‘I Have No Doubts We Will Be Free’ : Anti-Apartheid Matriarch Undaunted by Crackdown

Her husband is in prison, 22 years into a life sentence for plotting the overthrow of South Africa’s white-led government. Her eldest son has been in exile for more than 20 years. A daughter was nearly driven mad while she was detained by the authorities. An adopted son was recently convicted of treason and sent to prison. Another son was detained two weeks ago under the state of emergency.

But Albertina Sisulu, the wife of Walter Sisulu, one of the imprisoned leaders of the outlawed African National Congress, and the co-president of the United Democratic Front coalition of anti-apartheid groups, is far from despair.

“This is what we live for, to struggle for freedom,” she said in an interview here. “I am very hopeful, increasingly so. I have no doubts that we will be free.”

Keeps Bags Packed

Yet Sisulu, 67, keeps two bags packed, one at her home here and the other at the nearby clinic where she works as a nurse, in anticipation that she may be detained herself by the South African authorities.

“They are just waiting for something, I suspect, because they know where I am and what I am doing,” she said. “Everyone in the struggle knows he or she can ‘go inside,’ as we say, at any time. . . . Those midnight knocks are still coming, by the hundreds.”

Sisulu, matriarch of a family that for nearly five decades has been in the leadership of the black struggle against apartheid, does not seem at all intimidated by the possibility of renewed detention.

“The state of emergency, with its bans on meetings, its detentions of our leaders and many local activists, and the restrictions placed on the press, has quite clearly hampered our political activities,” she said. “And we are going through a process of reorganization to cope with these additional problems. But the state of emergency has not ended our struggle. Far from it. . . .

People’s Anger Growing

“As harsh as we believe this government has been in the past two years, it has united the people more than ever before. The people’s patience is exhausted, and their anger is growing. The state of emergency means the government is not able to govern the country without these additional police powers--it has even said so itself--and that means that the people’s anger has rendered the country ungovernable. . . . Now that anger runs much deeper than before, and it is too great to subside.”

Sisulu’s judgment is a considered one, reflecting that of the mainstream black leadership here as it tries to cope with the emergency rule imposed June 12. Her confidence in ultimate success, with the establishment of “a nonracial, democratic” government based on majority rule, is similarly shared within the black community.

(Many of Sisulu’s other comments on the current situation could be construed by the government as subversive, and thus may not be quoted under emergency regulations restricting press reports from South Africa.)

When Albertina Sisulu speaks, it is with the authority of someone who has been at the center of the anti-apartheid movement since the 1940s. She has gone through long periods of detention, house arrest and “banning,” which barred her from meeting more than one person at a time, and a political trial in which she and 15 others were eventually acquitted of treason charges.

Called Mother of Nation

With Winnie Mandela, wife of the imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson R.Mandela, she is often called by other blacks “the mother of the nation.”

“You have to set an example,” she said, although she disclaims any leadership position for herself. “Our leaders are in prison and in exile. Fortunately, our men prepared us for what might happen and provided guidelines for us to carry on before they went to prison.”

Walter Sisulu was secretary general of the African National Congress and a leader of its military wing, Spear of the Nation, when he was arrested in April, 1963. The following June, he was convicted with Mandela and other congress leaders of planning acts of sabotage and attempting to overthrow the government, and sentenced to life in prison.

Over the previous decade, because of his political activities, he had been in and out of jail, detention and house arrest. With Mandela and Oliver Tambo, who is now the president of the African National Congress, Sisulu had revitalized the organization in the 1940s and developed a “program of action” that led to nationwide protests.

Family, Political Roles

“We last saw Walter at home in 1961,” his wife recalled, “and the years after that were not easy. I had to be the backbone of the family and play a political role where I could. The children and I have always been committed to carrying on Walter’s work for the liberation of our people.”

The oldest child of an orphaned family of five, she had been educated at a Catholic mission school and came to Johannesburg in 1939 to become a nurse. She married Walter Sisulu, another nurse’s brother, in 1944. He was already involved in the African National Congress’ Youth League.

“What I heard at the ANC meetings and from Walter, Nelson and Oliver combined with my own experience of discrimination at the hospital to politicize me,” she said. “In fact, that is how we all get involved. Our own experiences . . . form the base, and the political leadership shows us what we can do about it.”

After her husband was elected as the ANC’s first full-time secretary general, Albertina Sisulu supported the family on her nurse’s salary--and sometimes provided the cash to keep the ANC office in Johannesburg open.

“The first shock was that of my husband being imprisoned for life,” she said, noting that it could have been worse. He was convicted of a capital offense, she said, “and I was prepared for the worst.”

5 Visits a Month

She and her children are now permitted five visits a month with Walter at Pollsmoor Prison outside Cape Town. He and Mandela were moved there four years ago from the penal colony on Robben Island.

“I save my visits up and put them together so that at some special time like Easter we can spend almost the whole weekend together,” she said. “We are not allowed to talk politics, of course, but with a family like ours it is hard to avoid a bit here and there. . . .

“These men in prison are really an inspiration to us all. They are steadfast, dedicated, really self-sacrificing, and they are amazingly well-informed about what is going on in the country and what directions the struggle should take.”

