Biography 3
ANC centenary 2012
Albertina Sisulu
Albertina Sisulu was a leading figure in the anti-apartheid movement. Known as ‘the mother
of the nation’, she dedicated her life to achieving human rights for all South Africans. Despite
being jailed, harassed by the police and separated from her husband for 26 years, she went
on to serve in the first democratically elected parliament in 1994.
Born on 21 October 1918, Albertina grew up in a village in the Transkei. As the eldest
daughter she often had to look after her younger brothers and sisters and missed out on two
years of primary school. This did not stop her from winning a college scholarship and in 1939
she was accepted as a trainee nurse at Johannesburg General Hospital. Here she
experienced the ingrained racism of South African society through the poor treatment of
senior black nurses by more junior white nurses.
She married Walter Sisulu on 15 July 1944 and they were to spend the rest of their lives as
activists in the struggle against apartheid. Despite having children and a nursing job,
Albertina joined the ANC Women’s League in 1948 and soon took on a leadership role. She
believed passionately in education and held ‘alternative classes’ at her home in Soweto,
because she opposed the inferior education imposed on black South African children.
In 1956, Albertina helped organise a huge women’s march to protest against the introduction
of passes for women: if stopped without a pass, a black woman could be arrested on the
spot. In 1963, Albertina was arrested and held without charge for 90 days in solitary
confinement. These were difficult days for Albertina – the security police would torment her
by telling her lies about her family - pretending one of her children was seriously ill or her
husband dying. When her home was raided and Walter was arrested, she had no idea.
Walter was sentenced to life imprisonment on 12 June 1964 along with seven others,
including Nelson Mandela, for planning acts of sabotage. He spent 26 years in prison, most
of the time on Robben Island. Over the next few years Albertina suffered further
imprisonments, bannings and house arrest but never gave up her struggle for a ‘free South
Africa’. In 1983 she helped form the United Democratic Front, which led anti-apartheid
resistance within South Africa in the 1980s, becoming one of its three Presidents. She was
allowed to leave the country in June 1989 and met with the US President George W Bush
and the UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, describing the severe conditions black South
Africans were living under and urging them to impose economic sanctions against the
apartheid regime.
In October 1989, Walter was released from Robben Island. In 1994, Albertina fulfilled her
dream of living in a free and equal South Africa by serving in the first democratically elected
parliament. She died peacefully at her home in Johannesburg, aged 92, on 2 June 2011.