Helen Suzman
Helen Suzman, OMSG, DBE 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, Jewish Lithuanian immigrants. 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 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 . Suzman then decided to leave lecturing behind to conquer the political atmosphere in South Africa.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 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, 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".
Abuse and Suzman's responses
Suzman was subject to antisemitic and misogynist abuse by Nationalist MPs in Parliament and out. Frequent comments were made to her in Parliament such as "We don't like your screeching Jewish voice" or "Go back to Israel!" One Nationalist MP, Piet Koornhof, said to her in Parliament: "If I should come home one evening and my wife should rant and rave the way the hon. member for Houghton did this afternoon, there would be only one of two things that one could do to her... I think she deserves a good hiding". In May 1965 P. W. Botha remarked: ‘The Honourable Member for Houghton... is in the habit of chattering continually. If my wife chattered like that Honourable Member, I would know what to do with her. There is nothing that works on my nerves more than a woman who continually interrupts me. She is like water dripping on a tin roof.’ In 1986, she had the following exchange with the then State President Botha: "Helen Suzman: Stupid! P. W. Botha: Woman!"When Prime Minister Verwoerd was assassinated in the Parliamentary chamber in 1966, P. W. Botha, then Minister of Defence, had accused Suzman of being responsible, saying: "It's you! You liberals did this! Now we'll get you!" She demanded, and eventually received a formal apology, but the enmity between the two remained. In the early 1980s, she had stayed to observe police dismantle shacks in a black settlement and take the occupants to jail. P. W. Botha warned in Parliament that her conduct was bordering on illegal and said "I am telling you that if you try to break the law you will see what happens". Suzman responded: "the prime minister has been trying to bully me for twenty-eight years and he has not succeeded yet. I am not frightened of you. I never have been and I never will be. I think nothing of you." On one occasion, P. W. Botha said "The Hon. Member for Houghton, it is well known, does not like me". Suzman interjected: ‘Like you? I can’t stand you!’
She was often harassed by the police and her phone was tapped by them. She listed her name in the phone book and often received phone calls with obscene, racist and threatening messages. She had a special technique for dealing with such calls, which was to blow a shrill whistle into the mouthpiece of the phone.
Marie van Zyl, of the Kappiekommando, wrote to Suzman protesting the latter's support for "heathens" and boasting that her own people, the Voortrekkers, had brought the Bible over the mountains to the interior to the blacks. She asked what Suzman's people had done. Suzman replied: “You say your people brought the Bible over the mountains and ask what mine did. They wrote it, my dear …”
In February 1974, LJC Botha, Nationalist MP for Rustenburg remarked: ‘When she gets up in this House, she reminds me of a cricket in a thorn tree when it is very dry in the bushveld. His chirping makes you deaf but the tune remains the same year in and year out. In her fight for the Bantu, the honourable member... sings the same tune for year after year.’
Helen, being uprooted from her Jewish ancestry was considered a secular jew, not formally representing herself in the political efforts at hand. On the contrary, she did place her motives for anti-apartheid on the prosecution of Jews. There was a time when the Jewish Board of Deputies adopted a policy to ignore all notions of anti-apartheid for the sake of keeping a certain demographic of people. Suzman was very unsatisfied with this decision and spoke up by saying "For me, for Jews to support the people who were in favor of race discrimination was the ultimate in treachery the values that Jews should . Throughout her entire career, Suzman used her outspoken voice and political power to say the things that people were too scared to say.
She famously advised John Vorster, Prime Minister from 1966 to 1978, to some day visit a township, "in heavy disguise as a human being". When a minister complained of the murder rate in his constituency, she advised him not to go there "or it will rise by one".