Albertina Sisulu

Nontsikelelo Albertina Thethiwe was born on the twenty-first of October 1918 in Camama, in the Eastern Cape, into a Xhosa peasant family. She trained as a nurse in Johannesburg and married Walter Sisulu — Nelson Mandela's closest political comrade — in 1944.

She and her husband and Mandela were inseparable in the ANC's mass-mobilization phase of the 1940s and 1950s. After her husband was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Rivonia Trial in 1964 — eight years on Robben Island, then transferred to Pollsmoor — she raised five children of her own and three more whose parents had been imprisoned or exiled, while continuing her clinical nursing practice and her political work.

She was banned from political activity by the apartheid state from 1963 to 1973 and again from 1976 to 1981 — sixteen years total under banning order. She was arrested seven times, detained without trial five times. In 1984 she became co-president of the United Democratic Front — the broad anti-apartheid coalition of nearly six hundred member organizations — and was the most senior woman in the leadership of the South African transition negotiations.

She served in the post-apartheid Parliament from 1994 to 1999 and refused, by her account, every offer of a Cabinet portfolio. She believed the work of liberation was not yet done.

She died on the second of June 2011 in Johannesburg, age ninety-two. Her funeral was a state occasion. Walter Sisulu had predeceased her by eight years. They had been married sixty-three years; for twenty-six of those years he had been a prisoner.

She is honored here as the wife and political comrade who held the South African transition together.