At a Glance
From the Transkei to Johannesburg: Nursing, Marriage, and Political Formation
Albertina Thethiwe came to Johannesburg in the late 1930s — a young woman from the Transkei, orphaned early and raised by relatives, making the journey that hundreds of thousands of Black South Africans made in those decades as the apartheid economy drew labour from the rural homelands to the mines and factories and domestic service of the urban industrial complex. She came not as a domestic worker or a factory hand but as a student nurse — one of the very few professional paths that the apartheid system made conditionally available to Black women — and she trained at the Johannesburg General Hospital where the conditions were segregated, the pay was inferior to white nurses, and the racism of the institution was daily and institutional rather than the personal racism of individual white South Africans, though it was that too.
She was working as a nurse and a midwife in Orlando, Soweto, when she met Walter Sisulu — one of the central figures of the ANC's rising generation, a man who had come to Johannesburg from the Transkei himself and had become through sheer organisational talent and political intelligence a key figure in the ANC's networks. Their marriage in 1944 was also, in a sense, a political alliance: she was entering a household that would be for the next half-century at the centre of South African liberation politics, and she brought to it not simply wifely support but her own political convictions and her own organisational capabilities, which grew over the following decades into a political significance comparable to her husband's own.
She joined the ANC Women's League and threw herself into the organised political life of Soweto with the same thoroughness she brought to her nursing work. The township in those years was a site of extraordinary political ferment — it was the world in which Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu, and the other ANC Youth League leaders were building the organisations and networks that would make the Defiance Campaign possible — and the Women's League was not a peripheral organisation but a central one, with its own organising capacity, its own networks, and its own analysis of how apartheid's specific impact on women required specific political responses.
The 1956 Women's March and the Federation of South African Women
On 9 August 1956, approximately twenty thousand women from across South Africa converged on the Union Buildings in Pretoria — the seat of the apartheid government — to protest the extension of the pass laws to women. The pass laws, which required Black South Africans to carry internal passports at all times and which the police used to control and restrict the movement of Black labour with relentless daily brutality, had until that point applied primarily to men. The government's decision to extend them to women was experienced as both a practical attack on women's already constrained freedom of movement and as a symbolic assault on the dignity and domestic lives of Black women across South Africa.
The march was organised through the Federation of South African Women, of which Albertina Sisulu was a member, alongside Lilian Ngoyi — the firebrand ANC Women's League president who led the march — and Helen Joseph. The women left petitions at the doors of the Prime Minister's office and stood in silence for thirty minutes, a silence that was simultaneously a demonstration of discipline and a statement about what the apartheid state had done to women's ability to speak publicly. The song that the women sang — a protest song that warned that when you strike a woman you strike a rock — became one of the defining anthems of South African women's resistance. 9 August is now commemorated as Women's Day in South Africa, a direct consequence of what those twenty thousand women did that day.
Albertina Sisulu's role in the march and in the Federation was not the most prominent — Lilian Ngoyi was the public face — but she was part of the organisational fabric that made it possible, and she continued that work through the late 1950s as the apartheid state intensified its repression and the political landscape shifted toward the crisis that would produce Sharpeville, the banning of the ANC, and the Rivonia Trial.
Walter's Arrest, the Rivonia Trial, and the Long Years Alone
Walter Sisulu was arrested at Liliesleaf Farm in July 1963, tried at the Rivonia Trial in 1963–1964, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He would remain on Robben Island for twenty-six years. Albertina was left in Orlando West with their five children — the youngest was just a few years old — without her husband's income, under the increasingly severe banning orders that the apartheid state imposed on her as it became clear that she would not be silenced by his imprisonment, and responsible for maintaining not only her own family but the broader network of support for the families of political prisoners that she and Walter had built together.
She continued to work as a nurse — her nursing qualification gave her an income that the banning orders could not entirely take away — and she continued to organise, within the constraints that the banning imposed. The constraints were real and severe: she could not attend public meetings, could not be quoted, could not leave her magisterial district without police permission, could not have more than a certain number of visitors at a time. But they did not stop her from the informal organising — the conversations, the support networks, the maintenance of relationships and commitments — that sustained the movement inside South Africa through the dark years of the 1960s when the ANC's internal structures had been largely dismantled by the post-Rivonia repression.
