Pippa Green wrote this article in 1990, shortly after Walter Sisulu was released from jail. She spent several weeks with the family at a time when
exiles were returning and prisoners were being released. For the first time in 30 years, not a single Sisulu was in jail. It was a period of joyous homecoming for this family, cleft by apartheid but held together by love, determination and hope.
By Pippa Green
On a windy autumn Friday in 1990, five young members of the African National Congress were taken from their cells on Robben Island and told to pack their belongings. They were to be released that afternoon. One of them was a slight, serious-looking young man called Jongumzi Sisulu, the youngest adopted son of Walter and Albertina Sisulu, and by blood the child of Walter's cousin. Jongi had been in jail since 1984 and on the island since 1986, serving a five-year sentence for promoting the aims of the ANC and harbouring ANC guerrillas.
By chance, Jongi arrived at the then Jan Smuts airport in Johannesburg an hour before a flight from Durban bearing Nelson Mandela and the man whom Jongi had grown up calling father, ANC leader Walter Sisulu. "I haven't seen him since I was five," said Jongi nervously at the time. As the beaming, white-haired man stepped into the airport building, he embraced his second-eldest son, Lungi, Lungi's wife Sheila, and his grandchildren before Sheila said: "Tata, this is Jongi."
When Jongi arrived at the house in Orlando West where he had grown up, Albertina Sisulu wrapped her arms around him and smiled. "Thank you for
bringing my child back," she said. Most newspapers at the time briefly recorded that five more Robben Islanders had been freed. For the Sisulus, though, March 30 was a watershed in their family history. It was the first day in 30 years that not a single member of the family was in prison.
The story of the family has been a story of imprisonment, persecution, exile and suffering. But it is also a story of love, and of personal and political triumph. "I have always admired the unity of the family," Walter told me then. "It was a tower of strength to me."
Ten days after Jongi returned to his childhood home, there was another homecoming: Lindiwe, the Sisulus' then 36-year-old daughter, flew into Jan
Smuts from Swaziland after 12 years in exile. The next day, the family threw a grand party.
Not since 1962 had so many Sisulus converged on the family home. Between 1984 and 1986, tough years when the black townships exploded in anger and government repression was most harsh, no fewer than six Sisulus spent time in prison.
That jail-time would form such a central part of their married life was hardly something the young Albertina Totiwe could have anticipated when she first met Walter in 1942. A nursing sister recently arrived in Johannesburg from Tsomo in the
Transkei, Albertina was not politically involved, but "found Walter in politics". The couple married in 1944. During the next 14 years they had
five children - Max, Lungi, Zwelakhe, Lindiwe and Nonkululeko - and adopted three; Gerald and Beryl (Simelane), the children of Walter's deceased
sister, and Jongi.
It was an unusual and close marriage. The young couple's outings were mainly to political meetings. Albertina, who had not been interested in politics before her marriage, quickly became inspired by the struggle for equal rights.
In 1946, she joined the local branch of the ANC Women's League. Eight years later, she was on the national executive of the Federation of South African Women, and was arrested for the first time defying the pass laws in 1958.
Her first spell in jail gave her a taste of what was to come, the regular separations from her children. Nonkululeko (or Nkuli, as her mother calls her) was 10 months old.
"She was on the breast, but they wouldn't let me take her with me," she recalls. "I had to suffer, you know; my breasts were so full."
By that time, Walter, then secretary-general of the ANC, had been arrested five times, three times for political offences, and banned twice. He knew then that there would be worse times ahead. Walter prepared his children, too.
"We used to lecture our children together," recalls Albertina. "Each time he would come back from a meeting, in the evening he used to gather all of us around the table and tell us everything that had happened. That is why our family is so intact politically, too."
Albertina's marriage was unusual in another respect. Walter, a fierce believer in the equality of the races, held a more uncommon conviction in the equality of the sexes. Unlike many young African brides of her generation, Albertina was not relegated to the kitchen; nor did Walter expect her to become his political shadow.
