Cyril Ramaphosa is the candidate most suitable to become the next president of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman said on Tuesday.
”I would like Ramaphosa or someone who is experienced in running a very important organisation [to become president],” said Suzman at her Johannesburg home.
Suzman said Ramaphosa’s experience at the National Union of Mineworkers would stand him in good stead in the job of president.
She said she had met him when she was involved in relief work after the Vaal Reef mine disaster, where 104 miners died in an accident in 1995. ”[I was] very impressed with Ramaphosa; he was extremely sensitive and practical and cared about the job.”
Suzman, an MP for more than three decades — much of that time as the only voice in Parliament against the apartheid — was speaking a day before her 90th birthday on Wednesday.
Having had a childhood filled with tennis and swimming lessons at an all-white girl’s convent, it was only at university that she became sensitised to the realities of apartheid South Africa.
”I had a very good lecturer in what was then known as native law and administration, and he taught me about all the discrimination and hardships of black people.”
While a lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand, Suzman decided to go into politics. ”[After the National Party won the elections in 1948], we decided that the Nats were in for good and I decided that if I stay here I must do something.”
In 1953, she was elected to Parliament as a member of the United Party. In 1959, she became a member of the Progressive Party and from 1961 to 1974 was its only representative in Parliament.
Suzman — who was married to a physician and had two daughters by the time she entered politics — said there was a mixed response to her decision to get involved in the political sphere.
”Well, I think my husband didn’t mind, I think he was quite glad to get rid of me for six months of the year,” she said jokingly. ”But the children I think did have a difficult time … it certainly affected them.”
Challenges
Suzman loved the challenges of her job. ”I thought as a member of Parliament I would use my privileges … I was very interested in what I was doing. I had the opportunity and I used it. I was a very conscientious MP.”
She eventually left Parliament in 1989. ”I had had 32 years and I thought it’s good to go when people want you to stay rather than when they are saying, ‘God, how do you get rid of her?”’
Nevertheless, Suzman said she regretted not staying one more year to see apartheid laws repealed against which she had so fervently campaigned.
Suzman said stories of white liberal resistance to apartheid are ones largely left out of current retellings of the history of the anti-apartheid struggle. ”I think they’ve completely air-brushed any efforts made by white liberals. People don’t know what really went on.”
She added: ”We must now put the past behind us. We must try and forge ahead and get skills going and education and better state hospitals and change the whole emphasis on how to deal with the pandemic of Aids.
”Race … should be forgotten. It should be on merit that people are judged, and behaviour; those are the things that matter.”
Yet, moving on also means finding ways to fix injustices of the past. ”There’s got to be a redress … a lack of opportunity for all those years — I mean, we lived with that for all those years.”
Suzman said her greatest life lesson was: ”Go see for yourself. Don’t take what the press tells you, don’t take what other people tell you; go and see for yourself.”
”[In Parliament] they would hate my views, but they could never deny them because I had been to prisons, I had been to resettlement areas, I had been to removal areas. So they could talk to me all about the wonderful new South Africa and I knew what [apartheid] was actually doing.”
Suzman said she was having a cocktail party to celebrate her birthday on Wednesday. ”I wish I hadn’t thought of it,” she said wryly amidst the bustle of the party preparations at her house. — Sapa