu ( Nontsikelelo Thethiwe; 21 October 1918 – 2 June 2011) was a South African anti-apartheid activist. A member of the African National Congress (ANC), she was the founding co-president of the United Democratic Front. In South Africa, where she was affectionately known as Ma Sisulu, she is often called a mother of the nation.
Born in rural Transkei, Sisulu moved to Johannesburg in 1940 and was a nurse by profession. She entered politics through her marriage to Walter Sisulu and became increasingly engaged in activism after his imprisonment in the Rivonia Trial. In the 1980s she emerged as a community leader in her hometown of Soweto, assuming a prominent role in the establishment of the UDF and the revival of the Federation of South African Women.
Between 1964 and 1989, she was subject to a near-continuous string of banning orders. In addition to intermittent detention without trial, she was subject to criminal charges on three occasions: she was acquitted of violating pass laws in 1958, convicted of violating the Suppression of Communism Act in 1984, and acquitted of violating the Internal Security Act in the 1985 Pietermaritzburg Treason Trial.
After the end of apartheid, Sisulu represented the ANC in the first democratic Parliament before she retired from politics in 1999. She was also the deputy president of the ANC Women's League from 1991 to 1993 and a member of the ANC National Executive Committee from 1991 to 1994.
Early life and education Sisulu was born on 21 October 1918 in the Camama, a village in the Tsomo region of the Transkei. She was the second of five siblings in a Xhosa (Mfengu) family. Her father, Bonilizwe Thetiwe, was a migrant worker who spent long stints working in the gold mines of the Transvaal, and her mother, Monica Thetiwe (), was disabled by the bout of Spanish flu that she had suffered while pregnant with Sisulu. Sisulu and her siblings spent most of their childhood with their maternal grandparents in the village of Xolobe, where Sisulu began school at a Presbyterian mission. Though her family called her "Ntsiki" throughout her life, she assumed the name Albertina at school, choosing it from a list of European Christian names provided by her missionary schoolteachers.
In 1929, while Sisulu's mother was pregnant with her fifth and final child, Sisulu's father died of occupational lung disease in Camama. Her mother remained in ill health until her death in 1941, so Sisulu – both the eldest sister and the eldest female cousin – became a primary caregiver to her younger siblings and cousins, with frequent interruptions to her education as a result. Nonetheless, in 1936, she received a scholarship for secondary schooling at Mariazell College, a Catholic boarding school in Matatiele. She covered her living expenses by ploughing fields and working in the laundry room during school holidays. Newly converted to Catholicism, she intended to become a nun or school principal, but her headmaster, Father Bernard Huss, convinced her to pursue training as a nurse after she finished school in 1939.
Anti-apartheid activism In January 1940, Sisulu moved to Johannesburg, where she began her long nursing career as a trainee in the non-European section of the Johannesburg General Hospital. She qualified as a nurse in 1944 and later qualified as a midwife too. Her interest in politics grew through her association with Walter Sisulu, a real estate agent and activist in the African National Congress (ANC), who courted and then married her. She began attending ANC meetings not as a member but as his companion. In her own description, "I had no political ideas. I was devout until I met Walter." Ellen Kuzwayo, another of the few women present at such meetings, later remembered her as "a kind hostess who served the committee members of the congress with tea after long and intense meetings". In this capacity, as Walter's fiancée, she was the only woman present at the inaugural meeting of the ANC Youth League in 1944.
According to Pippa Green, she joined the ANC Women's League in 1946. In addition, the Sisulus' home in Orlando West, a suburb of Soweto outside Johannesburg, was long-established as a meeting place for ANC leaders. However, her husband's political activities made Sisulu the family's main breadwinner, and she did not actively participate in ANC activities until the 1950s, by which time the National Party had introduced its programme of institutionalised apartheid. She abstained from the 1952 Defiance Campaign, during which Walter was arrested and convicted of communism; in her paraphrase of the ANC's policies, "if one of the members of the family was already defying, we couldn't all go, because there were children to be looked after".
1948–1963: Pre-Rivonia Trial Opposition to apartheid accelerated in 1954 and 1955, and Sisulu was involved in several related campaigns. She was elected to the inaugural national executive committee of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) when it was founded in 1954. In 1955, she participated in the Freedom Charter leafleting campaign ahead of the Congress of the People, and at the same time participated in a boycott of public schools in protest of the Bantu Education Act; the Sisulus' home housed one of the so-called alternative schools set up as part of the protest. She was present at the August 1956 Women's March in Pretoria, and in October 1958 she was arrested for the first time and charged for participating in another women's march against pass laws. On the latter occasion, she was detained for three weeks on charges of violating the pass laws, but she was ultimately acquitted, with her husband's close friend Nelson Mandela as her lawyer. In the early 1960s, she was involved in an ANC scheme to recruit nurses as volunteers to relocate to newly independent Tanganyika, a personal favour from Oliver Tambo to Julius Nyerere.
