"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

• 
  
• 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."

"who befriended the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and offered an often lonely voice for change among South Africa’s white minority"

The passing of a great woman. From the NY Times:

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Alexander Joe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Helen Suzman in Johannesburg in November 2007.

"Helen Suzman, Anti-Apartheid Champion, Dies at 91

By CELIA W. DUGGER and ALAN COWELL

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."