Rhoda Kadalie
5 January 2009
opinion
Johannesburg — IT IS an honour to pay tribute to Helen Suzman, the iconic liberal parliamentarian, who died on January 1. For many of us who knew her intimately, it was not a happy New Year's Day.
Her family has lost a dear mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother; her staff have lost a wonderful and caring employer and friend; her bridge partners will feel her loss keenly; her absence will leave a gaping hole in the life of her many friends; and I lost a dear buddy, who rated my columns regularly as either "one of your best" or "not one of your best!".
At 91, Helen was the youngest friend I had. She was modern, au fait with world events, intelligent and extremely funny. A month ago she called to congratulate me on some or other column. "How can you read when you have just had cataract surgery?" I asked. "You forget," she responded, "I have two daughters with doctorates who can read!" Last week, she called me excitedly to tell me that she had received a Christmas card from Thabo and Zanele Mbeki. She was especially pleased and felt particularly special when Nelson Mandela and Graca Machel popped in to make their surprise visits.
Her contribution to the struggle for democracy and the consequent demise of apartheid was more significant than many people today realise. A lone voice in a formidable, patriarchal Parliament, she used her extensive political rigour and ready wit to expose the iniquities of apartheid to the world. For this she became world renowned, twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, receiving numerous honorary doctorates, and the DBE from the Queen of England in 1989.
That Helen and I became close friends is rather strange, given that she entered Parliament in 1953, the year I was born. She was to become an ardent fighter against the laws that directly affected my life -- the Group Areas Act, the Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act. She abhorred the Population Registration Act of 1950 that determined the status of everyone in SA, where they went to school, where they worked, whom they could marry and sleep with, which public amenities they could use, and where they could or could not own property.
On issues of justice, no prime minister, no minister, no government official escaped her barbs. Those who took her on did so at their peril. She deflected their abuse and insults with a sardonic wit that made headlines the world over. Having served under five formidable prime ministers -- DF Malan, JG Strydom, HF Verwoerd, BJ Vorster and PW Botha -- from 1953 to 1989, Helen showed tremendous courage in single-handedly taking on the plight of the oppressed. Her battles for a just society were never done sanctimoniously. She gave as good as she got. Often, as the only woman in Parliament, she took on men who probably had the most daunting visages of any politicians in the world. "It is not my questions that are an embarrassment, it is your answers," was one of her world-famous retaliatory comments when a minister blamed her for the world's negative perception of SA.
Helen was a politician of a special type. She was elected as a member of the United Party in 1953, which she left soon afterwards with colleagues to form the Progressive Party, later known as the Progressive Federal Party. Armed with devastatingly accurate information gleaned from her insistence "on seeing things for herself", she became a "boots-on politician", going where the action was. In 1973, she went to Kliptown to see the unrest for herself; she visited the squatter camps in Cape Town in the winter of 1981, after shelters had been demolished by government officials; she addressed crowds at a mass funeral of victims of police shootings in Alexandra in 1986; took statements from Moutse residents who had been assaulted by vigilantes; visited Oukasie residents threatened by forced removals; and she pleaded the fate of the Sharpeville Six in 1988.
Helen's legacy of tackling issues in an informed manner became the hallmark of liberal opposition politics in SA. Already in 1969, she spoke of apartheid as structural violence that disrupted black lives in a most personal way, commenting that "in its broadest sense, violence can also mean the unfettered use of power by the state against a citizen, so as to deprive him of his normal civil rights. In this sense we have a great deal of violence in SA. Mass removals of African people from their homes is a violence ... the thousands upon thousands of Africans in resettlement areas, leading hopeless and helpless lives of poverty and unemployment, is a violence; the very way in which those removals have taken place is a violence -- these people were removed without any proper planning having been done for housing, health, education, medical services. The destruction of the coloured community ... in District Six is a violence. The uprooting of Indians from cities and dorps ... is a violence. The pass laws are a violence...."
In 1989, she invited me to dinner with a group of illustrious national and international guests. Helen was in full command of the evening, engaging with great insight with world and national politics, and keeping us spellbound with her wit, charm and wicked sense of humour. Often self-effacing, her daughter Frances and I could not convince her to update her biography. "I have done what I had to do and have lived a good life. I need no more." Just a month ago, when it was mooted that Houghton Drive be renamed Helen Suzman Drive, she resolutely refused, saying: "I just think that it's an unnecessary expense and I have been given enough recognition."
That is the Helen I knew , involved in politics not for the glory or reward, but for the love of democracy itself and a belief in equality of opportunity for all. And that is why she entered politics in 1948, incensed by the inhumane effects migrant labour and the influx control laws had on the mobility of black people and the destruction of family life. When she made submissions to the Fagan commission in 1947, hoping to influence the Smuts government to reverse a battery of laws that reduced black men, women and their families to mere chattels, she was clearly driven to speak up for the oppressed. It accounted for her indefatigable opposition to the apartheid laws and catapulted her into a role that set her apart from her fellow parliamentarians as the "only bright star in a dark chamber", to quote Albert Luthuli.
She fought those pernicious laws to the end of her career in 1989 with the ferocity of a tiger, holding up a mirror to a world that might have remained ignorant because of prevailing media censorship. Only she could do so authentically because parliamentary privilege enabled her to go places denied to ordinary citizens. She was able to raise issues in Parliament that were then disseminated by parliamentary correspondents throughout the world. It is for this reason that Helen constantly lamented the closing down of real debate in Parliament since 1994, citing how the speaker, ironically in the apartheid Parliament, protected her right to speak on any topic.
Her parliamentary privilege also enabled her to monitor prison conditions and visit Mandela on Robben Island, organising a pair of spectacles when she noticed how the quarry affected his eyesight. Among others, she interceded for Bram Fischer, responded to the needs of Terror Lekota, and helped Winnie Mandela in more ways than one. No wonder Breyten Breytenbach said of her: "The prisoners, both political and common-law, consider her as Our Lady of the Prisoners. She is indeed a living myth among the people inhabiting the world of shadows."
It is for this reason that, at any given moment, Helen's house would be filled with the great and the good from all corners of the world. Scores of television and radio crew still sought her opinion until very recently, and came to interview her about some or other political event. Until her death, she ran an impeccable household, and visiting her would be a five-star experience, with breakfast in bed and orders taken the night before. Nothing infuriated her more than being called an icon, and her appeal was due not only to her great political acumen, but also to her ability to make fun of herself, captured in a picture in her memoir of her receiving the DBE from Queen Elizabeth in 1989 , captioned "Great occasion, terrible hat!"
She was born Helen Gavronsky in 1917 and her mother died soon after her birth. Her father then married a woman Helen liked and appreciated, and she grew up in a very loving and privileged home. Having gone to a Catholic convent, she attributed her work ethic to Sister Columba, who instilled in her a rigour that was to guide her throughout her entire life. Helen married Mosie Suzman, an eminent physician of whom she always spoke with great admiration, and had two daughters, Patricia, a doctor in Boston, and Frances, an art historian in the UK.
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