Walter Sisulu
Walter Sisulu was a South African anti-apartheid organiser who recruited Nelson Mandela into politics, served twenty-six years in prison alongside him, and is generally regarded as the strategist of the movement's inner circle. Born in the Transkei in 1912 to a Xhosa mother and a white father who did not acknowledge him, he left school after Standard Six and worked in the gold mines, in a bakery and in a factory before setting up an estate agency in Johannesburg that served black clients. That office was where he met the young Mandela in 1941, lent him money to complete his law studies and introduced him to the African National Congress. With Mandela and Oliver Tambo he founded the ANC Youth League in 1944, pushing the organisation away from petitioning towards boycotts, strikes and civil disobedience. He became the ANC's first full-time secretary-general in 1949 and drove the 1952 Defiance Campaign. He travelled to the Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe in 1953, and was repeatedly banned, arrested and confined under the Suppression of Communism Act. He was a defendant in the four-year Treason Trial from 1956, which ended in acquittal. After the ANC was banned in 1960 he helped establish the armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe, went underground, and broadcast on the clandestine Radio Freedom. He was captured at Rivonia in July 1963 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, serving on Robben Island until 1989. Released in October 1989 ahead of Mandela, he became ANC deputy president and helped negotiate the transition. He is credited with holding the organisation together during the violence of 1990-94. He died in 2003.
- Lived: 1912 CE – 2003 CE
- Nationality: South African
- Roles: activist
