Helen Suzman: Bright Star in a Dark Chamber, by Robin Renwick

Helen Suzman: Bright Star in a Dark Chamber, by Robin Renwick. Jonathan Ball Publishers. Johannesburg & Cape Town, South Africa 2014. ISBN 9781868426102 / ISBN 978-1-86842-610-2

As British ambassador to South Africa, Lord Robin Renwick established a lasting friendship with Helen Suzman. Hence the excellence of this biography: the clarity of language, grasp and depth of issues, the human touch that pervades every chapter, and the deceptively easy readability. Helen Suzman was sharp, incisive, principled and loads of fun. So is this biography, Helen Suzman: Bright Star in a Dark Chamber, by Robin Renwick.

Robin Renwick  

[...] Helen Suzman also was the most entertaining company it was possible to find in South Africa, or anywhere else for that matter. However difficult the circumstances, lunch with her was sure to end in gales of laughter, and I will never again be able to watch anyone pouring soda into a glass of whisky without hearing Helen say: 'Don't drown it!' Never lacking in resourcefulness, on one well-remembered occasion, trying to avoid violence at a demonstration in Cape Town, she was confronted by a snarling Alsatian police dog straining on its leash to get at her. A dog-lover herself, she ordered the animal to sit, which it proceeded meekly to do, convulsing even the police with laughter at their own expense. In the course of weekend fishing trips with her in the eastern Transvaal I discovered that, as in her dealings with her political opponents, she did not believe in taking any prisoners. Every trout she caught was dispatched to the smokery and served up for future dinners, while I was painstakingly returning mine to the river from which they came. Behind the clear blue eyes, sparkling with intelligence, lay a biting wit, steely resolve and utter determination never to let up in her attacks on the system she abhorred until she saw it crumbling around her. Over four decades, she campaigned relentlessly against every manifestation of apartheid - against grand apartheid and petty apartheid, forced removals and the homelands policy, detention without trial and all abuses of authority on behalf of the victims and countless millions disenfranchised by the system. This book recalls the determination, indeed ferocity, with which she opposed every one of the apartheid laws and the spate of security legislation introduced by the Verwoerd and Vorster governments. In the elections of October 1961, Mrs Suzman was the only representative of the Progressive Party to be elected. Thereafter, she had to carry on a lone battle in parliament for the next 13 years. The greatest burden, she once said, was 'the fear that I won't come up to expectations. So many people depend on my acquitting myself well.' She had to face the hostility not only of the government but also of her own former party, one of whose spokesmen accused Helen Suzman of 'having nothing but a lot of principles she waffles about'. The first part of the accusation undoubtedly was true, but, as the reader of these pages will discover, Helen Suzman was never known to waffle. In 1969, in response to fresh security legislation enacted by the government, she declared: 'There is another interpretation to violence, apart from the violence against the state ... violence can also mean the unfettered use of power by the state against a citizen, so as to deprive him of his normal civil rights. In this sense we have seen a great deal of violence in South Africa. Mass removals of African people from their homes is a violence ... Banning, house arrests, detention without trial, banishment are all a violence.' In every succeeding year, she continued to campaign grimly on behalf of the detainees, asking what the government proposed to do with these people who had not been tried for any crime. Did it intend to keep them locked up for life? [...]

This is an excerpt from the biography: Helen Suzman: Bright Star in a Dark Chamber, by Robin Renwick.

Title: Helen Suzman
Subtitle: Bright Star in a Dark Chamber
Author: Robin Renwick
Genre: Biography
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Johannesburg & Cape Town, South Africa 2014
ISBN 9781868426102 / ISBN 978-1-86842-610-2
Hardcover, dustjacket, 16 x 24 cm, 148 pages, several photos