"relentlessly to provide the "watchful eyes" and "attentive ears" that ensured that the oppressors could not operate in silence"

More on Helen Suzman on the Guardian:

"Ned Temko

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• guardian.co.uk, Saturday 3 January 2009 16.00 GMT
• Article history

My most vivid memory of Helen Suzman has nothing to do with politics.

She was in London, visiting her Hamsptead-based daughter and son-in-law, in the autumn of 1993. It was only months before Nelson Mandela – the Robben Island inmate she had regularly visited, befriended and supported – was to win the Nobel peace prize and become her country's president.

And her rental car wouldn't start. As each of us tried with predictable futility to figure out what was wrong, her face was suddenly illuminated with the trademark Suzman smile. A few weeks earlier, she recalled, her own car had similarly expired not far from her Johannesburg home. And as she had her silver-crowned head buried in the bonnet to see if she could figure out what was wrong, a burly teenager had shouted out from across the street: "Good luck, granny!", to which Helen had replied: "If you can't fucking well help me fix it, find something useful to do!"

Funny, fesity, fearless, Helen Suzman was indeed a proud and doting grandparent (and more recently, a great-grandparent). But never an ordinary "granny". For more than three decades, including 13 years as the sole parliamentary voice of opposition to apartheid, she fought every one of pernicious building-blocks in the legal architecture of white separatist oppression. That this earned her only taunts in the chamber, and abusive messages and death threats at home, seemed only to reinforce her resolve.

She also fought – and won – a series of battles on another front: to visit Mandela and his ANC cohorts in prison and, little by little, to improve the regime under which they were held for a quarter of a century until his release in 1990.

The daughter of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, she was educated at a Johannesburg convent school – where her battles on the hockey pitch, she once told me, had taught her a lesson that would prove critical in her 36 years of parliamentary battle against apartheid's ruling National party: to "detest giving up".

She married young, and could easily have settled into the comfortable look-the-other-way existence of many white South Africans. But she completed her university degree, began teaching at Johannesburg's Witwatersrand University. The turning point, and the catalyst for her extraordinary political commitment, came when she started working with South Africa's Institute of Race Relations. "There was really no way," she said, "that one could shut one's eyes."

And she never did. One of the more bizarre aspects of the National Party's savage victimisation of South Africa's black majority was an obsession with making it all seem "legal", with an insistence on Westminster-style parliamentary rules and protocol. Helen relentlessly used that platform. She would excoriate the architects of oppression (once memorably remarking that if President PW Botha had been a woman "he would have come in on a broomstick.") But more importantly, she would place each new successive outrage in the public domain. Even when Botha slapped restrictions on the media in the 1980s (when I was the correspondent in South Africa for The Christian Science Monitor), she would use parliamentary privilege to air injustices in the chamber and thus ensure they would not, could not, go unreported.

"I suppose my anger kept me going," she told me in her later years. "And yes, outrage … because they did outrageous things."

But along with her anger, her courage, the empathy and kindess which I so often saw her show towards the victims of apartheid, there was something else as well – a core set of beliefs from which she would never deviate whatever the pressures. She called it her "old-fashioned liberalism". It made her deeply suspicious of unchecked political power (whether the autocrat was white like PW Botha or black like Robert Mugabe). It led to her to test any policy or dogma against what it would do for individual citizens (thus her readiness to break ranks with the anti-apartheid movement overseas and oppose economic sanctions which she feared would harm impoverished black South Africans without decisively crippling their apartheid rulers.)

And it gave her an extraordinary sense of personal mission, leavened by her humour and untainted by even a hint of arrogance. She would remind admirers that it was "black resistance" – and the Gorbachevian retreat from apartheid decided by Botha's successor, FW de Klerk – that had finally brought an end to apartheid. Her role, she would say, had been relentlessly to provide the "watchful eyes" and "attentive ears" that ensured that the oppressors could not operate in silence.

She tried to "shine a light" on their darkness. She did not topple apartheid. But without that light – as Mandela himself recognised in honouring her with the country's gold medal for freedom when he became president – the darkness might not have ended."