Helen Suzman

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Helen Suzman was born Helen Gavronsky on 7 November 1917 in Germiston, Gauteng, South Africa as the daughter of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants.

She was an anti-apartheid activist and politician. She studied as an economist and statistician at Witwatersrand University.

She married Dr. Moses Suzman when she was 20, and had two daughters with him before returning to university as a lecturer in 1944. She gave up teaching for politics, being elected to Parliament in 1953 as a member of the United Party. She switched to the liberal Progressive Party in 1959, and represented the wealthy Houghton constituency as that party's sole member of parliament from 1961 to 1974.

Suzman was noted for her strong public criticism of the governing National Party's policies of apartheid at a time when this was unusual amongst whites (although she was opposed to the One Person One Vote principle, instead favouring systems such as income thresholds, literacy tests etc. to decide on electoral roll entry), and found herself even more of an outsider by virtue of being an English-speaking Jewish woman in a parliament dominated by Calvinist Afrikaner men. She was once accused by a minister of asking questions in parliament that embarrassed South Africa, to which she replied: "It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa, it is your answers".^[1]

Later, as parliamentary white opposition to apartheid grew, the Progressive Party was renamed the Progressive Federal Party, and Suzman was joined in parliament by notable liberal colleagues such as Colin Eglin. She spent a total of 36 years in parliament.

She visited Nelson Mandela numerous times in prison, and was at his side when he signed the new constitution in 1996.

She was voted #24 on the Top 100 Great South Africans.