S. Africa Frees Sisulu, 7 Other Black Leaders

Walter Sisulu, a powerful leader of the outlawed African National Congress who has been unseen and unheard by South Africans for 26 years, was freed from prison at dawn today and greeted by singing crowds at the door of his modest home in Soweto.

The 77-year-old Sisulu, fully gray and wearing glasses, arrived under police escort and was raised on the shoulders of singing and cheering young black supporters who had maintained a two-day vigil in the street outside. He was quickly carried into the yellow house where he was living in 1963 when he, ANC leader Nelson R. Mandela and eight others were arrested, charged with plotting sabotage and sentenced to life in prison.

Inside the house were his 71-year-old wife, Albertina, and a dozen supporters, who had been waiting since President Frederik W. de Klerk announced Tuesday his intention to release Sisulu and seven other prominent political prisoners.

A prisons service spokeswoman said that all of the men were released early today and were on their way home. All except one of those men have been in prison for a quarter century on political charges.

Mandela, 71, was not among those named, but government officials and Mandela associates have said publicly that he was consulted over a period of months by Justice Ministry officials about the release of his fellow inmates.

Sisulu, wearing a gray suit and tie, was driven to his house today by police and was almost immediately swarmed by the crowd. As he emerged from the car, a reporter for Reuters news agency shouted: “Are you Walter Sisulu?”

“Yes, and how are you?” came Sisulu’s reply.

The crowd grew outside the house as word spread through this sprawling township on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Young blacks were singing ANC songs and, in an act of open defiance against the government, an ANC flag was unfurled in the cool, clear morning air. The ANC, the principal guerrilla group fighting white minority-led rule, has been banned in South Africa for 29 years, and many black activists have gone to prison for years on a charge of “furthering the aims of the ANC.”

Sisulu, a secretary general of the ANC in the 1950s, is Mandela’s closest confidant, and when the two men were put on trial, they formed the nucleus of the high command of Umkhonto we Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation, the ANC’s military wing. Together, they helped launch the ANC’s armed struggle after years of polite petitioning of the government had failed to win rights for South Africa’s black majority. Neither man has renounced the use of violence--the government’s longstanding condition for their release.

De Klerk said Sisulu and the others, representing a generation of leaders, would be released unconditionally, but government sources have said that the eventual release of Mandela, now expected sometime next year, will depend on the events of the coming days.

Govan Mbeki, another of Mandela’s co-defendants, was released two years ago unconditionally. But, within days, the government placed him under 12-hour house arrest and ordered him not to engage in political activity.

De Klerk also has left open the possibility that restrictions on the freed prisoners may be required if their behavior--and the public reaction to it--is seen as a threat to public order. Some 400 black activists are restricted from political activity and under nighttime house arrest.

But the government, which has eased its clampdown on some forms of anti-government protest in recent weeks, is reluctant to restrict the men. De Klerk has received worldwide praise in recent days for his decision to release them unconditionally and, in the view of many political analysts, bought himself a reprieve from additional economic sanctions so he can begin implementing what he has described as a step-by-step program to dismantle apartheid.

Anti-apartheid leaders have greeted de Klerk’s initiatives cautiously, insisting they need more concessions--including ending the three-year-old state of emergency, lifting the ban on the ANC and releasing all political prisoners--before any talks with Pretoria can begin.

Before the freeing of the eight political leaders, tens of thousands of black workers and anti-apartheid activists carried ANC banners through the streets of more than a dozen South African cities on Saturday to protest a new labor law--and to celebrate the anticipated releases.

Police for the most part watched quietly from a distance as protesters sang and danced in the streets and listened to militant anti-government speeches, suggesting that the government needs to go much further than releasing Sisulu before the 26-million black majority will be ready to go to the negotiating table.

One banner carried above the marchers in Cape Town read “Eight is Not Enough--Free Mandela.”

Sisulu was a founder in 1943 of the ANC Youth League and secretary general of the ANC from 1949 to 1954, when the government ordered him to stop working for the organization. He continued his ANC work in secret and, in 1963, a year after the beginning of the Mandela-led campaign of armed resistance, was convicted of furthering the aims of the ANC and placed under 24-hour house arrest while awaiting appeal.

He disappeared, however, rejoining the underground leadership of Umkhonto we Sizwe, and was among those arrested in a police raid on the guerrillas’ headquarters in Rivonia, a northern Johannesburg suburb. He served part of his sentence at Robben Island and was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison on the mainland in 1982.