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Helen Suzman, Relentless Challenger of Apartheid System, Is Dead at 91
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| Contributor | IndyGeorgia |
| Last Edited | IndyGeorgia Mar 13, 2016 11:20am |
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| Category | Obituary |
| Author | John F. Burns and Alan Cowell |
| Media | Newspaper - New York Times |
| News Date | Thursday, January 1, 2009 05:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Helen Suzman, the internationally renowned anti-apartheid campaigner who befriended the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and offered an often lonely voice for change among South Africa’s white minority, died in Johannesburg early on Thursday, a family member said. She was 91.
Her son-in-law, Jeffrey Jowell, a law professor in London, said she died peacefully at her home in the affluent northern suburbs of Johannesburg after a brief illness.
For decades, Mrs. Suzman was among the most venerated of white campaigners urging an end to racial rule. As the liberal Progressive Party’s lone representative in the all-white Parliament for 13 years until the mid-1970s, a period when many of apartheid’s most repressive features were being devised, she used her parliamentary immunity to speak out when other avenues of protest were harshly suppressed.
While she challenged apartheid at a time of violent protests among the black majority, she advocated peaceful change. More controversially, she differed sharply with more radical campaigners inside and outside South Africa who were supportive of economic sanctions to press the country’s white rulers toward reform, saying sanctions would hurt poor blacks more than whites.
To Mrs. Suzman’s frustration, this led some of her critics to say she was unwittingly helping to prolong apartheid. This was a variation on a critique she had long endured, and to some extent accepted — that by engaging in what was largely a charade of parliamentary politics in apartheid South Africa, she became complicit, however unwillingly, in the larger deceits of apartheid, which would ultimately be ended not by a small band of white dissenters, but by the more powerful forces of the black freedom struggle and external political pressure.
Among her friends, it was a reality Mrs. Suzman conceded, though she and many opponents of apartheid believed that it was important to keep the hopes of eventual democracy in the country alive and that she |
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