Helen Suzman’s legacy continues to shine a light on the political process
Feisty anti-apartheid campaigner’s tireless contribution offers lesson to this day and deserves to be celebrated
As the Progressive Party’s only MP between 1961 and 1974, Helen Suzman did more than anyone to oppose the legislative juggernaut of apartheid. She brought its horrors to international attention. Suzman would have turned 100 on Tuesday. Yet in a country obsessed with paying homage to its heroes and marking anniversaries, her centenary seems to be passing by largely unnoticed.
Much has been said and written in 2017 about Suzman’s co-centenarian, former ANC president Oliver Tambo. In contrast, the public commemoration of Suzman has been muted.
That is because the governing party’s nationalist narrative of history has triumphed. In fact, it has prevailed to such an extent that even the ANC’s political rivals feebly echo it or mimic it or try to lay claim to it for contemporary profit. This has inevitably led to the marginalisation of historical figures from outside the ANC tradition.
Suzman was a great South African. She was a liberal. The party she represented in Parliament was a progenitor of the DA, the official opposition. Her legacy deserves to be honoured and celebrated, for not only did she play a monumental role in opposing and exposing apartheid but her 36-year parliamentary career also offers valuable lessons to observers of the current political scene.
Suzman demonstrated great clarity of purpose. She pursued an alternative vision to apartheid — of a nonracial constitutional democracy — and over four decades, she did not veer off course.
She never pandered to racial nationalism or equivocated on policy or obfuscated contentious issues. She was decisive. She knew where she stood and what she stood for: simple justice, equal opportunity and human rights. As she often said: “If you don’t know what to do, go and look for the principle.”
She combined resoluteness and staying power (what Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, after his premature departure from Parliament in 1986, called her “built-in survival kit”) with razorsharp humour.
Suzman’s witticisms are legion and legendary. Arthur Barlow, the expelled United Party (UP) MP who she regarded as “an evil old liar”, would often interrupt Suzman’s speeches with the antiSemitic heckle: “It’s the lady from Lithuania.” She got her own back one day when Barlow made a speech complaining about the high murder rate in his constituency. If Barlow dared show his face to his constituents, Suzman told the House, the murder rate would go up by one.
Suzman armed herself with a sense of humour, because the environment in which she operated was a hostile one: to women, to Jews and to anyone who attacked the edifice of white supremacy. In the 1960s and ’70s, as a torrent of repressive legislation came before Parliament, she was the sole but powerful voice of dissent.
She fought for the abolition of pass laws and influx control. She campaigned tirelessly against forced removals. She shone a light on police torture in prisons. She battled against detention without trial. In 1964, when she introduced a private member’s bill to repeal all enactments that allowed such detention, not a single UP MP supported her.
Suzman used parliamentary mechanisms to unearth information that exposed the cruelty and irrationality of apartheid. In a typical session, she would submit more than 200 questions. During a memorable exchange, a furious minister shouted at her: “You put these questions just to embarrass SA overseas.” She responded acerbically: “It is not my questions that embarrass SA; it is your answers.”
Her speeches in the House attracted international attention and put pressure on the government to reform. Yet it was in the 1950s that Suzman’s political instincts were forged. Elected to Parliament for the first time in 1953 on the UP’s ticket, she found a party at sea, rudderless and adrift. The UP had made so many compromises on “native policy” over the previous decade that it lacked all sense of integrity and conviction.
Jan Smuts had died in 1950 and JGN Strauss was proving an ineffectual successor. He was the kind of political leader, Suzman wrote in her memoirs, who “chose to placate his enemies at the expense of his friends”.
On Strauss’s watch, the UP had supported the Separate Amenities Bill at its second reading (Suzman defied the whip and refused to vote for it) before eventually reversing its position.
Strauss opposed plans to remove coloured voters from the common roll, but he refused to give a cast-iron assurance that the UP would restore the coloured franchise should the Nats succeed in their plans. Strauss’s policy platform was a pale imitation of the National Party’s own: “white leadership with just recognition of nonEuropean aspirations”, a polysyllabic clunker that convinced or galvanised nobody.
Sir De Villiers Graaff, who replaced Strauss as leader in 1956, was a great disappointment to the liberals in the UP. Suzman would later recall that his favourite piece of advice to the caucus on controversial issues was “‘when in doubt, leave out’”. As historian Alex Mouton notes in his book on leaders of the parliamentary opposition before 1994, Graaff relied on public opinion surveys to determine what voters wanted. He would then appoint a succession of committees to develop policy. In this way, he foreshadowed the contemporary obsession with focus groups as a guide to policy formulation.
Graaff took a leaf out of Alexandre LedruRollin’s book. He was the 19th century French politician who said: “There go the people. We are their leaders and therefore we must follow them.” Indeed, Graaff wrote in his own memoirs that MPs were in large measure “mouthpieces of the people”. Their task was to “render articulate … the views of the ordinary citizen”.
Confronted with the UP’s ambivalence about racist laws, its policy prevarications and lacklustre leadership, Suzman considered not standing again in the 1958 election. But her sense of responsibility ensured that she did. The following year, she and 11 of her like-minded colleagues finally broke with the UP after its congress, at which the party reneged on earlier promises to transfer land to blacks. The result was the birth of the Progressive Party on November 13 1959.
Over the course of her long life, Suzman championed the causes of liberalism, constitutionalism and nonracialism within the context of a market-driven economy.
She did so by being clear, consistent and principled — and by refusing, to borrow the words of historian Hermann Gilliomee, to “bat on her opponents’ pitch”.
Hers is a legacy of which SA, and the DA in particular, can be proud.