I always admired you, Mrs Suzman

In 1989, when I was in Standard Seven, our Afrikaans teacher had us write a short essay on somebody we admired. I chose Helen Suzman. For me, she represented courage, tenacity and the rejection of apartheid – and she was a woman.

“Good choice,” said my teacher, a young verligte who taught us to appreciate Eugene Marais and DJ Opperman, and also told us the fallacious anti-abortion story about Beethoven.

I had discovered Helen Suzman relatively recently. Gradually it emerged that my grandparents had known her for decades through Max Borkum. Eventually I would meet her several times as a student and once had dinner at her house. I remember that Alistair Sparks and his late wife were also there, along with a recently acquired lilac Burmese kitten she named Suu Kyi, after the human rights activist. (She was over 80 at the time, so the acquisition of a kitten suggested that she did not intend to depart this mortal coil any time soon.)

She attended my wedding, a great honour for us (we still use her gift, a rather zhouzh Diana Carmichael spaghetti spoon — beautiful, and practical).

In person, she was sharp, but also surprisingly warm. Surprising, I say, because anybody who could face down all those ghastly grey-shoed Nats for all those years had to be made of steel. PW Botha described her as a “vicious little cat”. In turn, she described him as an “irascible bully”; there was no love lost there.

Though she was subsequently criticised for working within the system, she achieved a great deal more than if she had chosen to attack it from outside. Thanks to her parliamentary privileges, she was able to improve conditions for political prisoners and raise awareness of how rotten the apartheid system actually was.

She was never sentimental. I remember reading – in an interview in You/Huisgenoot of all places – how she almost tripped over her chocolate Labrador during the interview and drily added that she would break her neck … God willing. And she did have a great sense of humour. She furnished one of the great comebacks in my first book of South African insults. Asked what she thought of the Kappie Komando, she said, “Oh well, they really belong in the days of witch burning.”

The ladies of the Kappie Komando were indignant. Their leader wrote to Mrs Suzman to complain. The main thrust of her argument involved the fact that her ancestors had conquered mountains in order to take the Bible to the savages on the other side.

And what were your ancestors doing at that time, Mrs Suzman?
Die uwe Marie Van Zyl

So Helen Suzman wrote back:

Dear Mrs Van Zyl,
My ancestors were busy writing the Bible.
Yours faithfully,
Helen Suzman.

I read about her just last week in my local newspaper; it seems that she rejected plans to rename Houghton Drive after her. I could just imagine her dismissing the idea as utter nonsense. She was a very sensible, practical woman. Even when her portrait was unceremoniously taken down in Parliament, along with those of her former adversaries, she was philosophical about it all.

Until recently, I used to comment on how amazing she was for her age, still independent – until late in her 80s she drove herself around in an old Boxy 3-series – and still very sharp. I can imagine how frustrated she must have been by her loss of independence and, from what her daughter Frances Jowell told TV news, she had been ready to move on for a while now.

In the end, she died peacefully in her sleep. I was saddened to hear the news; if anybody could make it to a hundred, it would be her, I reckoned. Her body might have failed her, but her mind never did. She led the kind of life to which any of us might aspire and, in so doing, make the world a better place for our having been in it. Hamba kahle Mrs Suzman.