S.Africa struggle icon ‘Ma’ Sisulu to be buried Saturday

Anti-apartheid activist Albertina Sisulu, one of the last contemporaries of Nelson Mandela will be buried on Saturday in Soweto township southwest of Johannesburg, the presidential office said Sunday.

MaSisulu, as she was affectionately known, died at her Johannesburg home on Thursday at the age of 92 and will be given an official state funeral.

“Mama Albertina Sisulu was a national leader and it is befitting that we accord her a dignified funeral which is befitting for a leader of her stature,” said Collins Chabane, a minister in the presidency.

Family spokesman Mlungisi Sisulu said they had decided to use Soweto as the venue because it was there that the country “broke the back” of apartheid, the government news agency BuaNews reported .

“My parents had lived in Soweto for a good 60 years and so they relate a lot to the people in Soweto,” he said.

Sisulu and her late husband, African National Congress (ANC) leader Walter Sisulu, were key figures in the fight against white-minority rule, enduring decades of persecution by the apartheid regime.

In South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, when Mandela became the country’s first black president, Sisulu won a seat in parliament.