Anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman dies
By Michael Georgy
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Helen Suzman, one of South Africa's foremost anti-apartheid campaigners, has died at the age of 91, the SAPA news agency reported Thursday.
The former politician was publicly critical of apartheid at a time when this was rare among whites. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice and won praise from human rights organizations from around the world.
SAPA quoted her daughter Frances Jowell as saying she died peacefully in her Johannesburg home.
Suzman was for 36 years South Africa's most famous white crusader against apartheid, waging an often lonely parliamentary battle.
She was one of the few whites to earn any respect from black South Africans. Suzman regularly visited jailed black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964.
Remembering Suzman's first visit with him in B-Section of Robben Island prison, Mandela once said: "It was an odd and wonderful sight to see this courageous woman peering into our cells and strolling around our courtyard. She was the first and only woman ever to grace our cells."
The Nelson Mandela Foundation said South Africa had lost a "great patriot and a fearless fighter against apartheid."
The frail-looking champion of non-white rights was the longest serving member of the country's white parliament and had been an unrelenting campaigner for the enfranchisement of the black majority. She retired in May 1989.
A member of the liberal Progressive Federal Party for much of her career, she was regularly jeered in parliament with taunts such as "Go back to Moscow" or "Go back to Israel" -- a reference to her Jewish family.
Her arch foe President P.W. Botha dubbed her "Mother Superior" in sarcastic reference to her scolding attacks on the Nationalists.
The enmity was mutual. In a typical parliamentary exchange in which Botha warned her against breaking the law, she said he would never bully her.
"I am not frightened of you. I never have been and I never will be. I think nothing of you."
She once said of Botha: "If he was female he would arrive in parliament on a broomstick."
The pair never spoke to each other for years and Botha remarked: "She intercedes for the people who want to bring this country to its knees."
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