Thousands of South Africans have gathered to mourn anti-apartheid hero Walter Sisulu on today at a special funeral led by his comrade and Nobel Laureate Nelson Mandela.
A frail-looking Mandela received the loudest cheers from the 20,000-strong crowd at Orlando Stadium where South Africa's political elite and several African leaders are attending the funeral in Soweto township, south of Johannesburg.
Sisulu died at home in Johannesburg on May 5, two weeks before his 91st birthday and in the arms of his wife Albertina, 84, and herself an icon of one of the world's longest liberation struggles. They were married for 58 years.
Sisulu's death leaves the 84-year-old Mandela nearly alone as the great survivor of the fight against apartheid that ended with his election as president in the country's first multi-racial polls in 1994.
Mandela and his successor, President Thabo Mbeki, were due to address the funeral, with Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu giving the sermon.
Crowds lined the streets of Soweto to catch a glimpse of Sisulu's coffin, draped in the South African flag, as the hearse made its way to Orlando Stadium from his home. The stadium overlooks Soweto, Sisulu's political power base ever since the 1940s. The crowd, many wearing the colors of the African National Congress (ANC), sang liberation songs before the ceremony began.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and former Zambian liberation president Kenneth Kaunda were among the African dignitaries attending the funeral.
Sisulu's life spanned most of a tumultuous century for South Africa and he was among the ANC's most influential leaders.
Born in 1912, the year the ANC was created, he became an activist and a founding commander of the party's armed wing in its battle for political equality for non-white South Africans.
He was the son of a black domestic worker and a white railway man and raised by his mother's family.
In 1963, Sisulu was tried with Mandela and other activists for planning acts of sabotage and revolution. Sisulu was admired for the rest of his life for the mental strength he showed during six days of grilling in the witness box, when he gave nothing and nobody away even though he faced the death penalty.
Sentenced with Mandela to life in prison he was sent to the bleak Robben Island jail. He spent the next 26 years in prison -- one less than Mandela.
Sisulu's probity and self-discipline were legendary. Those qualities have been invoked many times since his death, often to draw an unflattering parallel with what are widely perceived as the lower moral and ethical standards of today's ANC leaders.
"He has not been honored the way some of us have been honored... nevertheless, he stood head and shoulders above all of us," Mandela said after the death of his old comrade.