We all knew that when Helen Suzman died (as she did last week, aged 91) she would be richly praised for her unforgettable role in South African politics. But what few of us could have expected was that the country's political leaders, almost without exception, would elevate her virtually to sainthood. The praise was unqualified, quite extraordinary. No ifs or buts - just plain Saint Helen.
It is easy to be cynical about this, about the pedigrees of some of the praise-singers; but there is something about what happened last week that seems to go deeper than even the tribute-payers could have conceived -that national feelings were stirred which still have to be identified. The phenomenon that has to be explained is why not just the "progressive" constituency, but practically every black political leader of note bowed his head: South African president (interim?) Kgalema Motlanthe, Mosiuoa Lekoto (leader of Cope), Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi (Inkatha), the Pan Africanist Congress, a queue of others. In a personal letter to Suzman's family, now deposed president Thabo Mbeki and his wife Zanele lauded Helen as "one of the leading midwives of the democracy we enjoy today" - the same Mbeki whose presidency Helen wrote off as "disastrous."
Motlanthe was a pall-bearer at the funeral (as was ex-apartheid president FW de Klerk), although when the Mandela-Mbeki presidency took over in 1994, the ANC could scarcely wait a decent internal of time before removing Helen's portrait from the National Assembly's walls and consigning it to the basement, from where the Democratic Alliance later salvaged it to position it in its caucus room. The ANC will recall, too, that in the 1980s it reviled Helen as a "sell out" for opposing international sanctions against the apartheid regime (she took the view that black trade unionism would be more effective).
Against this background, and surveying the fierce infighting between the ANC and Cope, some analysts have concluded that the ANC-Cope leaders did little more in their praise-singing than play yet another manipulative game. It is difficult for instance to fault the article written by Rapport's editor, Tim du Plessis (January 4), in which he said it had become overwhelmingly clear "that our political culture is not going to change. Mbeki's arrogance is simply replaced by Zuma's arrogance."
As for loyalty weighing more heavily than ability and integrity, this had never been unique to Mbeki. "We know it is in the ANC's DNA." Du Plessis warned his readers not to expect Jacob Zuma to be a transformer like Barack Obama: on the contrary, Zuma would stick to the status quo, as he has done over Zimbabwe, reenacting just what Mbeki did - "placate and protect" Robert Mugabe.
Here lies the puzzle. Du Plessis's analysis of current ANC politics is correct. On the other hand, what electoral mileage is there in it for a black leader to trawl the approaching general elections' catchment areas telling his followers that their role model should be a progressive white woman? None.