"As much as he didn't force me to join any organisation, he also allowed me to go wherever I liked. And during the time he was banned and under house-arrest, he used to do all the housework when I'd go out for our meetings."
In May 1982, five months before Ruth First was killed by a parcel bomb, she paid tribute to her old friend and comrade Walter on his 70th birthday, by then, the 19th he had spent in jail.
"Albertina Sisulu is a fine leader in
her own right," First told a gathering of ANC cadres in exile. "But his capacity to lead and her political strength are also the product of a good marriage, a good political marriage, but a good marriage, one that is based on genuine equality and on shared commitment."
The security police probably understood this, too. In 1963, after Walter had disappeared underground, they detained both Albertina and her son Max, then 17, who, with President Thabo Mbeki, played a prominent role in the African Students' Association. Walter spent three anguished months in his Rivonia hideout. "I knew that the aim was to ferret me out of hiding," Walter remembered. "They knew how I'd feel about their detention."
Did he ever consider coming out of hiding then? "No, no," he insisted. "My political activities were planned. Even when I married my wife, I told her it was useless buying new furniture. I was going to be in jail."
Still, the first thing he said to the police, when they arrested him in Rivonia on July 11 1963, was: "Where's my son? Where's my wife?"
By then, Walter was well acquainted with the inside of a jail cell. He had found politics, or politics had found him, when he was only 11 or 12,
although he didn't know it at the time. In 1923, a young man called Wellington Buthelezi came to the village of Engcobo in the Transkei where
Walter was born and brought up.
Buthelezi was linked with the Garveyist movement named after Marcus Garvey, a West Indian living in America who preached that one day all those of African descent, who had been enslaved, would return to Africa as free people. "The village was full of rumours that the negroes were already rulers of America and that they would come one day to liberate the black man in South Africa," Walter recalled.
It was a measure of Walter's character that he was not disappointed when no crusaders came from across the sea. Rather, the tale planted a seed of hope in his mind: "One day we shall be free". He carried this optimism with him all his life. With it went a natural dignity that was quickly affronted when whites treated him as less than a human being.
In 1933, Walter fell foul of the pass laws for the first time. He was locked up in the Hillbrow police cells, and the experience became a turning point in his life. "I saw the manner in which people were beaten, with the back of a gun in their stomachs," he recalled.
"Now and again I was arrested for passes after that, and nothing has humiliated me as much as that question of passes. You consciously know that
this is oppression."
In 1949 Sisulu was elected secretary-general of the ANC and steered it into a new era. He was known among his comrades for his common touch, and his easy way with people.
It was the first decade of apartheid, and as the ANC clashed increasingly with South Africa's new rulers the children grew accustomed to the harsh
beams of police flashlights waking them up in the dead of night, and to strange, hostile men tramping through the house in search of documents, or collecting their father for questioning.
The state of emergency in 1960 effectively ended the Sisulus' family life; 30 years would elapse before they could all relax together again in the
same house. After Walter was acquitted of treason, he went underground to continue his ANC work. With Mandela, he organised the 1961 strike to protest against the founding of the Republic of South Africa.
He went home when his mother died at the end of that year, but his visit was brief. A few minutes after his arrival, police burst into the room full
of mourners and arrested the ANC leader. He was released in time for the funeral, but in the following year spent more time in jail than out.
Released on bail after one arrest, he disappeared underground again. The next time his family saw him was in the dock at the Palace of Justice in
Pretoria with Nelson Mandela and seven of their comrades. The historic Rivonia trial had begun.
One might have assumed that the life sentences handed down to the Rivonia accused were the lowest point in Albertina and Walter's lives. Actually, they sighed with relief.
"We had expected to be hanged," said Sisulu. Still, the family struggled to adjust to those grim, early years of Robben Island. For Walter, an
affectionate man who got great pleasure out of contact with children, it would be another 19 years before he could touch a member of his family. But by then, this was by no means the full extent of the family's problems.
