Helen Suzman:HELEN SUZMAN, who has died aged 91, single- handedly carried the anti-racism banner in South Africa's apartheid parliament, her star the brightest in the liberal firmament.
She was elected in 1953 and her solitary crusade lasted 13 years from 1961 to 1974. After that, the electoral tide took a sudden, fortunate turn, and she was joined by seven Progressive Federal Party colleagues. She continued as an MP until 1989, standing down amid worldwide accolades.
That was the year in which President FW de Klerk lifted the ban on liberation movements and opened the prison gates to release, among others, Nelson Mandela. After that, the black liberation movement brought other heroes on to the stage - and, in the process, displaced the liberals. That is why Suzman's "magnificent battle against apartheid", as Mandela described it, belonged to an earlier era.
Born Helen Gavronsky in the Witwatersrand town of Germiston, of Lithuanian immigrant parents, she was sent to Parktown convent school where, she says, she was taught by rote by the nuns, which endowed her with a very good memory. The nuns also taught their pupils to be bad losers, which Suzman thought was excellent training for politics.
She matriculated when she was 16, started and abandoned a bachelor of commerce course at Witwatersrand University and married a doctor, Mosie Suzman, when she was 19 and he was 33.
She returned to Wits to complete her degree, then became a statistician at the War Supplies Board until 1944. In 1945 she was appointed a tutor and then lecturer in economic history at Wits, a post she held until she became an MP in 1953.
Suzman became a United Party (UP) MP (Jan Smuts's old party) five years after the National Party had been voted into office in 1948.
Six years after her election, in 1959, she and 10 of her colleagues, disgusted by the UP's refusal to vote for more land grants to blacks, resigned and formed the Progressive Party, later to become the Progressive Federal Party.
In the 1961 general election - the year in which South Africa become a republic - the Progressives were almost wiped out, except for Suzman, who won her seat in the Johannesburg suburb of Houghton. This marked the beginning of her 13 lonely years as a liberal MP (for six years of them the only woman among 165 male MPs).
During these years she built her reputation. She possessed four qualities in particular. Firstly, she was fearless, confronted though she was by some of the most menacing politicians of any parliament.
Secondly, she seemed to have more energy than anyone else. She often attributed her physical health to the fact that she never drank wine, only whisky.
Thirdly, Suzman had an unfailing sense of humour, sometimes lovely and light, at other times cutting and caustic.
Fourthly, she pursued with tenacity the principle that should be inscribed on her tombstone: "Let right be done."
She seemed to regard the ministers with whom she fought as denizens of some primeval forest. She described how government MPs used to refer to the Kenyan insurgency movement by bleating "Mau Mau" when she stood up, or shout "go back to Moscow/Ghana/Israel"! In her autobiography, In No Uncertain Terms, she notes: "I came from none of them."
Her reputation was built, not on lofty thoughts and resounding speeches, but on hard work.
Perhaps the most rewarding visit Suzman ever made outside parliament was to Robben Island to see Mandela and the other prisoners - rewarding because it signalled to the prisoners that they were not forgotten.
Everyone knew the name Helen Suzman, with one exception. She used to tell the tale that after returning from a trip to Australia in 1974 (when she was at the height of her fame), she stopped for a few days in Mauritius, where she had a "really torrid time" at the university, with screaming students yelling "racist go home"!
At breakfast one morning, she was directed to a table occupied by white South Africans. As she sat down, there was a hush, and Suzman thought she had been recognised.
"An aggressive female voice asked: 'aren't you Helen Gavronsky from Germiston. I played hockey against you at school. What have you been doing since then'?"
Mosie Suzman died in 1994. Suzman is survived by two daughters, Frances, an art historian who lives in London, and Patricia, a doctor, who lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
Helen Suzman: born November 7th, 1917; died January 1st, 2009