Albertina Sisulu: A life well lived

Mandela and Mama Sisulu

The sorrow with which the death of Nontsikelelo “Mama” Albertina Sisulu was met last week has as much to do with the end of an era as it does with her absence in the world. As the last of her generation prepare their leave-taking, tributes to Sisulu may be read as obituaries of a way of being in the country she fought so hard to liberate.

With Nelson Mandela, she was among the last of those in the ANC who were young in the early 1940s when the Congress Youth League was in the making, and when her late husband Walter, with Oliver Tambo and Mandela, was fired by a conviction that he would change the shape of things to come. The return of Mandela to his Joburg home after a visit to his home village of Qunu, in the Eastern Cape on the day she died, lent a sad synchronicity to the event.