The death of Helen Suzman, a member for 36 years of the “parliament” of apartheid South Africa has evoked fulsome tributes. An honest tribute would portray a complex life and a multifaceted personality of a person who also saw a moral equivalence between the violence of the apartheid regime and the violent resistance of the African National Congress.

M S Prabhakara (kamaroopi@gmail.com) has been closely following South African affairs for many years and during much of the 1990s he was based in South Africa.

Economic & Political Weekly

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The death of any person almost always induces in those that are living “a feelgood factor” in respect of the departed person. Even bitter political opponents in life go into the sentimental mode, at least in their public tributes, to a dead rival who they had hated in life. The faults and failings, occasionally even the crimes, of the dead are forgotten, and only the good things are remembered – or if necessary, manufactured. This is as it should be, the consensus, not to speak of conventional wisdom, runs, for death cancels out everything else. In reality death cancels out nothing except the life of the dead person.

(1953-89) as a member of the so-called parliament called “House of Assembly”, a monstrous abomination if ever there was one.

She was successively “elected” to this utterly illegitimate structure whose basis was an “electorate” of less than 15% of the population comprising exclusively of English and Afrikaans speaking whites, from the United Party, the Progressive Party and the Progressive Federal Party. The 165 members of this “House” were elected from constituencies which had on the average around 5,000 voters – this in a country whose population according to the 1980 census figures was 31,588,260, including the so-called “independent” Homelands, the Bantustans.

Typically, Suzman and other white liberals, barring exceptions like Frederick van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine who quit when the going was still good for them, could never see, let alone acknowledge, that their very participation in that abomination invested it with legitimacy. Openly contemptuous of the apartheid regime, even while respectful of individuals like one of the Speakers who always “acknowledged” her and so enabled her to intervene in a debate, she makes no secret of her annoyance that her portrait which hung on the walls of that “parliament” was removed, along with other relics of apartheid, by the democratic government after 1994. She was also very vocal in “parliament”, and made no secret of her contempt for the Boer.

Sage

on 29 April 1963 to illustrate its usage:

As extreme white nationalism is fed by crisis situations and tough measures which are then taken to deal with those situations, so too does Black nationalism feed on this type of so-called ‘kragdadigheid’.

So, in this neat, balancing formula, there is really no understanding of the complex trajectory of the ANC, from the exclusivist and Africanist nationalism of its early years to the non-racial (not multiracial, which is a just a fancy word for apartheid) politics post-Freedom Charter (1955) and more particularly post-Kabwe (1985) when the non-racial ideology of the freedom charter was structurally incorporated into the organisation.

Helen Suzman however became, at least in the liberal western media, a true “fighter against apartheid”, exceptional because she was also white. One has only to think of a wholly different stream of other fighters, broadly of the same class and cultural background (white, upper and middle class) like Molly Fischer or Ruth First, or Sonia Bunting or Hilda Bernstein to see the difference between symbol and substance, gestures and actions, words and deeds.