(Author: Rhoda Kadalie, Vol. 64, No. 1, Chanukah 2009)
I wish to thank the SA Jewish Board of Deputies for asking me to speak at this memorial service in honor of the great Helen Suzman. It is indeed a privilege because Helen and I were bosom buddies and we talked a lot. “The reason you and I get on so well,” Helen used to say, “is because we are so much alike; you are just worse!” In many ways Helen kept me on the strait and narrow. Whenever my columns were too strident, she would coax me out of it, very wisely. The more I got to know Helen, the more I realized that one comes across someone with such profound wisdom, only once in a lifetime.
We are all familiar with Helen’s illustrious life as the country’s most famous Member of Parliament, who used the powerful forum of Parliament to fight for the rights of those who were excluded from Parliament. She believed very deeply that Parliament was that space where public representatives transacted the business of citizens in public. She believed in the institutions of Parliament, in the rule of law, in an independent judiciary, and she became one of the world’s most famous human rights campaigners, fighting tooth and nail against every bill that violated the rights of people, citizens and non-citizens alike. There are few politicians today who combine these roles, of politician and human rights campaigner, so fantastically well, something aptly acknowledged by Chief Albert Luthuli in a letter he wrote to her in 1968:
In moments of creeping frustration and tiredness, please pick courage and strength in the fact that thousands of South Africans, especially among the oppressed section, thank God for producing Helen, for her manly stand against injustice, regardless of consequences. For ever remember, you are a bright Star in dark Chamber, where lights of liberty of what is left, are going out one by one. This appreciation covers your contribution since you entered Parliament as member of the Progressive Party. This meritorious record has been climaxed by your fittingly uncompromising stand in the rape of democracy by Parliament in the debate that made law, which was one of the most diabolic bills ever to come before Parliament. Not only ourselves – your contemporaries – but also posterity will hold you in high esteem.
What sets Helen apart for Luthuli was her “uncompromising stand’, taking up issues “regardless of the consequences”. Often alone, Helen was fearless, politically incorrect, and courageous in fighting for what was so obviously right. She was a liberal when to be liberal was not in fashion. She opposed sanctions when it was politically incorrect to do so, and she may have lost the Nobel Prize because of it. “Posterity will hold you in high esteem” says Luthuli, and that is exactly what happened. When Helen died, the entire world, even the ANC, graciously acknowledged her contribution towards building democracy in this country. In eschewing popularity and populism, she became popular.
In her old age, Helen increasingly despaired about South Africa’s double standards on Zimbabwe, and frequently pointed out that Mugabe’s tyranny started with his destruction of Parliament and its institutions, the rule of law, the judiciary, the media and its exemplary education and health systems. This enraged Helen, so much that she literally wanted to die. South Africa’s consistent support for the rogue states such as Zimbabwe, Sudan, Myanmar, and Iran at the United Nations Security Council destroyed her faith in the current regime and often made her feel that all her work was in vain. She could never understand why our government flirted with dictators and human rights delinquent regimes and why we consistently voted with China and Russia in vetoing Western-instigated resolutions. She despaired over South Africa’s schizophrenic approach, which the Democratic Alliance has described as “a courtship with the West on one hand, while giving succour to the West’s adversaries on the other, harming our international credibility and all but obliterating the moral high ground we attained through our transition to democracy”.
This brings me to the topic that I was asked to speak about tonight – Human Rights in general, the struggle for Human Rights in this country and what it means to be an activist.
In July last year, a group of local activists went on a tour of Israel and the occupied territories to inspect human rights violations in the region, and the Israeli occupation in particular. They visited one side of the conflict during their five day visit and came back smugly condemning Israel from a dizzy height. Immediately, others got on the bandwagon, supporting them because it was the politically correct thing to do. They did not for one moment reflect on why it was important to see both sides of the conflict, how they could help both the Israelis and the Palestinians find solutions to it and how we could share some of our experiences to help two related peoples imagine a future together, just as we have done. There was no modesty in their condemnation given what was going on in our country and how ashamed and modest we should be about the beam in our own eye. Intrinsic to human rights investigations is the weighing up of all sides; of weighing up one right against another, as Helen did so adeptly.
