Sisulu, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo formed the core of the historic leadership team that transformed the ANC into a militant organization leading mass action by black workers and peasants in the fight against the apartheid regime a struggle that culminated in South Africa’s first non-racial, democratic elections in 1994. He was buried at a May 17 state funeral in Soweto.

Sisulu was born in the Transkei region of South Africa in 1912, the son of an African domestic worker and a white civil servant. He spent his early years in the rural Xhosa village of Ngcobo, and ended his formal schooling at the age of 14.

By the late 1920s the institutionalized theft of African land, initiated by the British colonizers and Boer settlers in the 18th century, was well under way. Millions of Africans had already been forced from their land under the racist Union of South Africa, which had been formed in 1910, and were being driven into the gold and diamond mines.

Like many of his generation, Sisulu left the rural Transkei to work in Johannesburg, where he took jobs delivering for a dairy, as a gold miner, as a paint mixer, as a tobacco packer, and as a bank teller. He was fired after helping to lead an unsuccessful strike at a bakery. After 1938 he began selling advertising and opened a small real estate office. He joined the ANC in 1940.

In a statement paying tribute to his closest collaborator over more than six decades, Nelson Mandela described how he was influenced by Sisulu shortly after himself coming to Johannesburg from the Transkei.

“By ancestry, I was born to rule. Xhamela [Sisulu’s clan name] helped me understand that my real vocation was to be a servant of the people,” Mandela said.

“I was drawn inexorably into his circle of friends. We would gather at his Orlando [Soweto] home. His mother was always able to feed us, hordes of us. We nourished ourselves on our conversation over a pot of boiling ideas about freeing our people from bondage, about placing Africa on a pedestal.

“There was Anton Lembede…a fiery personality espousing a militant African nationalism. There was Peter ‘AP’ Mda with a keen analytical mind. Where Lembede was prone to heady, almost mystical flights of ideas, AP was sparing and judicious with words, a model of simplicity and clarity. There were Oliver Tambo with his sharply mathematical mind, Dr. Lionel Majombozi, Victor Mbobo, William Nkomo, a medical student, Jordan Ngubane, a journalist, David Bopape and so many others.  
 
ANC Youth League founded
“Out of that ferment of ideas and personalities was born the idea of the ANC Youth League.”

The Youth League marked a revolutionary break from the reformist outlook until then espoused by the leadership of the ANC. Sisulu became the league’s first treasurer, and was elected ANC secretary-general at the organization’s 1949 conference. He held this position until he was “banned” by the white minority regime in 1954.

Sisulu was a leader of the 1952 Defiance Campaign against apartheid laws, and in 1953 traveled to Europe, Russia, and China. He attended the World Festival of Youth and Students in Bucharest, Romania.

Sisulu was one of the main defendants in the 1956-1961 treason trial, was held in prison for five months during the 1960 state of emergency, and was arrested six times in 1962. In 1960 the regime banned the ANC. When the organization’s leaders decided to launch an armed liberation struggle in 1961, Sisulu became part of the high command of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC’s armed wing.

In July 1963, Sisulu and other ANC leaders were arrested at their secret headquarters on a farm in Rivonia, just outside Johannesburg. Sisulu, Mandela, and others were sentenced to life in prison when the Rivonia Trial culminated in 1964.

In an interview broadcast on national radio the day after Sisulu died, Mandela repeated a light-hearted story he has told often over the years. “‘Don’t get involved with that man Walter Sisulu,’ I was told when I first arrived in Johannesburg. ‘If you do you will end up spending the rest of your life in jail.’ Of course, I ignored this advice.”

Sisulu was released from prison in 1989 after 26 years behind bars most of them on the notorious Robben Island alongside Mandela, who was released a year later.

Their release and the unbanning of the ANC and other political organizations were the product of a range of factors, including the advancing wave of strikes and mass mobilizations in townships and rural areas throughout the country, and the economic and political pressures brought to bear on the white minority regime by the worldwide campaign against apartheid.  
 
Role of revolutionary Cuba
Revolutionary Cuba played an irreplaceable role in this process. In southern Angola, thousands of Cuban troops fighting alongside Angolan soldiers and Namibian independence fighters defeated South African troops at Cuito Cuanavale in 1987. It was a historic blow from which the South African military never recovered, and led in short order to independence for Namibia, until then a South African colony.

On his release from prison, Sisulu immediately resumed a role in the intensifying struggle. He was elected deputy president of the ANC in 1991, a position he held until the organization’s national conference in 1994 when, at the age of 82, he retired from full-time political activity. However, for a number of years thereafter, he could often be seen at the ANC’s Johannesburg headquarters, where he took on a variety of tasks. In summing up these contributions, Mandela also took note of Sisulu’s lifelong partnership with his wife, Albertina, who remained a leader of the struggle outside prison, and who survives him.

In closing, Mandela said, “Today the ANC and through it the African people are able and required to set the tone and national agenda for our country.

“The real challenge is to formulate and present this in a way that unites all South Africans—black and white—to share and work together in the common objective of eradicating poverty and creating a prosperous, non-racist and non-sexist South Africa. Walter’s vision of an ANC that unites and constantly expands its support across South African society remains as valid today as it was at that time.”  
 
 
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