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JOHANNESBURG, May 6: Anti-apartheid icon Walter Sisulu, a veteran of the struggle against white rule in South Africa and long-time friend of Nelson Mandela, died on Monday night. He was 90.
Mr Sisulu, a diminutive man who knew gut-wrenching poverty and the indignity of racial discrimination first hand, died after a long period of ill health.
“He died in his house, peacefully...He was going to be 91 on May 18,” daughter-in-law Elinor Sisulu said.
Mr Sisulu’s life spanned South Africa’s tumultuous 20th century. He was born in 1912, the same year as the creation of the African National Congress (ANC), the liberation movement which eventually won power in 1994.
Walter Sisulu was the son of a railway worker and a domestic servant.
Rising from humble rural origins, he became one of the leading lights of former South African president Nelson Mandela’s ANC.
Mr Sisulu was a commander in the long battle to end the system of racial segregation known as apartheid and to secure political equality for black South Africans.
But in 1963, he was arrested and subsequently tried with Nelson Mandela and other activists for planning acts of political sabotage and revolution.
He was sentenced with Mandela to life in prison and sent to Robben Island, a sandy islet in cold, shark-infested waters off Cape Town. He was later transferred, and was freed in 1989.
MANDELA LEADS MOURNING: Nelson Mandela led South Africans in mourning Walter Sisulu, whose death leaves the 84-year-old Nobel laureate nearly alone as the great survivor of the country’s liberation struggle.
“We have lost a remarkable man,” a frail-looking Mandela told reporters at Mr Sisulu’s home.
“He has not been honoured the way some of us have been honoured...nevertheless, he stood head and shoulders above all of us,” he said after expressing his condolences.
In an interview with the South African Press Association, Mr Mandela told he and Sisulu had together shared both the joy and pain of living.
“May he live forever! His absence has carved a void. A part of me is gone,” the agency quoted Mr Mandela as saying.
Sisulu’s death leaves Mandela with only a handful of comrades from the early days of the ANC’s fight against apartheid that ended with Mandela’s election as president in the country’s first multi-race polls in 1994.
“He was a great man, one of the greatest sons of our soil who mentored Nelson Mandela and did not mind playing second fiddle. He was not interested in personal kudos,” said Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 71, who won a Nobel peace prize for his impassioned moral campaign against the white-only government.
F.W. de Klerk, who as South Africa’s last white president freed Mandela, Sisulu and others before ceding power to the ANC, said Sisulu “played an important and constructive role in the negotiations that led to the transformation of South Africa”.
Deputy President Jacob Zuma, joining a queue of prominent mourners at Sisulu’s home as flowers piled up, said South Africa had lost “more than a leader, a father”.
South African President Thabo Mbeki praised Mr Sisulu as a “massive force for enlightenment and freedom” who fought alongside such anti-apartheid heroes as longtime ANC president Oliver Tambo, who died in 1993.—Reuters