She was detained under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act in 1969 — a provision that allowed the security police to hold people in solitary confinement without charge for renewable ninety-day periods — and held for 117 days. The experience of solitary confinement — the isolation, the interrogation, the uncertainty about whether you would ever be released — was designed to break political activists, and the apartheid security police were skilled at it. Albertina Sisulu was not broken. She was released without charge, returned to Orlando West, and resumed the work she had been doing before her arrest.
The 1980s, the United Democratic Front, and the State of Emergency
The formation of the United Democratic Front in August 1983 was the most significant development in South African internal resistance politics since the Rivonia Trial. The UDF was a response to the apartheid government's attempt to reform apartheid without ending it — the tricameral parliament proposal that would give limited representation to Coloured and Indian South Africans while continuing to exclude Africans — and it mobilised the extraordinary breadth of civil society organisations that had developed inside South Africa through the 1970s: civic associations, student organisations, trade unions, religious bodies, women's organisations, professional associations, and cultural groups that had each been building their own capacity for resistance and that were now brought together in a common front.
Albertina Sisulu was sixty-five years old when she was elected as one of the UDF's three presidents. She was the most prominent internal ANC figure available for such a public role — many of the older generation were in prison or exile, and the younger activists who led the township organisations that formed the UDF's backbone valued her presence as a direct link to the ANC's historical leadership. Her relationship to the absent Walter Sisulu, her long personal history in the movement, and her decades of endurance under banning orders and repression gave her an authority that younger leaders recognised and deferred to.
The mid-1980s were the most violent years of the apartheid state's internal conflict. The government declared states of emergency in 1985 and 1986, detained thousands of activists without trial, and deployed the security forces in the townships with a brutality that produced daily deaths. Albertina Sisulu was detained again during this period. The UDF was restricted and eventually, in 1988, banned. But by that point the movement had accomplished something the apartheid state could not reverse: it had demonstrated that the majority of South Africans rejected the apartheid system and were organised, committed, and willing to pay the price of that rejection.
Walter's Release, the Transition, and the Final Years
Walter Sisulu was released from prison on 15 October 1989, four months before Mandela. He and Albertina had been separated for twenty-six years. The reunion — captured in photographs that circulated around the world — was intensely personal and deeply political simultaneously: it was the reunion of two people who had built their lives and their political commitments around each other and had been forced to sustain those commitments separately across a quarter century of imprisonment and banning. That they had both sustained them — that neither had broken or compromised or been silenced — was a statement about both of them individually and about the partnership they had built.
She was active through the transition period and the first years of democratic governance, serving as an ANC MP from 1994 to 1999. She and Walter became two of the most visible symbols of the democratic South Africa that the liberation struggle had produced — the couple whose long separation had embodied the human cost of apartheid and whose reunion embodied the possibility of what had seemed impossible. Walter died in 2003, and Albertina lived for eight more years, continuing to speak, to be present at significant national occasions, and to represent the generation that had made the democratic South Africa possible.
Legacy
Albertina Sisulu's importance to the history of the liberation struggle is both specific and representative. Specifically, she was among the most important internal ANC and UDF leaders during the most difficult years of the struggle inside South Africa — the years when the external mission under Oliver Tambo was sustaining the ANC internationally while the internal movement had to rebuild itself after the devastation of the post-Rivonia repression. Representatively, she embodied the experience of the many women who sustained the liberation movement from within — who raised children, supported prisoner families, maintained networks, organised communities, and kept the movement alive — while their husbands were in prison or in exile and while they themselves bore the brunt of the apartheid state's repression without the international recognition that came to the imprisoned male leadership.
The naming of Albertina Sisulu University in her honour — one of the more significant commemorative gestures in post-apartheid South Africa — is an acknowledgement that her contribution was foundational, that the generation she represents deserves institutional memory as well as personal tribute. She lived long enough to see the democracy she had helped create, to vote in the elections whose possibility had sustained her through the dark years, and to be recognised, finally, as one of the people who had made those elections possible. She died in June 2011, aged ninety-two, having given her entire adult life to the proposition that South Africa belonged equally to all who lived in it.