Sisulu a Guiding Light to Young in Early Days : South Africa: While Mandela was clearly the leader, Sisulu was regarded as the thinker and philosophizer of the cause.

SOWETO, South Africa —  When Walter Sisulu was running the African National Congress offices almost single-handedly 40 years ago, young black students would often drift by to chat. And he always seemed to have time for them.

“You wouldn’t go to Nelson Mandela to just talk. He suffered fools very badly,” remembers Dr. Nthato Motlana, one of those students and an early member of the ANC. “But you could always go to Sisulu and talk about the little things. He was a real uncle.”

In those days, Sisulu was the ANC. He had encouraged a young Mandela, then newly arrived in Johannesburg, to join the organization. He helped Mandela enroll in law school, even paying his tuition, and welcomed him into his mother’s home as a lodger.

Sisulu, 77, freed on Sunday after spending the last 26 years in prison, was the most effective grass-roots organizer of the ANC and, with Mandela and Oliver Tambo, guided that organization away from its historic reliance on petitioning the white government for black rights into an era of civil disobedience and armed struggle.

“He’s a lovely man, jovial and easygoing,” said Amina Cachalia, who fondly remembers Sisulu’s many visits to her home and that of her husband, Yusuf. “I never heard Walter raise his voice or get cross. He was always calm and level-headed. And always persuasive.”

One of his closest friends in those days was Mandela, who had risen to the forefront of the anti-apartheid fight by the early 1960s, and that bond grew stronger during their years together, friends say.

Many former prisoners remember receiving visits from Mandela and Sisulu, and the two trained several generations of ANC leaders at Robben Island and Pollsmoor prisons in Cape Town. While Mandela was clearly the leader, Sisulu was regarded as the thinker and philosophizer of the cause.

But the two men came from sharply different backgrounds. While Mandela was the son of a tribal chief, Sisulu was the son of a black maid. His father, a white construction worker, had left the family when Sisulu was young. At the age of 15, he was called on to support his mother and brother.

Although he would have been classified Colored (mixed-race) under South Africa’s race classification laws, he chose to be considered a black and was initiated into the Xhosa tribe.

He worked in the gold mines, as a domestic worker--and was fired from a job in a bakery for organizing a strike to press for higher wages. In his spare time, he took high school correspondence courses. He set up a small real estate agency in 1940, and joined the ANC. A year later he met Mandela.

Sisulu had his first run-in with police in the 1940s, when he was imprisoned for assaulting a white train conductor who had confiscated a black child’s season ticket.

He, Mandela and Tambo, now leader of the ANC in exile, formed the ANC Youth League, which eventually took control of the ANC and made Sisulu the secretary general from 1949 to 1954.

Although an early proponent of racial exclusiveness, he became one of the leading forces in bridging the gap between the ANC and anti-apartheid activists of other races. Sisulu and Cachalia, then a leading figure in the Transvaal Indian Congress, organized the Defiance Campaign of 1952. Sisulu kicked it off by leading activists into a Johannesburg suburb without a permit. Within months, 8,500 people had been arrested for taking part in the campaign.

Sisulu left the country secretly in 1953 to seek support for the ANC. Upon his return, he was banned by the government, but he continued working for the rebel underground. After the government banned the ANC in 1960, Sisulu was detained, released and placed under house arrest numerous times.

In 1963, he was convicted of furthering the aims of the ANC and placed under 24-hour house arrest while awaiting his appeal. But he escaped and joined the high command of the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation.

Sisulu and other ANC leaders were arrested in a 1963 police raid on a farm in a Johannesburg suburb. Along with Mandela and eight others, he was convicted of plotting sabotage and sentenced to life in prison. Since then, Mandela and Sisulu have been considered the most important leaders in the ANC.

The Sisulus are one of the most prominent anti-apartheid families in South African history. Walter’s wife, Albertina, 71, a nurse, has been repeatedly arrested, detained and banned during their 35 years of marriage. They have seven children, two of them adopted, and 20 grandchildren.

The Sisulus’ 38-year-old son, Zwelakhe, editor of the New Nation newspaper, emerged from two years’ detention last year and has been placed under severe restrictions that prevent him from, among other things, leaving home at night or writing articles for publication.

While in prison, Sisulu was a man without pretense. Small and thin, with heavy black-rimmed glasses, he cared little about his dress, wearing his prison-issue sweater until fellow inmates changed it for him, former prisoner Thami Mkhwanazi wrote recently in the Weekly Mail.

Sisulu loves classical and choral music as well as films and board games. He is an avid Scrabble player, and prisoners came to his cell after lunch each day to play and watch the game.

One of his most prized possessions was his dictionary, which he regularly loaned to the players. “Half the pages were loose, and he would rearrange the pages after the game at the end of the day,” Mkhwanazi remembers.

Mkhwanazi says Sisulu is a walking encyclopedia of the ANC, and like many of its leaders, Sisulu would occasionally compile political essays or teach inmates the history and political ideology of the black liberation struggle. Sisulu also is studying for a bachelor’s degree in anthropology.

It was only in recent years that Sisulu and Mandela were allowed regular visitors. Nevertheless, most of Sisulu’s friends outside prison were denied permission to see him. Until Sunday, the closest contact they had were the messages Sisulu passed to them through his wife--and an artist’s rendering of a younger Sisulu that hangs prominently in the living room of his home.

BACKGROUND

The African National Congress, the oldest surviving black political organization in South Africa, was founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress. The group took its current name in 1923. Initially a moderate, even conservative organization, it opted for armed struggle against the South African government after it was banned in 1960. Its president, Oliver Tambo, heads an external wing operating from Zambia, while its president for life, Nelson R. Mandela, remains imprisoned for life after being convicted of sabotage.