Cape Town — Adelaide Tambo, an icon of the generation of South African leaders which left South Africa in the early 1960s to fight apartheid from exile, collapsed and died in her home in Johannesburg on Wednesday night. She was 77.
Tambo was born Matlala Adelaide Frances Tsukhudu, the daughter of a steelworker in Vereeniging, south of Johannesburg. At the age of seven, police raided her home during a strike and arrested her grandfather. The disrespect with which young white policemen treated him left a lasting impression on Adelaide, and she vowed afterwards, "I'm going to get these white boys. When I'm grown up, I am going to get them."
When she first wanted to join the African National Congress Youth League, she was told she was too young, but was allowed to act as a courier for the party when she was out of school at weekends.
At 17, she came to the notice of Oliver Reginald Tambo, president of the Youth League, when she made a speech at a league meeting on the East Rand in which she said black South Africans needed to be represented in Parliament.
They met again later when she was a student nurse. She found they shared not only a political commitment but a religious commitment. Moreover, she was impressed with Tambo's mature response to her reluctance to commit herself to a relationship too soon after they met.
Adelaide later became a nurse at Soweto's Baragwanath Hospital, while Oliver became a lawyer and went into partnership with his fellow ANC leader, Nelson Mandela.
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The Tambos married in 1956. As resistance to the oppression of apartheid began to grow in South Africa, their lives were taken over by the struggle against the system.
After the Sharpeville massacre and the banning of the ANC in 1960, the party sent them out of the country, designating Oliver to lead the movement in exile. Adelaide based the family in London, where she earned a living as a nurse. "O.R." travelled the world, becoming a legend in the ANC as a result of his skill in holding the exiled movement together for three decades.
Adelaide continued her political work in London. As well as hosting exiles and students in her home, she was a founder member of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement and the Pan-African Women's Organisation, and worked with the International Defence and Aid Fund to help families whose children had left South Africa after the Soweto uprising of 1976.
The Tambos returned to South Africa after the unbanning of the ANC in 1990, where Oliver, who had suffered a series of strokes in the 1980s, relinquished the presidency of the movement to Mandela. He died before liberation, in 1993, but Adelaide became one of the first democratically-elected members of Parliament in 1994.
In that role, said President Thabo Mbeki in a tribute last night, she "contributed immensely" in helping to draft South Africa's new constitution.
Adelaide Tambo is survived by daughters Thembi and Tselane, and a son, Dali.
With acknowledgements to Luli Callinicos's biography, "Oliver Tambo, Beyond the Engeli Mountains," David Philip, Cape Town, 2004.
