Albertina Sisulu
Nurse, midwife and mother who held a family and a movement together through decades of bans and prison
Nontsikelelo Albertina Thethiwe was born in the Transkei, the eldest daughter of a family so poor that she had to leave school for a year to look after her siblings when her father died. She trained as a nurse in Johannesburg because the training was free, and it was there that she met Walter Sisulu, a former miner who was rising through the African National Congress. They married in 1944, with Nelson Mandela as best man.
She joined the ANC Women's League in 1948 and helped organise the march of 20,000 women to the Union Buildings in 1956 against the extension of passes to women. In 1963 she became the first woman detained under the new 90-day law, held in solitary confinement while Walter was in hiding. He was sentenced to life the following year. She would not see him free for 26 years.
The state then tried to make her invisible. She was banned almost continuously from 1964 to 1983, forbidden from gatherings, publication and even from being quoted, and at times confined to her house at night. She kept working as a midwife and nurse in Soweto, raised five children and took in others whose parents were in prison or exile, and quietly kept the ANC's networks alive. In 1983 she was elected a co-president of the United Democratic Front, and in 1985 she was charged with treason; the case collapsed.
She served in the first democratic Parliament from 1994 and died in 2011.