In her classic autobiography Call Me Woman (1985) Ellen Kuzwayo has a vivid portrait of Walter Sisulu at the moment of one of his greatest intellectual triumphs, his political engagements within the newly found African National Congress Youth League: “Later in the year, my interest turned to the youth section of the African National Congress. The ANC Youth League had been launched in 1943, four years before my return to Johannesburg. the leaders of this movement, Nelson Mandela, walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, were young black radicals who saw the ANC as an organisation of the black elite. Their aspirations were to produce a mass grass-roots organisation. I remember the glamorous Nelson Mandela of those years. The beautiful white silk scarf he wore round his neck stands out in my mind to this day. Walter Max Sisulu, on the other hand, was a hardy, down-t-earth man withpractical clothing---typically a heavy coat and stout boots. Looking back, the third member of their trio, Oliver Tambo, acted as something of a balance, with his middle-of-th-road clothes! Most of my leisure-time in the evening was spent on that. I worked very closely with Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, as well as Peter Mila and Herbert Ramokgopa. I wish I could explain why there seemed to be no outstanding women in the ranks of the ANC movement at that time. If they were present, for some reason or another I missed them. I heard of Ida Mtwana but I did not meet her to work with her. I regret that to this day.” It was at Sisulu’s house in Orlando that the initial discussions that eventually led to the founding of the ANC Youth League took place. It was there that Nelson Mandela for the first time met Anton Lembede, A. P. Mda and other young New African intellectuals and political leaders who destined later to lead the ANC deeper into the vortex of modernity. The encounter and the great friendship between Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela, which was deepened and strenghtened by their joint 27-year imprisonment, has had an incalculable effect on the political history of South Africa in the twentieth-century. All the more fascinating Nelson Mandela’s recollection in Long Walk To Freedom (1995) of  his first encounter with Walter Sisulu when Mandela was looking for housing in Johannesburg, having just completed his B. A. studies at Fort Hare: “A few days later, Garlick [Mandela’s cousin who was a street hawker] told me that he was taking me to see ‘one of our best people in Johannesburg.’ We rode the train to the office of an estate agent on Market Street, a dense and rollicking thoroughfare with trams groaning with passengers, sidewalk vendors on every street, and a sense that wealth and riches were just around the next corner. Johannesburg in those days was a combination frontier town and modern city. . . Sisulu ran a real estate office that specialized in properties for Africans. In the 1940s, there were still quite a few areas where freehold properties could be purchased by Africans, small holdings located in such places as Alexandra and Sophiatown. . . Sisulu’s name was becoming prominent as both a businessman and a local leader. He was already a force in the community. He paid close attention as I explained about my difficulties at Fort Hare, my ambition to be a lawyer, and how I intended to register at the University of South Africa to finish my degree by correspondence course. I neglected to tell him the circumstances of my arrival in Johannesburg. When I had finished, he leaned back in his chair and pondered what I had said. Then, he looked me over one more time, and said that there was a white lawyer with whom he worked named Lazar Sidelsky, who he believed to be a decent and progressive fellow. Sidelsky, he said, was interested in African education. He would talk to Sidelsky about taking me on as an articled clerk. In those days, I believed that proficiency in English and success in business were the direct result of high academic achievements and I assumed as a matter of course that Sisulu was university graduate. I was greatly surprised to learn from my cousin after I left the office that Walter Sisulu had never gone past Standard VI. It was anpther lesson from Fort Hare that I had to unlearn in Johannesburg. I had been taught that to have a B. A. meant to be a leader, and to be a leader one needed a B. A. But in Johannesburg I found that many of the most outstanding leaders had never been to university at all. Even though I had done all the courses in English that were required for a B. A., my English was neither as fluent nor as eloquent as many of the men I met in Johannesburg who had not received a school degree.” This was a fundamental lesson for Mandela from the actual lived experience of Walter Sisulu: that formal educator can never be a guarantor of acumen, astuteness, astuteness, foresightfulness in political leadership. This lesson served Nelson Mandela well in the 1950s when he was President of the ANC in the Transvaal province. This proved invaluable during the Defiance Campaign of 1952. It was Walter Sisulu who initiated Nelson Mandela into the ANC politics in this province as well as at the national level. It was partly because of these two factors that Mandela developed a life-long abiding respect for Walter Sisulu. From early manhood Sisulu acquired his political education as a worker in Johannesburg, from the early 1930s when he came up from the Engcobo district in the Transkei. He had by then come into contact with Clements Kadali’s Induustrial and Commercial Workers Union in East London. One of the greatest moments of Walter Sisulu’s contribution to South African political history was as Secretary-General of the ANC from 1949 to the banning of the organization in 1960. In 1949 he had been instrumental in persuading the ANC parent organization to adopt the Programme of Action as a national policy, a manifesto that originally been formulated by the ANC Youth League. One of the astonishing things about Walter Sisulu in the 1940s and the 1950s was his continuous metamorphosis and ideological