She is confident that her husband, now 74, will be released. Like Mandela, Walter Sisulu last year rejected the government’s offer to release him, on condition that he first renounce violence as a means of ending apartheid and, in effect, break his ties with the African National Congress.

“I think he will get out,” she said. “I am sure he will. That’s why I’m taking good care of myself. I’m waiting for him. He won’t die in jail.”

Years of Arrest, Banning

Albertina Sisulu was detained without charge for three months in 1963 under South Africa’s severe security laws and then placed under house arrest and other restrictions for nearly two decades. For many years, while she was banned, she could talk only with her children and later with a limited number of visitors.

When her children were in school here, she was barred from taking them to class or talking with their teachers. When they went to boarding school in neighboring Swaziland, she could not get a passport to visit them.

“Once I applied for permission to go to church, but I was told I could not talk to anyone,” she recalled, and then added wryly, “except perhaps God. He was all right, I guess.”

As one of the national presidents of the United Democratic Front since 1983, Sisulu has been giving the anti-apartheid movement direction, pulling together the many rival groups within it and articulating its goals.

With other leaders of the United Democratic Front and several of its affiliates, she was charged in 1984 with treason and conspiring to overthrow the government by force. Theirs was the biggest political trial since that of Mandela, her husband and other ANC leaders 20 years earlier. The case against them collapsed as defense lawyers showed that much of the evidence was questionable and the conspiracy charges untenable, and all were eventually acquitted.

Discipline for Youths

She has worked recently to instill political discipline in black communities such as Soweto where youths, many not yet in secondary school, were engaged in daily running battles with the security forces.

“We don’t want those children killed--they are our future,” she said, “As parents, we have had to work hard to win their trust and persuade them not to go out and die on the streets . . . as martyrs. We don’t need more martyrs.”

She is one of the founders of the multiracial Federation of South African Women and is seeking to increase support among white mothers for the anti-apartheid movement.

“No self-respecting woman, no matter what her race, can stand aside and say that she is not involved in the struggle for the liberation of herself, her children and her country,” she told a group of white women in Cape Town last month before the state of emergency was declared. “If we remain silent, we are condoning the brutality that is taking place. . . . And I must warn you: It can happen to you tomorrow as it happens to me today.”

With a brand of feminism that puts “the basics of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness . . . first,” Sisulu tells her audiences: “We, the women, share the pain of bringing children into the world. We have a duty to feed them, to educate them, to protect them, and we don’t want them dead. . . . What is happening today will not end with black children. It will go far beyond the (black) townships.”

Eldest Son in Zambia

The oldest of the Sisulu children, Max, now 41, was detained in 1963 for political activities, and then he left the country. He is a graduate of one of the Soviet Union’s premier economics institutes in Moscow and, after working with the ANC Youth League for many years and overseeing its schools, he is helping to establish a new economic section at ANC headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia. Her nephew, whom she also reared and refers to as a stepson, left at the same time.

“I last saw Max when he was 17, and I only hear from time to time about him and his family,” she said. “You know, that’s very hard on a mother, really very hard.”

A daughter, Lindiwe, 29, is also in exile, living in neighboring Swaziland and married to the son of a longtime African National Congress activist. She was held in solitary confinement for 11 months during the 1976-77 anti-government riots known as the Soweto uprising. She is reported to have been tortured, and suffered a nervous breakdown. When she was released, she fled the country and was hospitalized for psychiatric treatment in Scandinavia. Later she spent two years recovering in Hungary, where Max was then living.

A son, Zwelakhe, 36, is the editor of a new black-oriented newspaper, New Nation. He was abducted from his home shortly after midnight almost two weeks ago by four men, two of whom were masked. The government later confirmed that he had been detained under the state of emergency.

Son Was at Harvard

A Nieman fellow at Harvard University last year, Zwelakhe Sisulu is not only regarded as one of South Africa’s top journalists; he is seen increasingly as a leading black political thinker. He has been detained without charge on several occasions, twice jailed for refusing to testify at political trials and, like his mother, “banned” for a time.

In May, an adopted son, Jongumuzi, 27, the son of Walter Sisulu’s brother, who had died, pleaded guilty to charges of treason and terrorism and was sentenced to five years in prison. The judge said the sentence would have been longer because a policeman had been killed and the defendants had been captured with weapons, but Jongumuzi had not taken an active part in the group’s attacks. Other members of the ANC received sentences of up to 14 years.

Another son, Mlungisi, 38, a Soweto businessman, was detained for a time in connection with this incident, but was eventually released.

“I think we have all been detained or arrested or banned or something at one time or another,” Albertina Sisulu said, “and often several of us have been ‘inside’ at the same time.”

Youngest a Student

Of her five children--three sons and two daughters--and the three adopted children she reared, only the youngest, Nonkululekhe, 24, a journalism student in Cape Town, has not been jailed for political activities.

“This doesn’t worry me at all,” Sisulu said of her activist children. “In fact, I’m happy that my children understand why we are struggling and have joined that struggle.”

One of her strongest memories is the way her children, then still in school, gathered on the stoop of their home when she was detained in 1963 and, raising their small clenched fists in salute, shouted the black nationalist slogan “ Amandla! “--”Power!”

“One of the policemen said to me then, ‘What kind of family have you raised when even these little tykes raise their fists and shout amandla?’ ” she recounted. “I was very proud.”