TRIBUTE TO THE LATE MRS HELEN SUZMAN BY PRINCE MANGOSUTHU
BUTHELEZI MP
It was with great sadness that I heard that my dear friend Helen Suzman passed away earlier today.
The many tributes to Helen will record that she was one of the many people who were madly pulling at the ropes of apartheid inside and outside of South Africa. Like so many others, she has not been given the recognition she deserves. I hope that in the hour of her passing this will begin to be rectified. She is, without doubt, one of the unsung heroines of the struggle.
Mrs Suzman tirelessly used her position to break the apartheid mould in a profoundly undemocratic whites-only parliament. She demonstrated raw courage in curbing some of the worst excesses of the apartheid government with her forensic parliamentary skills and relentless badgering of National Party politicians to, occasionally, do the right thing.
She also gave me unstinting encouragement when dallying with black politicians was not the smartest thing to do. On one occasion in the 1960's, after attending a Progressive Federal Party seminar, my brother-in-law, Dr Dotwana and I were stopped in our car at a roadblock in Germiston. One of the policemen spotted a leaflet on the backseat of the car containing pictures of Helen Suzman and Dr Verwoerd with a scathing attack on the Prime Minister. I was arrested and driven to the office of the Security Police in Germiston. In the meantime someone had been in contact with Mrs Suzman who promptly called the police, demanding that I be released immediately, which I was. In 1976, Helen pleaded with me not to go Soweto during the riots because she feared for my safety.
My wife and I will always be grateful for the hospitality that Helen and her late husband Mosie gave to us at a time when it was virtually unheard of for Africans to stay in the homes of white people.
We sometimes differed, as friends of course do, but we never stopped talking and we always gave each other a big hug when we see each other.
We have never differed on the fundamentals.
Opposing revolutionary change and violence, we recognised the complexity of the situation in South Africa. Blacks here, we both noted, were not a homogenous group and this would require constitutional allowances in any future, preferably federalist, political framework for the country. What we ended up with was rather less than what we had hoped for.
We both rejected rapid and imposed solutions that would likely result in anarchy and hardship for the people that this approach was supposed to help. This was the preferred route in the radical Left's opinion. For this reason, we both dismissed sanctions as a mere gesture that would not make any strategic sense.
Helen played a straight bat and played it for all it was worth. She always said what she meant, and meant what she said.
She was blessed with a wonderfully dry sense of humour. In the midst of apartheid's despair and injustice (much of which still persists), she saw the funny side of life. One of the reasons that people like Mrs Suzman fought such a valiant fight was so that we could also do that most human of things: laugh.
When God made Helen, He, to use a well-worn metaphor, broke the mould.
We will miss her terribly.
Issued by the Inkatha Freedom Party, January 1 2009
