18 July 1929 - 31 January 2007
Adelaide Frances Tambo (née Tshukudu) was born on 18 July 1929 in Top Location in Vereeniging.
Her political life started at the age of 10 after a police raid following a riot in Top Location, in which a police officer had been killed. Tambo's ailing grandfather, aged 82, was among those arrested and marched to the town square. Here the old man collapsed.
"I sat with him until he regained consciousness," Tambo recalled in an interview. "The way those young policemen pushed him around and called him 'boy' decided me. I swore I would fight them till the end."
This incident happened in 1939. At the time she was a primary school pupil at St Thomas Practising School in Johannesburg. Five years later, she started working for the ANC as a courier, while studying at Orlando High. She had joined the school's debating society "at the time Dr Malan was preaching the gospel of apartheid, which became a heated matter for most of the students. Most of the debates centred round this theme and the future that spelled doom for generations to come."
At the age of 18, Tambo joined the ANC Youth League and was almost immediately elected chairperson of the George Goch branch. Her early work involved opening branches of the Youth League in the then Transvaal. Later, as a student nurse at Pretoria General Hospital, she started a branch of the Youth League with the help of people like Sheila Musi, Mildred Kuzwayo and Nonhle Zokwe.
She met Oliver Reginald Tambo at a meeting of the Eastern township branch of the ANC and married him in December 1956, during the marathon Treason Trial.
"We were aware we were both likely to be arrested sometime. We discussed our political involvement and having children. We decided that one of us would have to do full-time political work and the other would have to work part time and take full charge of all other family matters,including supporting the old people of both families," she later said.
In 1960, after Oliver Tambo had been elected ANC Deputy President, the couple were asked by the ANC to leave the country and carry on the work of the organisation outside South Africa. Once again Adelaide Tambo became a courier - this time for her husband.
Based in London until the unbanning of the liberation movements, Tambo was a founder member of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement and the Pan-African Women's Organisation (PAWO). She also worked with International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) to identify and financially assist some of the families whose children left South Africa after 1976.
Adelaide Tambo returned with her husband to South Africa in December 1990, where they received a hero's welcome. She was elected Treasurer General of the ANC Women's League in 1993, and became an ANC Member of Parliament in the country's first democratically-elected parliament in 1994.
Oliver Tambo passed away following a massive stroke in the early hours of 23 April 1993.
Adelaide Tambo passed away in her Johannesburg home on 31 January 2007.
The couple had three children: Thembi, Dali and Tselane.