Helen Suzman 'at it again'

2004-10-11 08:05

Helen Suzman has been at it again. With her loyal ideological sidekick Tony Leon, and sometimes with their fawning vassal Douglas Gibson, they have been quick to accuse people of racism.

I should know; Suzman has called me a racist many times in the past and I still expect her to repeat the charge.

This time she has been rubbishing President Thabo Mbeki as a racist who always "plays the race card" (whatever that tired cliché means these days!).

I am no big fan of President Mbeki's, and actually feel that he must be roasted regularly for some glaring defects of leadership, but to cop it from the likes of Suzman (on foreign television, nogal) is taking chutzpah to new highs.

The usual defence of Suzman's lackeys is to dredge out Nelson Mandela's praises of the woman, and also to gleefully point out that she used to visit him during his long years of imprisonment.

Let me deal with Mandela's praises first, by stating the obvious about the Grand Old Man - he is an incorrigible gentleman, a diplomat to his very toes, and quite incapable of saying anything harsh about anyone.

Reconciliation is the cornerstone of Mandela's being, as was shown by the lunch he hosted for his chief jailer, Percy Yutar, the Judas prosecutor who concocted huge lies ("they had plans for bombs to blow up a city the size of Johannesburg", and such rubbish) and helped earn him an undeserved life sentence on Robben Island.

Mandela, in short, is the type of decent human being who will not be pushed far enough to snap and tell someone curtly: "Jy maak kak" (You're up to shit).

Instead Madiba would probably give a discourse on the divergent views people hold and how uncomfortable those views could be, and how everyone was entitled to their views.

Madiba had all sorts of bantustan types in his first cabinet, as he had Nationalist practitioners of racism and apartheid.

What this says about Mandela is that he would, even if he inwardly knew and believed otherwise about Suzman, say very nice and flattering things about her.

But it does not mean he was not aware that she was an apartheid parliamentarian and earned a salary from being inside the apartheid legislature for the role she played -"opposition", her supporters will say, but opposition to what?

Answer: "opposition" to apartheid, and operating as "opposition" from a platform provided by apartheid - and earning a salary from apartheid!

No prevarication on this one, and no matter how many supporters of her politics will argue, they will not remove the fact that her presence in the apartheid structures gave racism and apartheid a credibility they needed desperately.

The problem with some sections of white South Africa is that they have grown to denying the obvious to such a large extent, that this sort of lying has become second nature to them.

They grew rich and fat because of apartheid, yet it is very fashionable nowadays to hear many of them claiming that they neither supported nor benefited from apartheid.

And because I must protect myself from the inevitable charges of "racist" from hurt Suzman disciples, I must point out the highly obvious: one does not become a racist by talking about racism, any more than one becomes a criminal because crime is the major talking point in South Africa.

And, despite his faults, President Thabo Mbeki has never been a racist. He never served in any racist structure, and never gave respectability to such things.

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John Qwelane's column is published each week on News24, courtesy of Jon Qwelane and the editor of Sunday Sun, which originally carried the article.

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