Helen Suzman

Helen Suzman (née Gavronsky; 7 November 1917 – 1 January 2009) was a South African anti-apartheid activist and politician. She represented a series of liberal and centre-left opposition parties during her 36-year tenure in the whites-only, National Party-controlled House of Assembly of South Africa at the height of apartheid.

She hosted the meeting that founded the Progressive Party in 1959, and was its only MP in the 160-member House for thirteen years. She was the only member of the South African Parliament to consistently and unequivocally oppose all apartheid legislation.

Suzman was instrumental in improving prison conditions for members of the banned African National Congress including Nelson Mandela, despite her reservations about Mandela's revolutionary policies, and was also known for using her parliamentary privilege to evade government censorship and pass information to the media about the worst abuses of apartheid. She was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Early life and education

Suzman was born Helen Gavronsky in 1917 to Frieda and Samuel Gavronsky, both were Lithuanian-Jewish émigrés. She was born in Germiston, then a small mining town outside Johannesburg. Her mother died shortly after she was born.

Suzman matriculated in 1933 from Parktown Convent, Johannesburg. She studied for a bachelor's degree in commerce at Witwatersrand University. At age 19, she married Dr. Moses Suzman (who died in 1994), who was 33, and an eminent physician; the couple had two daughters, one of whom became a physician. Helen Suzman returned to university in 1941 to complete a degree in economics and economic history. After completing her degree she spent the rest of the war working for the Governor-General's War Fund and as a statistician at the War Supply board. In 1945, she became a tutor and later lecturer in economic history at Witwatersrand University.

Career

Career before Parliament

After Suzman completed all levels of her college career, she was prompted to help her country by becoming a member of the war supplies board. Her position consisted of carefully calculating the statistical reality of various supplies, equipment quantities, and shortages of manufactured goods. Ultimately, Suzman pursued this career for a short period from 1941 to 1942. Later, in 1944, she followed in the footsteps of her husband by becoming a professor at the University of Witwatersrand, teaching economics [1]. Suzman then decided to leave lecturing behind to conquer the political atmosphere in South Africa.[2]

As a member of the South African Institute of Race Relations, she was involved in preparing evidence for the Fagan Commission's inquiry into laws applying to Africans in urban areas and into the system of migrant labour. She attributed this experience to her first real awareness of the hardship and difficulties experienced by Africans seeking work in urban areas.

Parliamentary career

Suzman has been described in The Guardian as having had "among the most courageous Parliamentary careers ever".

She was elected to the House of Assembly in 1953 as a member of the United Party for the Houghton constituency in Johannesburg.

The United Party caucus supported the second reading of the 1953 Separate Amenities Bill that provided for separate (and effectively unequal) facilities for Blacks, Coloureds, Indians and Whites. When the vote was taken, Helen Suzman and one other UP member refused to vote and walked out of the House.

Dissatisfied with the supine stance of the United Party to the apartheid policies of the Government, Suzman and eleven other liberal members of the United Party broke away to form the Progressive Party in 1959. The party rejected race discrimination and advocated equal opportunities for all with a qualified franchise with a common voter's roll.

In the 1961 South African general election, all the other Progressive MPs lost their seats, while Suzman retained hers by a margin of just 564 votes. This left Suzman as the sole parliamentarian unequivocally opposed to apartheid for 13 years from 1961 to 1974.

The solo years: 1961–1974

After the 1961 election, Prime Minister Hendrik F. Verwoerd announced in Parliament that he had never believed the Progressive Party would be a threat and, turning towards Suzman, said "I have written you off". Suzman replied "And the whole world has written you off".

As the sole representative of her party in Parliament, she sought to do the work of an entire opposition party by herself. In her first session she made 66 speeches, moved 26 amendments and put 137 questions. Most of her questions concerned treatment of Black, Coloured and Indian people – on issues such as housing, education, forced removals, Pass Law offences, detentions, bannings, whippings, police brutality and execution.

Mandela later wrote: "She was undoubtedly the only real anti-apartheid voice in parliament and the discourtesy of the Nat MPs towards her showed how they felt her punches and how deeply they resented her presence."

For two more general elections (1966 and 1970), she was again the sole member returned for her party to Parliament. As a result, for 13 years, she dined alone in Parliament with no other MP to discuss tactics or approach. Often, as apartheid legislation was introduced, she would call a division of the house, a process whereby the members of the Parliament had physically to stand up and be counted. On many such occasions, as when opposing the infamous 90-day detention law, she found herself alone at one side of the Parliamentary chamber and all other MPs at the other side.

An eloquent public speaker with a sharp and witty manner, Suzman was noted for her strong public criticism of the governing National Party's policies of apartheid at a time when this was atypical of white South Africans. She found herself even more of an outsider because she was an English-speaking Jewish woman in a parliament dominated by Calvinist Afrikaner men. In her 13 years as the sole member of her party in the South African Parliament, Suzman made 885 speeches on almost every conceivable subject and posed 2,262 questions. In a period in which there were numerous laws passed imposing censorship on the press, parliamentary privilege ensured that her exchanges in Parliament could be published. She was once accused by a minister of asking questions in parliament that embarrassed South Africa, to which she replied: "It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers."

On one occasion, Prime Minister Verwoerd announced in Parliament to her: 'You are of no account. Your days in Parliament are numbered.' Suzman replied: 'Why? Are you going to put me under house arrest or put me on Robben Island?'

Early in her career, a white woman said at a caucus meeting, "Well, I don't know about Mrs Suzman, but when I go to a museum, I don't like it if some strange black man rubs himself up against me". Suzman retorted: "Don't you mind it if some strange white man rubs himself up against you?" Later in her career, she mused in Parliament: "I do not know why we equate—and with such examples before us—a white skin with civilisation".