Meanwhile, Sisulu's husband was a defendant in the 1956–1961 Treason Trial, and their home became a target for Security Branch attention and raids. After the 1960 Sharpeville uprising, the apartheid government banned the ANC and several associated organisations; shortly afterwards, the ANC announced the inauguration of armed struggle. Her husband, a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe, went into hiding underground in 1963. On 19 June of that year, Sisulu became the first woman to be detained under the so-called 90-Day Detention Law: the recently enacted General Laws Amendment Act, 1963 allowed police to detain activists incommunicado indefinitely and without charging them. She was held in solitary confinement and interrogated at length about Walter's whereabouts. She was released after her husband and his comrades were apprehended at Rivonia in July 1963. The ensuing Rivonia Trial concluded in June 1964 with Walter being sentenced to life imprisonment. During the trial, Sisulu redoubled her engagement with the ANC Women's League.
1964–1989: Post-Rivonia Trial
In August 1964, in the aftermath of the Rivonia convictions, Sisulu was served with the first in a series of banning orders. She was banned continuously for the next 17 years, prohibited from political activity and for several years confined to effective house arrest. The Minister of Law and Order allowed her fourth ban to lapse in August 1981, and she celebrated by making an address – her first political speech since the early 1960s – at a local church's commemoration of the Women's March. The respite lasted less than a year before she was arrested and served with another banning order, her fifth, in June 1982; that order was part of a more general crackdown effected in Soweto during commemorations of the 1976 Soweto uprising.
Nonetheless, throughout this period, Sisulu remained a prominent figure in the resistance movement, notable for her focus on civic organising on a national rather than local scale. She was particularly influential in the preparations for the establishment of the United Democratic Front (UDF), a popular front against apartheid that was launched in 1983, and in a protracted campaign to revive FEDSAW. From the 1970s, she was active in the political mentorship of younger women activists such as Jessie Duarte and Susan Shabangu; Duarte later said that Sisulu's protégés considered themselves "MaSisulu's girls", and she was instrumental in the foundation of a Soweto-based underground ANC cell for women, named Thusang Basadi ("wake up women").
Communism trial and UDF launch Sisulu's June 1982 banning order was allowed to lapse after only a year, and in July 1983 she attended meetings of the national steering committee that was preparing for the national launch of the UDF. However, on 5 August, she was arrested again at her workplace and charged with a violation of the Suppression of Communism Act. She and her co-accused, activist Thami Mali, were accused of having conspired to further the aims of the banned ANC in connection with their role in planning the funeral of Rose Mbele, an ANC Women's League Stalwart. The funeral had taken place months earlier – on 16 January 1983 in a church in Soweto – and the charges were widely viewed as a justification to detain Sisulu ahead of the UDF's launch.
Later in August, while Sisulu was awaiting trial in solitary confinement in Diepkloof, the UDF was launched. She was elected in absentia as the regional president of the UDF's Transvaal branch, and then, at the front's national launch in Mitchell's Plain on 20 August, as one of the three national co-presidents of the UDF, the others being Oscar Mpetha and Archie Gumede. Her trial began in Krugersdorp shortly afterwards, with George Bizos as her defence counsel. On 24 February 1984, in a ruling condemned by the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid, she was convicted and sentenced to four years' imprisonment, with two years of the sentence suspended for five years. However, she was also released on bail pending an appeal, allowing her to resume her political activities; she said that, after several consecutive months in solitary confinement, "I came out speaking to the walls". The appeal against her sentence was ultimately upheld in 1987.
Abu Baker Asvat and Mandela United In 1983, Sisulu retired from public nursing, having reached retirement age and received her pension. The following year, in the aftermath of her criminal trial, she began work as receptionist and nursing assistant in Rockville, Soweto in the private surgery of Abu Baker Asvat, a doctor who was renowned for his humanitarianism. Although Asvat was a leading member of the Azanian People's Organisation, a rival of the UDF, the pair worked closely together; she later said that they were like mother and son, and he did not object to Sisulu's political activities, which continued in earnest.
This period was also marked by increasing tension between Sisulu and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Nelson Mandela's wife, whose Mandela United Football Club engaged in gangsterism and intimidation in Soweto from around 1986 onward. Because of the friendship between their husbands, Sisulu and Madikizela-Mandela had been close during their youth; arrested together in 1958, Sisulu had nursed Mandela through the near-miscarriage of her first child in a jail cell. However, in the 1980s, their relationship grew tense as Sisulu attempted to curb Mandela United's excesses. Sisulu later said that, "As a woman, I tried to pull her out of that... Winnie and I were never enemies, I tried to help her." According to historian Jonny Steinberg, other members of the community delegated Sisulu to report their concerns about Madikizela-Mandela's behaviour to the exiled ANC leadership in Lusaka, Zambia. In later years, because of their husbands' stature, the press often contrasted Madikizela-Mandela and Sisulu as opposing models of female activism, comparing Sisulu's cool-headed maturity with Madikizela-Mandela's "rage and charm".