The World

My earliest political memories are of Helen Suzman, the veteran anti-apartheid MP, who died yesterday.

I was born in London, but I lived in South Africa for three years from 1968-70 – between the ages of five and eight. I think it was probably possible to grow up in London completely oblivious to politics, but that wasn’t really an option in South Africa. My first political memory is of a general election in apartheid South Africa – seeing posters for Suzman being nailed to trees in the rich, liberal Johannesburg constituency of Houghton that she represented.

Reading the obituaries of Suzman this morning, I was struck both by her bravery and her wit. She was the only anti-apartheid MP for many years and she was sharp. I particularly liked her reply, when accused by the prime minister of asking parliamentary questions that embarrassed South Africa – “It’s not my questions that are embarrassing. It’s your answers.” Suzman seemed such a patrician woman that I had half-forgotten an obvious fact – she was also Jewish.

The South African Jewish community threw up a remarkable array of talent: Nobel-prize winning scientists like Sydney Brenner and Aaron Klug, a Nobel-prize winning novelist in Nadine Gordimer, actors and actresses like Anthony Sher and Janet Suzman (a relation of Helen’s), political figures like Helen Suzman and Joe Slovo, the head of the South African Communist Party. And also quite a few dentists.

Jews, like Helen Suzman, played a prominent role in the anti-apartheid movement. But I suspect the Jewish community in South Africa is now shrinking quite fast. Certainly my own family’s experience suggests so. Of my ten South-African born cousins, three are now in Australia, two are in London, one is in the US – and just four are still living in South Africa.