development: from a ferocious black nationalist in the mode of Anton Lembede to a progressive democrat in the tradition of Sefako Mapogo Makgatho. This is the same evolution Mandela was also making at the same time. To Mandela too, Makgatho was critical in the development of his consciousness. Walter Sisulu’s 1953 trip to Europe, Russia and China convinced him of the correctness of their ideological progression. The visit to China seems to have had the most pronounced effect on his political sensibility and historical consciousness: “My visit to the new China has been a remarkable and unforgettable experience. . . From these experiences, it is clear to me that tremendous changes are being brought in this vast country by the Mao Tse-Tung Government, and that when China’s six hundred million speak of their liberation, they mean something very real. Although the Communist Party of China is the leading party in the coalition government, there is real unity in China today, based upon the common opposition of many classes to imperialism, the landlord classes, bureaucratic capitalism and the reactionary Kuomintang clique of Chiang Kai-Shek. . . The women of China have been liberated from the age-old system of feudal bondage. They now participate in all forms of administration in the country both in the central government and in local governments and institutions. They hold high positions in factories and in the villages. . . This radical transformation in the life of the nation with the largest population in the world, from semi-colonial slumber and backwardness to the front rank of progress and advancement, is of tremendous significance to the future of humanity, both to the countries of western imperialism and to the people of the colonies in Asia and Africa and elsewhere” (“I Saw China”, Liberation, no. 7, February 1954). These observations of Sisulu are a reflection of the political movement of the ANC toward a position that made possible the Congress of the People of 1955: forging of alliances with whites, Indians and Coloureds and their political organizations. The most contentious alliance was between the ANC and the South African Communist Party. Because of the progression of the ANC in the early 1950s towards this rapprochement, many political stalwarts and intellectual giants such R. V. Selope Thema, H. Selby Msimang and Jordan K. Ngubane left the organization. Their vehement objection was to the perceived undue influence of Communism within the ANC. This led also to the break between Jordan K. Ngubane and Albert Luthuli, who was then President-general of the ANC. Although he was not a Communist, Walter Sisulu was one of the principal driver towards the rapprochement. Consequently the obsessive hatred directed at him by his erstwhile ANC Youth League colleague Jordan K. Ngubane: Ngubane’s An African Explains Apartheid (1963) and Unpublished Autobiography (1966?) are obsessive are the damages which supposedly Sisulu was inflicting on the organization. Jordan Ngubane hardly ever shifted much from the black nationalism of Lembede to which at one time they subscribed to. A year after his trip to China, Walter Sisulu formulated an interesting exposition on African Nationalism, which is markedly different the voluminous writings of Ngubane on the same topic: “The Africans feel that it was never the aim of the colonial Powers to give the African the benefits of civilization. Their main interest was to develop their economic interests. That---and not the furtherance of so-called Western civilization---is what they defend by their military might even today. Inevitably national movements of the indigenous people of Africa developed to try to throw off the foreign yoke. . . The successful struggles of the people of Asia inspired their brethren in Africa to no small degree. Events in India, in China and Asia generally helped to broaden their outlook. . . African nationalism must be examined in the light of the situation obtaining on the continent. It is a movement stemming from what the people feel is the common oppression of the indigenous people of Africa by the foreign imperialist Powers of the West and other European-dominated groups such as the South African Government. It is based on the desire of the people to free themselves from exploitation and domination by an alien and conquering group. It springs  from a desire of the African people to live happily and peacefully in the land of their birth. It resents racial discrimination and the treatment of people as inferiors on the grounds of colour. It is therefore very sensitive to any attack on African people wherever they are and attacks on other non-European people in other parts of the world. It is this aspect which makes African nationalism in my country not limited but broad enough to embrace other peoples oppressed by colonial Powers” (“The Development of African Nationalism”, W. M. Sisulu, Indian Quarterly, vol. x no. 3, July/September 1954). It was partly because of this broadly based historical vision of African Nationalism that reinforced the convictions of Mandela and Sisulu and other great patriots during their long imprisonment from 1963 to 1990. On the penultimate page of Long Walk To Freedom Nelson Mandela pays tribute to Walter Sisulu by placing him in the context of great South African political leaders: “The policy of apartheid created a deep and lasting wound in my country and my people. All of us will spend many years, if not generations, recovering from that profound hurt. But the decades of oppression and brutality had another, unintended effect, and that was that it produced the Oliver Tambos, the Walter Sisulus, the Chief Luthulis, the Yusuf Dadoos, the Bram Fischers, the Robert Sobukwes of our time---men of such extraordinary courage, wisdom, and generosity that their like may never be known again. Perhaps it requires such depth of oppression to create such heights of character. My country is rich in the minerals and gems that lie beneath its soil, but I have always known that its greatest wealth is its people, finer and truer than the purst diamonds” (p.622). This is grteat praise indeed.