Walter Sisulu, South Africa's quiet warrior

Crisis, The, Jul/Aug 2003 by Hunter-Gault, Charlayne

APPRECIATION

They called him "Tata" - Walter Sisulu, a True Father of the Nation. But on May 5, at the age of 90, "Tata," was, as South Africans say, "no more."

It was an amazing life's journey - from humble origins in the tiny village of Qutubeni on the Eastern Cape, to a celebrated status of "Public Enemy No. 2," during the years he and Public Enemy No. 1 - Nelson Mandela - led the struggle against the White minority-ruled apartheid state that sought to deny them their humanity. Sisulu left school before completing sixth grade and traveled an often challenging road into manhood, along the way working in mines, on a farm, as a domestic. At 28, he joined the African National Congress (ANC) - helping to shape its mission to unify and liberate Africans treated as "hewers of wood and drawers of water." He recruited a young Mandela, who became his fast friend and co-conspirator in the struggle. They and other ANC comrades launched the armed struggle that eventually saw them facing the gallows for plotting to overthrow the apartheid state. Sisulu's words at their 1964 sentencing may have saved the ANC leaders from hanging: "All honest men have an obligation to smash oppression and tyranny wherever it exists and by whatever means...I am quite confident that our blood will certainly water the Garden of Freedom." The group received a life sentence on Robben Island. Sisulu was, Mandela recalled, "the leader of all of us." The limelight was not then, nor had it ever been, his raison d'etre. Sisulu remained out of the Black-led government he helped bring to power, but not out of the corridors of the power behind it. Even as his health was failing, I would see him at the ANC headquarters, his presence and vision still respected and honored there, focused on making meaningful the freedom and the victory won.

On his 90th birthday, I sat in a room full of well-wishers and close friends in a community center named for him on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Albertina, his adoring wife of 60 years, and heroine in her own right, was, as always, by his side, as were his five children - all working professionals. Sisulu didn't speak during the tribute. He didn't need to. His legacy spoke for him then, as now, the roots of his Garden of Freedom now firmly planted in the soil and psyche of the nation he loved enough to have been willing to die for, "heroically humble," in Archbishop Tutu's words, to the end.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault is the bureau chief of CNN International in Johannesburg