Last week we were greeted by a headline: “Top Jews condemn War on Gaza”.1 Can you imagine a headline: “Top Christians condemn Hamas”? President Motlanthe called the war on Gaza ‘savagery’ in his opening address to Parliament, when Zimbabwe on our doorstep is ravished by an unstoppable barbarism that has rendered 3000 dead from cholera alone, not to speak of all the other human rights abuses he is guilty of. Mugabe, of course, will never be called a savage, because then that would be called racism.
Let me pose a question to SA: if Israel sent a human rights delegation to SA, what would it find?
The HR delegation went to Israel at a time when SA was reeling in the aftermath of the embarrassing outbreak of xenophobic violence, in which hundreds were killed simply because they were foreign and black; in a matter of weeks over 32 Somalis were killed for simply being entrepreneurial. Bishop Paul Verryn’s church is overflowing with thousands of Zimbabwean refugees, treated like dirt by the very South African regime that is quick to utter condemnation of others.
On every international index, this country has gone down a notch or two, such as for example the Human Development Index, because of the devastating rates of maternal health and infant mortality rates. We have a HIV/AIDS pandemic which kills a thousand people a day; over 6 million are infected, mostly young women between the ages of 15 and 29; we have a multiple drug resistant TB epidemic that is out of control; and now hundreds of people are infected with cholera.
Recently, I hosted a professor from Holland who is an expert analyst of sexual violence in her country. She could not believe our figures on rape, and child rape in particular. The fact that rape against women is not declining, given our strong representation of women in government, is one of the biggest indictments against women in public office. Given the proportional representation electoral system, our women politicians are beholden to the men in the party who put them there. Party interests override their commitment to gender interests, and once women are catapulted into power they forget their obligations as politicians. Helen was never like that. She set the tone.
I have yet to find a politician of Helen Suzman’s calibre that effectively combines human rights campaigning with their role as politician. She left her comfort zones; she went where angels feared to tread; she challenged and took on the police fearlessly, recently shown in one of the video clips on CNN when she died.
Armed with devastatingly accurate information gleaned from her insistence “on seeing things for herself”, she became a “boots-on politician”, going where the action was. In 1973 she went to Kliptown to see the unrest at first hand; she visited the squatter camps in Cape Town in the winter of 1981, after shelters had been demolished by government officials; she addressed crowds at a mass funeral of victims of police shootings in Alexandra in 1986; she took statements from Moutse residents who had been assaulted by vigilantes; she visited Oukasie residents who were threatened by forced removals; and she pleaded the fate of the Sharpeville Six in 1988.
Going into these areas were often life-threatening, but Helen knew that people relied on her to get the information out and expose to the world the atrocities of apartheid. Beneath Helen’s tough veneer of taking on the apartheid bullies, prime ministers and security police alike, lay a warm compassionate soul, whose mission was driven not only by a deep respect for democracy, equality for all, and human rights, but also by a deep compassion for those who were not represented, the ‘Other’ and the oppressed, by laws she considered fundamentally inhumane.
I am always sad that Helen died disappointed in our new democracy; disappointed that Parliament had become captive to liberation politics and majoritarianism; that our legislators are implicated in one corruption scandal after another. She detested having to acknowledge that life for her in the apartheid parliament was more tolerable than the post-1994 parliament is today for opposition MPs.
The lesson for us today: we cannot leave the business of Parliament to politicians alone. Helen believed so profoundly that an opposition was crucial because without one there could be no dialogue; and without dialogue, one could not begin to approach the truth. No one person, and no one party, can lay absolute claim to the truth, whatever their credentials. And the person or party that does so is almost certainly going the Mugabe route to fanaticism, fascism, and thuggery.
Let us commit ourselves to continuing Helen’s legacy of speaking truth to power as much as we speak power to the truth.
Dr Rhoda Kadalie is a distinguished South African human rights activist and academic, is a former Commissioner on the SA Human Rights Commission and former lecturer in Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape. She currently serves as Executive Director, Impumelelo Innovations Award Trust and Director: Restitution of Land Rights. This article is adapted from the address she delivered at the Helen Suzman Memoriam held at the Marais Road Synagogue, Cape Town, on 8 February 2009.
