Walter Sisulu, to millions of people uTata, Comrade Walter to me and those close to him, among all the great leaders of the liberation movement, believed in and lived the idea of unity in action. That translated into always finding ways of drawing people together to achieve the ending of racism in South Africa and making it possible for all of us to look forward to sleeping safely at home in our beds at night.

It was comrade Walter's greatest attribute that despite the rejection that so many young men experience in their families, and for him it was intensified by his white father's denial of his son who was raised by Granny, that he transcended all of this to become an adult who genuinely embraced everybody in his vision.

During his early years of political activity in the 1940s he was greatly influenced by the African national exclusiveness of Lembede and Mda who played their roles in developing the militancy of the ANC Youth League during and immediately after World War 2. But for Sisulu who during those years discovered that there were people of all races in South Africa who opposed the racism of segregation and later apartheid, many of them in the Indian Congress and the Communist Party and other formations, there was the need to embrace these groups and individuals. Together with Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, Alfred Nzo and others they transformed the ANC into a powerful campaigning organisation.

That he transcended the daily insults of apartheid to recognise and accept his own self worth set him truly free and I have to say that in my considerable personal contact with him I found a person who was at ease with himself. How rare that is! He was a man who did not need adulation and high office to feel that he was recognised. He knew within himself the value of his contribution as a great leader. In the process of freeing himself intellectually from the daily insults and humiliations of apartheid he participated in and became a leader of the struggle to free all oppressed South Africans. We are indeed fortunate that he came to understand that freedom is indivisible and the oppressors too are not free to develop their full capacities as human beings.

The life of Walter Sisulu is also the story of the life of his wife Albertina. They were so "ordinary," so normal, so approachable and so likeable yet both achieved greatness as a family couple with a family of activist children, a couple who sustained each other, and sustained, guided and nurtured the struggle for freedom in South Africa.

I first met Comrade Walter in Cape Town at a quiet, secret meeting during September 1962 when he and Comrade Nelson Mandela travelled around the country together after the latter had returned from his visit to African countries and to Britain. There we discussed the state of the campaign to end apartheid and the need to introduce the armed struggle as a politically directed campaign against the white supremacy government but not against whites as such. That view was the expression of Sisulu's understanding of unity in action, and the Preamble to the Freedom Charter adopted in 1955 at Kliptown, that says that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black and white together." That now sounds like a very mild expression, but at the time it was a revolutionary concept. The Freedom Charter's epilogue states, "These freedoms we shall fight for side by side all our lives, sparing neither courage nor strength, until we have won our liberty." That is what Walter Sisulu lived up to all his life including 25 years in prison after the Rivonia Trial and in the years thereafter.

In the weeks before our arrest on 11 July 1963 at Lilys Leaf Farm near Sleepy Hollow in Rivonia, we had lived together with the late Govan Mbeki, father of President Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba later Premier of the Eastern Cape, and Wilton Mkwayi, organiser and leader from the Eastern Cape. We had bought a place at Travallyn Agricultural Holdings on the edge of Krugersdorp (Mogale City) as a new hide out because Lilys Leaf had become known to too many people. I have to say that Comrade Walter was an undemanding companion to share a house with. He seemed always lost in thought, always analytical but always good-humoured. He was not a dogmatic person. He preferred to convince you of his views by rational argument and analysis. He did not ever demand that you agree with him because he was the leader. Yet you knew that he should be, indeed had to be, consulted over just about every significant decision and you did it willingly because he was always worth listening too.

A small incident: on June 16 1963 Walter was to make a broadcast over our Freedom Radio, from Johannesburg. He wanted to sit at the microphone during the broadcast. We insisted that he tape record the speech because he was too valuable a leader to put him at risk in this way. Then he said he needed forty-five minutes to say all that had to be said. I of course wanted to protect the operator too. I was the operator! I explained that during World War 2 Nazi counter espionage could locate a radio transmitter in a matter of minutes. The apartheid security police were not yet expecting us to have a transmitter so I thought we could risk a broadcast of 10 minutes. After discussion Walter quietly said that as I was the "expert" and at risk, he would accept my view, but could he please have a bit longer. That was the man, reasonable and analytical. The speech was a masterpiece of his personal commitment and dedication and a rallying call to people to continue the struggle to make all our people free. He said that he had not given up but had gone underground to continue his struggle.

uWalter was out on bail of R6000 pending an appeal against a sentence for continuing the work of the banned ANC. Of course going underground meant that his bail was forfeited. When we were interrogated after our arrest at Rivonia my tormentors offered me that sum of money to betray my comrades. I don't think they hoped to succeed but they always kept trying. Besides one's own loyalty to a belief in the non-racial future of our country how could one betray people like my great comrade and so many others? It would have been such a victory for the oppressors, the very system that I too wished to repudiate from within the ranks of the system.

There were things that I could do because of being white. I could buy a farm, buy a Kombi and have it fitted with curtains to drive my comrades, great leaders all of them, about Johannesburg. Walter Sisulu was worried about me, a young man of 30 living the restricted life of an underground activist. He insisted I visit safe friends, the Sepel family, who had been his host family underground, to play squash or just to visit. He of course warned me to ensure that I was not followed back to Travallyn.

On 11 July, the day of our arrest, we drove back to Lilys Leaf in Rivonia for one absolutely last time. That visit was forced upon us by circumstances even though we knew the risk we were taking. On the way I was asked what I thought we should name our new little farm. I had thought about this and suggested, SHUFISA. "It sounds an African word, they chorused, but it isn't. What does it mean?" I replied, "It is short for Supreme Headquarters United Front in South Africa." There was a great shout of laughter from the others and then Walter said, absolutely seriously, "But Denis, I don't think we have achieved a united front yet." Always the analyst, always filled with integrity.

After our 90-day detention, together with Nelson Mandela as no 1 accused we were charged as the National High Command for plotting the overthrow of the state by force of arms, and other related matters. For the next 8 months I sat in the dock between Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki and got to know them exceptionally well. What a source of strength Walter Sisulu was. He was our main defence witness. Here was our leading thinker, a mainly self-educated man up against the notorious prosecutor Dr Percy Yutar. The prosecutor tried all the tricks of one who thought he was from the master race to torment and humiliate Sisulu. Sisulu, quietly, by force of personality, dominated the proceedings for a very long four days in the witness box. He explained that it was the nature of apartheid oppression that denied black people their dignity and their rights as human beings that led us to commit acts of sabotage but had not taken a decision to embark on full-scale guerrilla warfare. He explained the nature of the political campaigns the ANC had been involved in and the number of times he had been arrested, banned and harassed by the police. Only once did he lose his cool. He cried out, when the prosecutor said life was not so bad for "the Bantu," that he should experience how Africans were forced live before saying such a thing. He shut him up completely. The accused was not supposed to answer the prosecutor so sharply.

In 1989 when he and others were released from Robben Island, I having been released in 1985, met them in Stockholm in Sweden. What a re-union that was. What a spilling over of emotion. We had not seen each other since the day we were sentenced on 12 June 1964. My Black Comrades were kept on Robben Island and I was held in a special prison built for White politicals in Pretoria. Comrade Walter's first inquiry was about who had betrayed us to the security police and then to ask after the Sepels' children. After nearly 30 years his concern was for the children of his protectors.

I also said to him that after all those years we had indeed achieved a united front of activists against apartheid. That was his strategy. That is why we can live together now to make our new South Africa.

During my last real conversation with Walter Sisulu, I thanked him for teaching me the greatest lesson of all, "To draw people to us, and not to drive them away." Washing my hands with his hands, he said he was grateful that I had learned this from him.