A Flickering Flame of White Conscience

Simon Jenkins writes:

We can all be brave in a crowd. The truly brave are brave alone.

Next month we celebrate the 20th anniversary in 1994 of the first free election in South Africa, one of the few times in history that a minority has voluntarily handed power to a majority in conditions of relative peace.

The two "saints" of the occasion, Nelson Mandela and the outgoing president, FW de Klerk, will have their tributes.

So should a third – Helen Suzman, who died in 2009, and whose biography by Robin Renwick appears this week.

She had no Nobel prize, no memorial. She is ignored by Mandela biopics. As she predicted, political correctness would "airbrush white liberals from anti-apartheid history".

For an astonishing 36 years Suzman was a flickering flame of white conscience in apartheid South Africa.

For 13 of those years she carried that light alone, a one-woman party in a parliamentary sanctum of hostile men. While some came to admire her, most loathed her, and tried to drive her from their presence.

They jeered her interventions with sexist, antisemitic, domineering abuse. The anti-apartheid activist Helen Joseph wrote that "even house arrest" must have been less lonely.#

Suzman's resistance must be among the most courageous parliamentary careers ever.

Covering South Africa at the time, I was fascinated by what made Suzman tick.

From comfortable Jewish stock, married to a doctor and with no need to worry herself with politics, in 1953 she became MP for Johannesburg's "silk stocking" Houghton district.

She could have settled into the English-speaking United party, in fake opposition to the apartheid nationalists. Later, even as a solitary Progressive, she could have "done a Sinn Féin", and boycotted the system as a gesture.

She did none of this.

Britain's oddest legacy to white South Africa was a robust if minority parliament. In 1960 Suzman remarked that it was, ironically, "the last forum of free speech in the country".

If the Nationalists pretended to respect that freedom, she would test it to destruction.

She exploited an MP's right to ask questions, table amendments, demand votes, say what she pleased and go where she wanted.

She read out Mandela's entire defence speech in parliament so it could be reported. She visited townships, argued with police chiefs, dared them to silence her. She stuffed obscene letters in a file marked "Fan Mail".

Suzman's use of her right of access was, Mandela said later, crucial in securing prisoners books and education and links to the outside world.

She befriended prisoners' wives, including Winnie Mandela, and never turned a supplicant from her house.

Mandela said prison conditions always improved in advance of a Suzman visit. He adored her and paid her the greatest compliment, that such was her tenacity he almost sympathised with the regime.

The most lethal weapons in the political tool kit are anger and humour. Suzman deployed both.

She was perpetually furious.

On my visits she would thrust at me some document of appalling injustice and ask how I could just stand there without getting down to write.

When a minister complained that her questions were embarrassing South Africa abroad, she said it was his answers not her questions that were embarrassing.

When another said she should be more careful in her friends, she shouted: "No, only in my enemies."

Suzman undoubtedly benefited from being a woman. Her femininity nonplussed Afrikaner backwoodsmen, whom she nagged and infuriated.

One said: "If you were my wife, I know what I would do with you." She guffawed. Her gallows humour was anything but ladylike.

After a day of hearing Afrikaners tell anti-black jokes, I was shocked to hear her telling dreadful anti-Afrikaner ones.

She famously told John Vorster, the prime minister, to his face that he should some day visit a township, "in heavy disguise as a human being".

When a minister complained of the murder rate in his constituency, she advised him not to go there "or it will rise by one".

Dissident whites living under apartheid appeased their consciences by voting for (and financing) Suzman's party – opening them to accusations of appeasement.

She opposed sanctions (other than on sport), seeing no point in impoverishing black workers simply to make western liberals feel good. Western disinvestment merely shifted economic power from foreign firms to less liberal Afrikaner ones.

Suzman held that effective opposition to apartheid was internal, from black activists, unions, and the undermining of Afrikaner self-confidence – in which she played her part.

I witnessed Suzman in London tearing into Mandela for supporting sanctions, which black leaders such as Desmond Tutu at first opposed. Evidently embarrassed, he muttered about Americans wanting them.

Suzman never compromised and would have been dreadful in office. To the end she prayed, "Let no one say I mellowed."

I followed her on the 1994 election day, when she was inspecting polling stations in Soweto. I thought it would be an elegiac victory tour through the dusty streets of a lifetime's struggle. No way.

Suzman was in a perpetual rage at the queues and official incompetence.

"Don't worry, Mrs Suzman," people said. "We have waited 46 years. We can wait four hours.We are happy." She replied: "Nonsense. Find me the returning officer."

No one could singlehandedly end apartheid, but millions buried their heads and awaited the judgment of history. They refused an orange and called it action.

Suzman's legacy to liberalism was to abandon the armchair, to exploit the vulnerabilities of even the cruellest regime.

Challenge its petty powers, exploit its tiniest freedoms, endure its pains, nudge it however painfully towards the gate of freedom.

She of all people deserves her memorial.