Albertina Sisulu | The Invisible Backbone Of South Africa's Freedom

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]Her husband was in prison with Mandela for 26 years. The apartheid state spent three decades trying to break her. She spent three decades building schools, organizing women, and running the underground ANC. She was a nurse. She healed a nation. Nicole Albertina Culu was born in 1918 in the Transcape, the same region that produced Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo. She trained as a nurse and midwife and worked at the non-European hospital in Johannesburg where she saw daily the consequences of apartheid medicine, the deliberate underresourcing of black healthcare, the inferior treatment, the preventable deaths. Nursing was her vocation. It was also her politics. She married Walter Culu in 1944, the same year he, Mandela, and Tambo formed the ANC Youth League.

[00:00:49]From that moment, their home became a center of the anti-apartite movement.

[00:00:53]When Walter was arrested at Ravonia in 1964 and sentenced to life imprisonment alongside Mandela, Albertina was left to raise five children, support the families of other political prisoners, and continue the struggle alone. The apartheid government banned her in 1964, restricting her movements, forbidding her from being in a room with more than one person at a time, preventing her from speaking publicly or being quoted in any media. The banning order lasted with brief interruptions for most of the next 26 years. She was arrested multiple times, including a 1983 conviction for furthering the aims of the ANC. She continued anyway. She worked with the Federation of South African Women, the United Democratic Front, and the ANC Underground Network. She was a mother figure to multiple generations of activists, literally housing young people, fleeing apartheid repression, feeding them, connecting them to the movement, all while under constant surveillance. Walter was released from prison in 1989. A year before Mandela, Albertina had waited 26 years. She became a member of parliament in the first democratic South African government in 1994 and remained a central figure in the ANC women's league for decades advocating for the women who had been the invisible batbone of the liberation movement. She was awarded the order of Luoui in G South Africa's highest civilian honor. She died in June 2011 at age 92 having outlived apartheid by 17 years. long enough to see much of what she had fought for and long enough to watch some of it be squandered. The history of the anti-apartite struggle is told largely through its men. Mandela, Bo, Tambo, Culu, the Elder. Albertina represents the thousands of women who held the movement together while men were imprisoned or in exile, who raised the children, ran the networks, attended the funerals, and kept showing up. She did not write manifestos or command armies. She nursed the sick, housed the hunted, organized the women, and sustained the underground for three decades under banning