Houghton, Helen Suzman’s constituency, was the richest and most Jewish seat in South Africa and at first she held it by only a tiny majority.

The United party, which she had left in 1959 to help found the liberal Progressive party, was determined to topple her and put up Hymie Miller. As everyone feared, the United party raised the spectre of the black peril in the last few days of campaigning.

“The UP are going door to door asking, ‘How would you like it if your daughter had to marry a kaffir?’ What can we say to that?” Helen’s team asked. She said: “Tell them there’s something far worse than that: what if they had to marry Hymie Miller?” She doubled her majority.

Stories like that are what come to mind when I think about Helen, who died last week aged 91. It wasn’t just that she was the indomitable lone parliamentary voice against apartheid for many years, but she also had great panache. While she went tirelessly into squatter camps, townships and prisons to see for herself things that were often almost indescribably awful and sad, she never lost her sense of humour. We had our share of arguments.

Helen could be difficult, but then someone so sparky would be. She was a close friend of Nelson Mandela and once told me that if she had been a lot younger she would have rather fancied him.

As it was, they confined their relationship to politics. They often disagreed, but their arguments always ended with a hug.

Helen was never afraid to tell Mandela what she really thought, even if he didn’t like it. I recall her coming back from a meeting with him once complaining that it had been full of wealthy women fawning over him.

Helen had always been comfortably off and could easily have insulated herself from the unpleasant realities of life in South Africa. Instead, she chose to become a campaigner for prison reform who greatly improved conditions on Robben Island, where Mandela was held for 18 of his 27 years in jail.

While she admitted, “I can be pretty unpleasant when I feel like it”, she always tried to be fair. Despite being a political rival she appreciated the wonderfully courteous way she was treated by the Speaker of the South African parliament, H J Klopper, a right-wing racist who nonetheless took the view that as a solitary Progressive party MP for 13 years, she represented a whole school of thought and thus must be allowed to speak in every debate.

Helen was Jewish, but resisted all rabbinical approaches to claim her, saying: “I just don’t believe any of that religious stuff.” But that didn’t stop her using herheritage to score points. In the1970s she was asked her opinion of the far-right Afrikaner woman’s organisation, the Kappie Kommando, and responded: “They really belong to the days of witch burning.”

This provoked a furious letter from the Kappie Kommando leader who said its members were “proud of their old-fashioned ideas” and she wished to remind Helen that “my ancestors took the Bible across the mountains to the savages on the other side.

And what were your ancestors doing at that time, Mrs Suzman?” This had a clear antisemitic edge, for Helen’s Lithuanian Jewish roots were well known. Helen simply wrote back: “Dear Mrs Van Zyl: my ancestors were busy writing the Bible.”

When F W de Klerk, then president of South Africa, abolished apartheid in 1990 he graciously commissioned a portrait of Helen to hang in parliament and, at its unveiling, said: “All those years you were right and we were wrong.”

As soon as the ANC came to power 15 years ago, all parliamentary portraits of white politicians, Helen’s included, were relegated to the cellars. She was indignant. “I don’t mind about you taking the bloody thing down but if you don’t want it, you can damn well send it back to me,” she wrote to the ANC Speaker.

She felt greatly disappointed by the ANC and was furious about the support of President Thabo Mbeki for Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, his denial of the threat from Aids and his endless playing of the race card.

“This is hardly what I hoped for. But don’t think I ever regret for one minute having fought apartheid,” she said. She was no theorist but she knew that one of the hardest and most necessary things was to hold conflicting feelings and ideas in your mind. She was willing to do that because she was always willing to do whatever it takes.

R W Johnson was director of the Helen Suzman Foundation from 1995-2001

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