SOUTH AFRICA: South Africa yesterday mourned the death of Walter Sisulu, one of the pantheon of heroes in the struggle against apartheid, an elder statesman of the ruling African National Congress and a long-time comrade of the former president, Mr Nelson Mandela.
His death was officially announced late on Monday night after he collapsed and died in the arms of his wife, Albertina, earlier in the evening on his return home from a routine medical check-up.
Had he lived to May 18th he would have celebrated his 91st birthday.
Although Mr Sisulu's involvement in the ANC dates back to 1940, the first sight many South Africans had of him was in October 1989 when President F.W. de Klerk released him from prison.
This decision that was to lead to the liberation from incarceration of Mr Mandela four months later and to the triumph of the ANC in South Africa's first fully democratic elections in April 1994.
The white-haired, bespectacled Sisulu, who spent the best part of 26 years in prison after being convicted with Mr Mandela of sabotage in the Rivonia Trial of 1963-64, looked for all the world like a university professor as he walked through the streets of Soweto to his home in the early-morning light that day.
He blinked professorially as if his eyes were unused to the bright light as he politely answered questions from the journalists who were waiting for him near his home.
Mr Sisulu, a light-skinned man of mixed racial ancestry who resented the patronising attitude of whites to black indigenes, recruited Mr Mandela to the ranks of the ANC and forged a bond with him that made them brothers in the struggle.
Together with Mandela, he was one of the founders of the ANC Youth League in 1943-44 and, through it, helped to wean the ANC from cautious protest to militant campaigning.
After the banning of the ANC in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre of March 21, 1960, he was associated with Mandela and Joe Slovo of the SA Communist Party in the formation of the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe.
In 1991 he was elected deputy president of the ANC. Although a compromise choice to avoid a bitter and potentially divisive struggle for that high office between Thabo Mbeki, the present ANC national leader, and Chris Hani, of the Communist Party, he filled the role assigned to him with dignity.
Shortly after his election as deputy president he was accorded the ANC's highest award as a mark of recognition for his devotion to the liberation struggle.
In his last years Mr Sisulu, like Mr Mandela, was known as Tata or Father, as befitted his age and status as an elder statesman of the ANC and, for that matter, South Africa.
Referring to Mr Sisulu by his clan name, Mr Mandela said: "Xhamela is no more. May he live for ever.
"His absence has carved a void. A part of me is gone. We have lost a remarkable man".