Helen Suzman Dies; Anti-Apartheid Leader

[TotallyOz]

Helen Suzman, the internationally known anti-apartheid campaigner who befriended the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and offered an often lonely voice for change among South Africa’s white minority, has died, South Africa’s SAPA news agency reported Thursday. She was 91.

Her daughter, Frances Jowell, said she died peacefully in her Johannesburg home, SAPA reported. The date and cause of her death were not immediately known.

Mrs. Suzman was for many years among the most venerated of white campaigners urging an end to the injustices of racial rule. But, while she challenged apartheid at a time of violent protests among the black majority, she advocated peaceful change and differed sharply with more radical campaigners inside and outside South Africa supportive of economic sanctions to pressure the country’s white rulers toward reform.

“I understand the moral abhorrence, and pleasure it gives you when you demonstrate,” she told a New York audience in 1986. “But I don’t see how wrecking the economy of the country will insure a more stable and just society.”

A diminutive, spry and elegant politician, Mrs. Suzman became her country’s longest-serving legislator, pressing for changes from the benches of the whites-only Parliament for 36 years before she retired from the assembly in 1989. For 13 of those years, she was the sole parliamentary representative of the Progressive Party, the only party to reject racial discrimination. After stepping down, she created a pro-democracy foundation.

In the country’s first fully democratic elections in 1994, she acted as an election commissioner. The ballot spelled the formal demise of apartheid and brought Mr. Mandela to power as the country’s first black president.

The ruling African National Congress paid tribute to Mrs. Suzman saying she “became a thorn in the flesh of apartheid by openly criticizing segregation of Blacks by a Whites-only apartheid system.”

Virtually to the end of her life, she remained a critic of what she viewed as official wrongdoing. Only this month, she joined a growing list of well-known South Africans asking for a new inquiry into dubious government arms contracts in the 1990s.

Mrs. Suzman “seems never to have been content to fight her battle against apartheid only in Parliament,” Vincent Crapanzano, an author, wrote in a review of her memoir, “In No Uncertain Terms,” published in New York in 1993.

“She took advantage of her status as an M.P. to gain access to prisons, resettlement areas, black townships and homelands barred to ordinary white South Africans,” Mr. Crapanzano wrote. “She visited Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe and countless other political prisoners, and was able to argue with some success for prison reform. She did this by describing in Parliament what she observed, enabling the liberal press to publish what would otherwise have been censored, for what was said in Parliament was not subject to censorship.”

Mrs. Suzman was born Helen Gavronsky on Nov. 17, 1917, in Germiston, a gold-mining town outside Johannesburg, a descendant of Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to South Africa. Educated in a Roman Catholic school in Johannesburg, she married Mosis Suzman, a doctor, in 1937.

For many years, Mrs. Suzman lived a life of privilege common to wealthier white South Africans used to servants and big homes. Indeed, in 1994, she signed a reader’s letter to The New York Times defending the way many whites treated their domestic staff.

“Most employers in South Africa treat their live-in domestics with consideration,” she wrote. “Weekly half-days and alternate Sundays are accepted minimum ‘off-times,’ and so are paid annual holidays. Many employers assist their domestics to educate their children, especially as there are a great number of one-parent families. Many domestics are regarded as members of the families for whom they have worked for years.”

She traced her opposition to apartheid to her university years when she studied racial laws that incensed her, particularly the so-called “pass laws” defining where and how black people in South Africa could live. Even in a favored vacation resort — Plettenberg Bay on South Africa’s southern coast — she campaigned to improve the status of non-white residents living in a nearby segregated township.

Mrs. Suzman first visited Mr. Mandela in the Robben Island prison, just off Cape Town, in 1967, where he was serving a life sentence imposed in 1964.

Reuters reported that Mr. Mandela, remembering her first visit with him in B-Section of the prison, once said: “It was an odd and wonderful sight to see this courageous woman peering into our cells and strolling around our courtyard. She was the first and only woman ever to grace our cells.”

The Nelson Mandela Foundation on Thursday that said South Africa had lost a “great patriot and a fearless fighter against apartheid.”

She ran for Parliament in the up-market and whites-only Houghton district of Johannesburg and remained a legislator from 1953 to 1989. First elected to represent the United Party, she was a founder of the liberal Progressive Party, which favored a more inclusive franchise, and was its sole parliamentary representative from 1961 to 1974.

According to Mr. Crapanzano, she was heckled and verbally abused in Parliament for her gender, liberal politics and religious roots, labeled “the lady from Lithuania,” a “sickly humanist” and a “dangerous subversive.”

Her nemesis was P. W. Botha, South Africa’s penultimate white president, who accused her of supporting “people who want to bring this country to its knees,” Reuters reported. She once said that if Mr. Botha had been “female he would arrive in Parliament on a broomstick.”

The outside world saw her in a different light than many of her fellow white lawmakers and she was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Celia W. Dugger reported from Cape Town, South Africa, and Alan Cowell from London.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/world/af...uzman.html?_r=1