Albertina Sisulu has been celebrated in obituaries as a political leader in her own right, as the matriarch of a political dynasty whose stature rivals that of the Mandelas, and as "mother of the nation" -- a term once reserved only for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Less well known is how she helped to change relations between South Africa and the United States.
The story begins in 1988, when apartheid's most brutal leader, P. W. Botha, was commanding army and police forces which were running death squads, struggling to keep control of events in the face of uprisings, strikes and sanctions imposed by foreign governments.
Botha's most reliable allies were Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Helmut Kohl in the then West Germany and Ronald Reagan in the United States.
Reagan's policies on South Africa were disastrous for opponents of apartheid and, had South Africans known his personal views, they would also have found them deeply offensive.
Despite publicly proclaiming his commitment to change through "constructive engagement," Reagan's views mirrored those of Botha.
Excerpts from his personal diaries published recently reveal that, writing after a 1984 meeting with Desmond Tutu a few days before the bishop was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Reagan commented: "He is naive... The Bishop seems unaware, even though he himself is Black, that part of the problem is tribal not racial. If apartheid ended now there still would be civil strife between the Black tribes."
Fortunately for South Africans, Reagan's South Africa policy was offensive to most Americans too. In 1986 he suffered perhaps the biggest foreign policy defeat of his presidency, when members of Congress, under pressure from their constituents, overrode his veto of sanctions for which they had voted -- the first override on a major foreign policy question since 1972.
When Reagan's vice-president, George H. W. Bush, was elected to replace him at the end of 1988, Bush gave early attention to South Africa. One of those to whom he turned to for advice was David Boren, an old family friend, a fellow member of Yale University's Skull and Bones secret society, and the then Democratic senator for Oklahoma.
Boren had just returned from visiting South Africa with Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia. The two were powerful forces in the U.S. government, Boren being the chairman of the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence and Nunn chairman of the Armed Services Committee. They were regarded in Washington as conservative Democrats, whose views on an issue such as sanctions against apartheid could tip the balance of opinion one way or the other.
Years later Boren recalled in an interview the difference between the reception he was given by P. W. Botha in Tuynhuys, the president's office in Cape Town, and that he received from Albertina Sisulu in the family's modest home in Orlando West, Soweto.
Botha "went into a tirade," Boren said, "shaking his finger at me, almost touching my nose, and was saying things like, 'You Americans have no place to talk, you persecuted blacks, you killed the American Indians' ... He used the word 'nigger' several times..."
In contrast, Boren found that Albertina Sisulu, who lived under house arrest, "was no terrorist. Her spirit was incredible to me. She recounted all the things she had been through. Here she was, this dignified woman, she'd been humiliated, strip searched, imprisoned in her home in essence... and her only crime had been advocating funding for education and things like that."
Boren returned to the U.S. and, the month before George Bush's inauguration as president in January 1989, spent two hours with the vice-president in his office.
"I told him at length about Mrs. Sisulu, and that the conversation we had with her in Soweto was one of the most moving conversations I've ever had in my life. She was a great inspiration to me; more than any single individual, she really energized me on the South Africa question."
Boren discussed with Bush signals that he could send as president that he would step up pressure on Botha.
Three months after Bush's inauguration, Desmond Tutu visited Washington with fellow church leaders Allan Boesak and Beyers Naude, and asked to see the president.
Bush's officials were uncomfortable. Perhaps Tutu's excoriation of the Reagan administration's South Africa policies at a Martin Luther King Day commemoration in Atlanta in 1986 -- in Vice-President Bush's presence -- was still fresh in their memories. In King's church, in the words of Reagan writing in his diary, "Bishop TUTU of S. Africa took advantage of the day to kick me & our admin. around."
An official of Bush's National Security Council suggested that the new president could not avoid meeting Tutu: such a step "would be distorted by the President's opponents," he wrote. So the official proposed that Bush should quickly announce that he would see Tutu, but that -- in line with Boren's discussion six months earlier -- Bush should invite Albertina Sisulu to the White House as the centre-piece of a "broadened outreach to the black South African opposition."
An invitation was delivered to Orlando West, the apartheid government was forced to give Sisulu a passport, and -- accompanied by a delegation of other South African leaders -- she toured Sweden, France, the United States and Britain for six weeks, meeting the heads of government in each country -- even Margaret Thatcher in London.
And a measure of Sisulu's persuasiveness can be seen in the effusive statement which Bush -- representing a party which had previously given succour to apartheid, fighting bitterly against sanctions -- issued when she visited him in June 1989.
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"I have been pleased today to welcome to the White House Mrs. Albertina Sisulu, of Soweto, South Africa," Bush said. "Mama Sisulu, as she is known by her legion of admirers, is co-president of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of multiracial South African organizations opposed to apartheid. The UDF is among the organizations banned by the South African Government, and Mrs. Sisulu has been subjected to imprisonment, house arrest, and to government restrictions on her activities. However, she remains a strong advocate of non-violence and of a non-racial South Africa.
"Mrs. Sisulu has lived a life of sacrifice for the betterment of all South Africans. At age 70, she continues to be active in the service of others. Each day she travels more than an hour to reach her job as a nurse in a clinic which cares for the neediest residents of Soweto. She personifies the struggle for human rights and human dignity, and her presence here is an inspiration to us all."
Less than four months after the White House visit, Albertina Sisulu was woken shortly before dawn one Sunday morning to welcome her husband, Walter, back home from prison after 26 years.
John Allen is managing editor of allAfrica.com. This account is based partly on his research for "Rabble-Rouser for Peace," a biography of Desmond Tutu. The title was inspired by Albertina Sisulu, who teasingly told Tutu during the anti-apartheid agitation of the 1980s, "You're just a rabble-rouser, man."
