A Lone Voice Against Apartheid

South Africa’s Helen Suzman was known by many names: “a thorn in the flesh,” “a vicious little cat,” “cheeky little Jewish girl” and “Yiddishe Bantu expert.” L.J.C. Botha, a pro-apartheid member of Parliament (MP) in the 1960s, described her as a “cricket in a thorn tree” whose “chirping makes you deaf.”

From 1953 to 1989, as the MP from Houghton, a predominantly Jewish Johannesburg suburb, Suzman chided the majority Nationalist Party for its unjust and inhumane treatment of South Africa’s blacks. The longest serving member of Parliament in South Africa’s history, she served 13 of those years, from 1961 to 1974, as the only dissenting voice in South Africa’s all-white apartheid government. She was also the only Jew and the only woman to serve.

Every day she attacked the Nationalist Party’s poorly educated bullies who had “very high opinions of themselves that she couldn’t fathom,” says Glenn Frankel, the former Washington Post southern Africa bureau chief, who wrote a book about white South African opponents of apartheid. Suzman’s critics called her arguments irritating but saw them as ineffective since she could stop neither the passage of increasingly racist legislation nor the silencing of apartheid’s opponents. Nor could she prevent the incarceration of black opposition leaders, communists (many of whom were Jewish) and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The historical record, growing since her death on January 1 at age 91, shows that her “chirping” was in fact loudly heard. “Indomitable. A powerhouse,” said Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who worked closely with Suzman in the 1970s. At the Washington, DC opening in March of a traveling exhibit, “Fighter for Human Rights,” one of Suzman’s two daughters, Dr. Frances Suzman Jowell, explained that her mother’s position within the government enabled her to outwit censorship because anything said in Parliament could be published. As a result, her thousands of challenging speeches made their way into the world media. When a government minister accused her of embarrassing her country with her questions, she retorted, “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it’s your answers.”

As a legislator, Suzman also could see for herself what was happening. During regular visits to the all-black enclave of Soweto, she helped improve appalling living conditions and wring some redress from the government for specific injustices. Suzman’s meaningful trips, beginning in 1967, to Robben Island’s political prisoners went “way beyond her assigned role,” says Frankel. One of those prisoners was Nelson Mandela, who declared in his autobiography, “It was an odd and wonderful sight to see this courageous woman….She was the first and only woman to grace our cells.”

Born Helen Gavronsky, she was the second child of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. After dropping out of the University of the Witwatersrand in 1937, she married Moses Suzman, a prominent Johannesburg physician; she was 19, he was 33. Returning to school after her daughters were born, she became a university lecturer in 1945. When the Nationalist Party took over South Africa’s government three years later, Suzman joined the official opposition United Party. A quiet back bencher when elected in 1953 as one of 57 United Party members, she and 11 other MPs became disillusioned by their party’s ambiguity over the Nationalists’ expansion of racial discriminatory policies. After forming the Progressive Party, a dozen dissidents ran for re-election in 1961 under their new banner. Only Suzman won. Being the lone party member in Parliament turned out to be a boon. “She was freed of being part of a consensus of dominant males; she was a caucus of one,” explains Joseph Lelyveld, the former New York Times South African correspondent.

Her critics have argued that by being part of the apartheid government she was complicit with it, while others like Frankel have observed that she took great risks to be the “lone voice and gave no legitimacy to the system.” In the 1980s, she was further accused of abandoning her principles by opposing the popular worldwide movement to deploy economic sanctions against South Africa. Suzman argued that the disenfranchised, poor blacks would suffer most from sanctions.

Many credit Suzman’s courageous struggle for human rights to her Judaism, but as Suzman once said: “I never ever spoke officially as a Jew.” The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) formally supported the Nationalist government out of fear of anti-Semitism. “Jews in South Africa were usually liberal, but they were part of the economy,” says Frankel. “They would have liked to have seen reform, but there were very few activists.” In addition to communists, individual rabbis and academics did speak out, but Frankel notes, Suzman was “an exception in the mainstream Jewish community” as the only prominent liberal Jew in Parliament. Although the American Jewish Congress recognized her achievements in 1984, the SAJBD did not honor her until her 90th birthday in 2007.

Suzman remained politically active until her death, standing at Mandela’s side when he signed the new constitution in 1996, while criticizing post-apartheid policies that failed to improve education and health care. Although nominated for two Nobel prizes, Suzman was especially proud of being named “Enemy of the State” by Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe in 2001 because of her denunciation of then South African president Thabo Mbeki’s support for that dictatorial regime. Friend and foe alike now acknowledge Suzman’s courage, determination, humor and adherence to her favorite Theodore Roosevelt quote: “I did what I could, where I was, with what I had.”—Joan Alpert