In her 36 years in Parliament, a lone liberal voice denouncing the evils of apartheid, she was twice nominated for a Nobel prize and was appointed an honorary dame by the Queen. She received hundreds of letters from the oppressed and dispossessed, black South Africans who had no vote, no voice and almost no rights under the white minority Government. She was denounced as a “vicious little cat” by one former prime minister, but won the grudging respect even of her enemies for the “steel in her teeth”. Helen Suzman, who died yesterday at the age of 91, was truly one of South Africa's heroic figures of her country's far from heroic past.

Long the sole MP from the Progressive Party, the daughter of Jewish immigrants never compromised with injustice. Her background, she said, gave her a sensitivity to the evils of discrimination, and she made the most of her parliamentary voice to rail against forced removals, racial inequalities, the erosion of the rule of law, capital punishment, torture, censorship and police abuses. She was the first, and only, woman to visit Nelson Mandela in his cell. And when one apartheid minister accused her of asking questions to embarrass South Africa overseas, she replied with typical dignity: “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa, it is your answers.”

Those who may question whether she really achieved anything in the face of overwhelming state oppression should remember this: what in the end matters is that the moral conscience of a nation should be kept alive, even when almost extinct. Helen Suzman was that conscience. She achieved, for South Africa and for all those oppressed, more than they can ever repay.