South Africa's First Woman U.S. Ambassador

Ebony, Oct, 1999 by Laura B. Randolph

SHE remembers it vividly. The way a bride recalls her wedding day or a mother recollects the first time she gave birth. More than five years after South Africa's first democratic elections, when Sheila Sisulu, the country's first female ambassador to the United States, thinks back on that June 1994 day, the images come racing back.

"I got up very early in the morning," Sisulu says of the unforgettable afternoon she went to her church to vote for the president of her country for the very first time. "I got dressed up to go and my whole family went with me. We stood in line with all kinds of people. There was such excitement in the air."

When the moment finally came for Sisulu to cast her vote for Nelson Mandela, the statesman and nation-builder who had been freed from a 27-year imprisonment only three-and-a-half years earlier, it felt almost surreal--not electric as it had been outside, says Sisulu, but tranquil, serene, preternaturally peaceful.

"I was standing in the cubicle with my little daughter next to me and we were separated from all the noise and the buzz," she says. "I remember very vividly that it became very still. There was this sudden quiet, a complete peace. It felt like such a solemn moment."

It was a moment Sisulu had been working for and waiting for her whole life. An "education activist" during the unholy days of apartheid, Sisulu came of age under the height of White oppression. "I was born the same year formal apartheid started," says Sisulu, 51, who came to Washington in February 1999 after 18 months as Consul General in New York to guide U.S.-South African relations at the start of the new millennium.

By her own admission, it's a long way from the Western Native township, just northeast of Johannesburg, where she grew up as the daughter of working-class parents. "They were business people as much as one could be as a Black person at that time," says Sisulu, who has two brothers and two sisters. "My mom started out as a seamstress in a factory; my father was a salesman, and together they started their own corner shop."

When she started sixth-grade, Sisulu's parents sent her to boarding school in Swaziland ("It was a British protectorate") so that she could escape the indignities of an apartheid education. "Even at 11 years old I could feel the difference," she says. "Each time I went home for vacation, the starkness of apartheid became even clearer to me."

So clear, in fact, that Sisulu's memories of those long ago days still evoke strong emotions. "As a little girl, I'd walk through town with my father and see a playground, but I wasn't allowed to play there because it was only for White children," she says. Worse, were the "dumb passes" ("To identify Black people as stupid I suppose") that the law required Black South Africans to carry.

"It was humiliating," Sisulu says, shaking her head. "You'd be walking down the street with your father, who you think is such a hero, and the minute you saw a policeman you could see him tense up because the police could stop him and ask for his pass at any time. He knew that. He [father] knew that you knew that. And so in that moment, he loses his dignity even though you both try to pretend otherwise."

When Sisulu turned 16, however, pretense was no longer an option; she had to carry a "dumb pass" of her own. "That pass was almost my branding," she says quietly. "To go anywhere, I had to have it. And to have it was to identify me as a second-class citizen in the country of my birth."

There were other humiliating incidents, says Sisulu. Like the time the police stopped Sisulu's father as he was driving her and two of her friends back to school, allegedly because they were out past the government-imposed curfew on Black South Africans.

"It was the first time I ever saw doubt in my father," says Sisulu, who went on to obtain a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland, and an education degree from the University of Witwatersrand. "At the police station, we were ridiculed by very young White policemen who thought flexing their muscles on a group of Black adults was fun."

There was also the constant police harassment Sisulu's mother suffered when Sisulu's brother went to the United States so that he could study engineering. "After he left, the police harassed my mother constantly," she recalls. "They would come to the house during the night and say, `Where did he go? How did he go? Tell him to come back.'"

It was incidents like that, says the ambassador, that crystallized for her at an early age what she wanted to do with her life--help abolish apartheid. "From the time I was a teenager," she says, "I knew I was going to go back to South Africa to fight against the system with whatever was at my disposal ... People ask me if I was involved in politics and I tell them, as a Black South African, it was impossible not to be. Your very existence was a statement of resistance."

Making her own statement against apartheid is what Sisulu has been doing throughout her career. When she started out as a teacher, for example, the government wouldn't allow her to teach in the school system, so Sisulu taught in an alternative program for young adults who hadn't completed high school because they didn't want an apartheid education.