Helen Suzman in Johannesburg in November 2007.
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Helen Suzman, the internationally prominent anti-apartheid campaigner who befriended the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and offered an often lonely voice for change among South Africa’s white minority, has died, South Africa’s SAPA news agency reported on Thursday. She was 91.
Ms. Suzman was for many years among the most venerated of white campaigners urging an end to the injustices of racial rule. But, while she challenged apartheid, her views on the creation of a new society fell well short of demands advanced by more radical black campaigners for such measures as economic sanctions to pressure the country’s white rulers toward reform.
A diminutive, spry and elegant politician, Ms. Suzman became her country’s longest-serving legislator, pressing for changes from the benches of the whites-only Parliament for 36 years before she retired from the assembly in 1989 and later created a pro-democracy foundation named after her.
For 13 years of her parliamentary career, she was the sole representative in the segregated Parliament of the Progressive Party, the only party to reject racial discrimination.
In the country’s first fully democratic elections in 1994, she acted as an election commissioner. The ballot spelled the formal demise of apartheid and brought Mr. Mandela to power as the country’s first black president.
South Africa’s SAPA news agency quoted her daughter, Frances Jowell, as saying she died peacefully in her Johannesburg home. The date and cause of her death were not immediately known.
Virtually to the end of her life, she remained a critic of what she viewed as official wrongdoing. Only this month, she joined a growing list of well-known South Africans asking for a new inquiry into dubious government arms contracts in the 1990s.
Ms. Suzman “seems never to have been content to fight her battle against apartheid only in Parliament,” Vincent Crapanzano, an author, wrote in a review of her memoir, “In No Uncertain Terms,” published in New York in 1993.
“She took advantage of her status as an M.P. to gain access to prisons, resettlement areas, black townships and homelands barred to ordinary white South Africans. She visited Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe and countless other political prisoners, and was able to argue with some success for prison reform. She did this by describing in Parliament what she observed, enabling the liberal press to publish what would otherwise have been censored, for what was said in Parliament was not subject to censorship,” Mr. Crapanzano wrote.
Ms. Suzman was born Helen Gavronsky on Nov. 17, 1917, in Germiston, a gold-mining town outside Johannesburg, a descendant of Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to South Africa. Educated in a Roman Catholic school in Johannesburg, she married Mosis Suzman, a doctor, in 1937.
For many years, Ms. Suzman lived a life a privilege common to white South Africans used to servants and big homes. Indeed, in 1994, she signed a reader’s letter to The New York Times defending the way many whites treated their domestic staff.
“Most employers in South Africa treat their live-in domestics with consideration. Weekly half-days and alternate Sundays are accepted minimum “off-times,” and so are paid annual holidays,” she wrote. “Many employers assist their domestics to educate their children, especially as there are a great number of one-parent families. Many domestics are regarded as members of the families for whom they have worked for years.”
She traced her opposition to apartheid to her university years when she studied racial laws that incensed her, particularly the so-called “pass laws” defining where and how black people in South Africa could live.
Ms. Suzman first visited Mr. Mandela in the Robben Island prison, just off Cape Town, in 1967, where he was serving a life sentence imposed in 1964.
Remembering her first visit with him in B-Section of the prison, Reuters reported, Mr. Mandela once said: “It was an odd and wonderful sight to see this courageous woman peering into our cells and strolling around our courtyard. She was the first and only woman ever to grace our cells.”
The Nelson Mandela Foundation on Thursday that said South Africa had lost a “great patriot and a fearless fighter against apartheid.”
She ran for Parliament in the up-market and whites-only Houghton district of Johannesburg and remained a legislator from 1953 to 1989. First elected to represent the United Party, she was a founder of the liberal Progressive Party, which favored a more inclusive franchise, and was its sole parliamentary representative from 1961 to 1974.
According to Mr. Crapanzano’s review, she was heckled and verbally abused in Parliament as “the lady from Lithuania,” a “sickly humanist” and a “dangerous subversive.”
Her nemesis was P.W. Botha, South Africa’s penultimate white president, who accused her of supporting “people who want to bring this country to its knees,” Reuters reported. She once said that if Mr. Botha had been “female he would arrive in Parliament on a broomstick.”
The outside world saw her in a different light than many of her fellow white lawmakers and she was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize."
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