Albertina was served with her first banning order shortly after her husband was sentenced, and spent most of the next 24 years either banned,
house-arrested, detained, or restricted. Max, the eldest son, had left the country in 1963 with his adopted brother, Gerald. Twenty-six years would
elapse before they would see their parents again.
Left alone with six children to support on a nurse's salary, Albertina could not afford to fly to Cape Town to visit her husband.
She was never refused visits, she says, but often the authorities made it impossible for her to see him. "Each time I got my permission from the
prison authorities, I would hand the permit over to the chief magistrate of Johannesburg so they would give me permission to leave the area. That
permit would be kept there until the last day. So it would be impossible for me to go, because the only way I could get there was by train."
For the children, the 1960s taught them what it meant to be a Sisulu.
With his older brother in exile and his mother banned and under house-arrest, Lungi effectively became father to his younger siblings. When
his mother's banning order made it impossible for her to make the journey to Cape Town, Lungi reported to his father on the affairs of the family. He took this task seriously and often compiled a little check-list of items.
Thirty minutes was a short time and he wanted to make sure he didn't forget anything.
One of the most painful visits was the time when Lungi and Sheila took their baby son Linda (the name means "wait" and was chosen by Walter) to
the island soon after he was born. It was the first child Walter had seen in nearly 10 years, and he asked the warders if he could hold his
two-month-old grandson.
"It was one of the saddest moments," recalls Sheila, a former ambassador to the US. "The warders refused, and that moment stayed with me for a long time. It was a mixed thing. Walter had to wait until 1982, after he had been moved to Pollsmoor prison, before he could touch a member of his family."
In spite of the silence imposed on her, Albertina had come to be recognised as a national leader and it was while she was sitting in a jail cell, in August 1983, that she was elected as a co-president of the United Democratic Front (UDF).
When the state of emergency was declared in 1986, Albertina was among the first to be restricted and her restrictions were only lifted on the day
before her husband was released, October 14 1989.
"I knew why the government hated me," she told me. "It was because I was against apartheid. I was aware that I was the government's enemy. Nothing could have pleased me more."
It was with less equanimity though that she had to face her daughter Lindiwe's long detention in 1976, and her subsequent flight into exile, and
her son Zwelakhe's banning, house arrest and detention four years later.
Still living in the parental home, he had to get special permission to speak to his mother who was also banned.
Lindi's detention was particularly traumatic for her and her family. They were not told where she was being held and Lindi was told by security
police that her mother had died. "She was terribly affected," Albertina told me shortly before Lindiwe, now the minister of intelligence, returned from exile. "She had been held in solitary confinement and had been tortured. They used to pull her by the hair, knock her against a wall."
Clearly hurt by the memory, she added: "She had long hair, Linda."
It would take another 12 years for the family's suffering to ease. For Albertina, the breakthrough came in 1989 when she was granted a passport as part of a UDF delegation after an invitation to visit George Bush Senior, the United States president. She stopped in Lusaka en route and said she was startled to see Zwelakhe at the airport. "Only when I came near did I notice it was Max. And, of course, I didn't mistake Lindi."
Three months later, Walter was released from prison. His family heard the news on SABC-TV on October 10. Albertina was in Nelson Mandela's cottage at Victor Verster as part of a visiting UDF delegation. "Nelson said we must watch the television. I think Nelson knew but he didn't break the news to us."
Yet it was another five days before Walter returned home. After having waited nearly 27 years, this last stretch was almost unbearable.
Walter returned home as the sun was rising on Sunday morning. Albertina and Nkuli, exhausted from interviews, visitors and toyi-toying comrades, were asleep. Nkuli was awakened by a shout from one of them.
"It's Tata," she cried and woke her mother. Albertina awoke, put on a dressing gown and reached the living room in time to see her husband walk through the front door.
Walter told me then that he was always confident that he would be reunited with his family. Albertina had held the family together and his children had never faltered in their support for him. "The future was ours," he said then.
I went to the airport with him in 1990 when Lindiwe flew in from exile.
Walter went to the airport to make sure she got through safely. He said nothing when he saw her. He walked towards her, put his arms around her,
and stroked her long hair.