Walter Sisulu

Walter Max Ulyate Sisulu was born in Engcobo, in the Transkei region of South Africa, on the eighteenth of May 1912, the son of a Xhosa mother and a white father he never knew. He left school at fifteen, worked in Johannesburg as a domestic servant and a gold-mine laborer, and ran a real-estate office that handled property for Black clients — one of the few professional opportunities the apartheid economy permitted.

He joined the African National Congress in 1940 and became its Secretary-General in 1949. He was the architect of the ANC Youth League — the political vehicle that brought Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Anton Lembede into the leadership of the organization in the late 1940s. He recruited Mandela to the ANC. He was Mandela's political mentor for sixty years.

He was a defendant at the Treason Trial of 1956 to 1961 (acquitted with the other accused). He was a co-founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1961 alongside Mandela. He was a defendant at the Rivonia Trial of 1963 to 1964. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with Mandela and seven others on the twelfth of June 1964 and held on Robben Island, then at Pollsmoor, for the next twenty-six years.

He was released in October 1989 — three months before Mandela. He served as deputy president of the ANC from 1991 until his retirement in 1994. He declined every Cabinet portfolio offered him in the post-apartheid government.

He died in Johannesburg on the fifth of May 2003, age ninety. His wife Albertina Sisulu — also placed in this archive — predeceased him by eight years. Mandela said at his funeral: "I am no longer in a position to function without him."

He is honored here as the recruiter and mentor of Nelson Mandela, and the political architect of the South African transition.