The most celebrated white champion of the anti-apartheid movement, Helen Suzman was the South African MP who, over a period of 36 years, consistently denounced the iniquities of racial segregation.

Often, she was the sole politician in South Africa’s parliament to campaign vociferously against apartheid leglisation and highlight the frequent instances she discovered of institutional racial abuse. For six years, she was also the only woman among 165 MPs, enduring the contempt of male parliamentarians who viewed white supremacy as a birthright, and to whom “liberal” was a dirty word.

Undeterred, Suzman used her privileges as an MP to gain access to areas forbidden to the general public: prisons, black townships and “resettlement areas” in the tribal homelands. At every step she highlighted the evils of the system. She disseminated her findings and presented alternative policies to the outside world through the parliamentary press gallery.

Suzman began her parliamentary career as a United Party MP in 1953, but left in 1959 to co-found the Progressive Party after the UP split on the question of allocation of land to blacks. Thereafter hers was often the lone voice of dissent on the parliamentary benches. For 13 years she was the only representative in Parliament of the Progressive Party. But she persevered, using the paradoxical circumstance of the authoritarian Government’s respect for the parliamentary system to challenge it and its policies at every turn.

Her most relentless campaign was against the notorious pass laws, which restricted the movement of blacks and prevented them from selling their labour in the open market. The repeal of these odious laws towards the end of the life of apartheid government in South Africa owed much to her obduracy.

Slight of build though she was, Suzman had great reserves of courage and stamina. She readily held the attention of the House, particularly in her clashes with successive prime ministers and ministers of justice. She used question time to good effect, drawing attention to abuses in the police force and other departments of state and ensuring that these gained the widest publicity.

Helen Suzman was born in Germiston, a small mining town outside Johannesburg, in 1917. She was the daughter of Samuel Gavronsky, a Jewish immigrant who had come to the Transvaal from Lithuania with, as she used to say, “a bundle on his back”. She was educated at Parktown Convent in Johannesburg and at the University of the Witwatersrand where she read commerce and economics. She married in 1937 before graduating, and dropped out of university to give birth to her first child. She returned to her studies and completed her degree with first class honours.

After the Second World War Suzman taught economic history at Witwatersrand for eight years before going into politics. She entered Parliament with the United Party representing the Houghton constituency of Johannesburg in 1953. At that time Dr D. F. Malan’s Nationalists had completed five years in office and were enforcing the first apartheid legislation. Elected as a member of the old United Party of General Smuts, Suzman was one of a group of liberal-minded MPs who broke away from the UP to form the Progressive Party in 1959. In the general election of 1961 this new party was all but wiped out at the polls: Suzman was the only survivor. It was a situation to be repeated at the elections of 1966 and 1970.

In the 1960s, with the Vorster Government introducing the first legislation providing for detention without trial, hers was frequently the only dissenting voice on the opposition benches. It was this legislation, later supplemented by the Terrorism Act and consolidated in the Internal Security Act, which gave the State powers to hold detainees incommunicado and in solitary confinement. It also gave rise to abuses such as torture during interrogation — and a spate of deaths in detention.

Suzman was witty and irrepressible in debate, a master of the pungent aside and cutting rejoinder. She often faced roars of disapproval from the government benches as she argued the case against the Nationalist Government’s ideological legislation. In the 1960s, she frequently had to stand her ground in debate amid intense anger and abuse. The three successive prime ministers whom she confronted over a period of 25 years: Hendrik Verwoerd, John Vorster and P. W. Botha, she was subsequently to describe as “as nasty a trio as you could encounter in your worst nightmares”.

She later admitted that Verwoerd was “the only man who has ever scared me stiff”. Yet she stood up to him across the floor of the House, notably on one occasion in 1961 when he was at his most aggressive and sarcastic, telling her that “the country has written you off”. Suzman replied “The world has written you off.”

Her spell as the only Progressive MP came to an end in 1974 when the party won five more seats. Indeed, as the United Party continued to lose ground at the polls, the Progressive Party gradually became the official Opposition, and Suzman’s onslaughts on apartheid policies gained welcome reinforcement from a new breed of vigorous parliamentarians.