Albertina Sisulu

Albertina Nontsikelelo Sisulu was born on 21 October 1918 in Camama, in the Tsomo region of the Transkei, into a Xhosa (Mfengu) family. As the eldest girl she helped raise her younger siblings after her father died, before moving to Johannesburg in 1940 to train as a nurse at the city's General Hospital. She qualified as a nurse in 1944 and later as a midwife — a profession of care she would never fully leave, working for over forty years and, late in life, at Dr Abu Baker Asvat's surgery in Soweto.

Her politics began with a marriage. In 1941 she met the young activist Walter Sisulu at the hospital, and they married on 15 July 1944 with Nelson Mandela as best man. She joined the ANC Women's League, helped found the non-racial Federation of South African Women in 1954, and on 9 August 1956 was among roughly 20,000 women who marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria to refuse the pass laws — a day now marked as South Africa's Women's Day.

The apartheid state answered with detention and silence. On 19 June 1963 she became the first woman held under the 90-Day Detention Law, and from 1964 she lived under banning orders for seventeen years, all while raising five children and an extended household after Walter was sentenced to life in the Rivonia Trial. She never bent. In 1983, while she was again in detention, the United Democratic Front elected her one of its three national co-presidents — leading hundreds of anti-apartheid groups from a cell she could not leave.

When freedom came, she was there for it: a member of South Africa's first democratically elected Parliament in 1994, the woman who formally nominated Nelson Mandela as President. She retired from Parliament in 1999 and died at home on 2 June 2011, aged 92. A grateful country buried her as Ma Sisulu — proof that healing a family and freeing a nation can be one and the same work.