From his Wikipedia entry (the embedded hyperlinks are from yours truly): “Walter Max Ulyate Sisulu … was a South African anti-apartheid activist and a member of the African National Congress (ANC), serving at times as Secretary-General and Deputy President of the organization. He was jailed at Robben Island, where he served more than 25 years’ imprisonment.
[In 1943, a couple of years after becoming a member of the ANC, Sisulu], together with Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, joined the ANC Youth League, founded by Anton Lembede, of which he was initially the treasurer. [….] Sisulu was a political networker and had a prominent planning role in the militant Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’). He was made secretary general of the ANC in 1949, displacing the more passive older leadership, and held that post until 1954. He also joined the South African Communist Party.
As a planner of the Defiance Campaign from 1952, he was arrested that year and given a suspended sentence. In 1953, he travelled to Europe, the USSR, Israel, and China as an ANC representative. He was jailed seven times in the next ten years, including five months in 1960, and was held under house arrest in 1962. At the Treason Trial (1956–1961), he was eventually sentenced to six years, but was released on bail pending his appeal. He went underground in 1963, resulting in his wife being the first woman arrested under the General Laws Amendment Act of 1963 (or ‘90-day clause’). He was caught at Rivonia on 11 July, along with 16 others. At the conclusion of the Rivonia Trial (1963–1964), he was sentenced to life imprisonment on 12 June 1964. With other senior ANC figures, he served the majority of his sentence on Robben Island.
In October 1989, he was released after 26 years in prison, and in July 1991 was elected ANC deputy president at the ANC’s first national conference after its unbanning the year before. He remained in the position until after South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994.”
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More invaluable information about his life, especially the role of his wife Albertina during his time at Robben Island, as well as his continuing education while incarcerated, his leading role in the “High Organ” at the prison, and the tutoring of his prison comrades, please see the biography at South African History Online, and the section, “The ANC on Robben Island,” in Fran Lisa Buntman’s Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Lastly, from the South African Communist Party, a tribute to Sisulu, the inspirational anti-apartheid activist who “distinguished himself as a promoter and defender of the revolutionary alliance between the national liberation movement, the communist party and the trade union movement.”
For further research and reading, please see this bibliography on South African Liberation Struggles.
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