Mandela tells of comradeship at veteran Sisulu’s 90th birthday
Former South African president Nelson Mandela paid an emotional tribute to his friend and fellow anti-apartheid veteran Walter Sisulu, who celebrated his 90th birthday on Saturday, calling him a giant of the liberation struggle.
Speaking at a party organised by South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC), a high-spirited Mandela told the frail-looking Sisulu he had set an example as a leader, a fighter and a servant of the people.
He also told some 500 people attending the celebration of his personal relationship with the veteran.
The party was held in a hall named in Sisulu’s honour in an area of northern Johannesburg reserved for whites under the apartheid regime.
”On a personal level I can tell of a relationship — a friendship and comradeship that was profoundly formative in my life,” said the 83-year-old statesman.
”We are highly privileged to be able to celebrate the 90th birthday of such a giant and cornerstone of our (ANC) movement,” he said.
Mandela said everybody who worked in the ANC’s struggle for freedom in South Africa, which had its first democratic elections in 1994, respected Sisulu’s leadership.
”He knew and taught us that wisdom comes from sharing insights and listening to and learning from each other,” he said.
Mandela ended his tribute with an emotional rendering off by heart of William Earnest Henley’s poem Invictus.
”How charged with punishment the scroll. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul,” a visibly moved Mandela recited.
South African President Thabo Mbeki also paid tribute to Sisulu, saying ”Xhamela (Sisulu’s Xhosa clan name) is precious, a son of our people.”
The aging Sisulu was brought to the front of the hall in a wheelchair, where he cut a birthday cake bearing the inscription: ”90 years, Dedication, Tata (Father) Sisulu.”
He was surrounded by his wife Albertina and Mandela and his wife Graca Machel.
Sisulu, an unassuming pillar of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle was born on May 18, 1912 to a peasant family in the small town of Engcobo in the rural Eastern Cape province, where Mandela was born six years later.
On Saturday, Mandela pointed out the significance of Sisulu’s birthday and the formation in the same year of the ANC, which fought colonial oppression and later 48 years of apartheid under the white nationalist regime.
Sisulu left in the 1920s and moved to Johannesburg, working in a dairy, a gold mine, various factories and a bakery, before setting up a short lived estate agency for blacks.
It was during this time he became politically active. He organised a wage strike — for which he was fired — and later joined the African National Congress in 1940. With Mandela and Oliver Thambo (who died in 1993), he became one of the leaders of the ANC’s Youth League in the early 1940s, later rising to the post of secretary general.
He was with Mandela and Govan Mbeki (the late father of president Mbeki) during a raid in July 1963 when the leadership of the ANC was arrested.
He was sentenced in 1964 with Mandela to imprisonment on Robben Island, from where he was released early with a handful of others on special orders from then president FW de Klerk in 1989.
Sisulu was the first person to meet Mandela when he walked from prison on February 11, 1990 after 27 years in apartheid jails. – AFP