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Defying the Odds
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12113 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1994 |
2,029 Words |
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Judith E. Chettle
Judith E. Chettle is a South African--born writer and editor
who now lives in the United States. She reviews frequently for
this publication, as well as the Washington Times, Kirkus
Reviews, and the Washington Post. |
IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS
A South African Memoir
Helen Suzman
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993
304 pp., $25.00
South Africa has always been a country of paradoxes, a place that regularly confounds the conventional wisdom of friend and foe alike. It is here, for example, that an Afrikaner like Breyten Breytenbach could be exiled for his politics but receive prestigious prizes from the government for his poetry, and a hard-line conservative white like neo-Nazi Eugene Terreblanche could ally himself with black Chief Gatsha Buthelezi. Not least of South Africa's paradoxes has been the political career of noted antiapartheid warrior Helen Suzman.
A woman in a congenitally male chauvinist society, a Jew in a predominantly Christian country, and for many years the only elected member of her political party, Suzman became not only the internationally respected voice for the often voiceless, but also a parliamentarian admired by men as diverse as Nelson Mandela and H.J. Klopper, the hard-line Nationalist speaker of the house. A woman who fought what even her most loyal supporters thought were futile battles, she has now been gloriously vindicated. All such paradoxes are addressed in her recently published memoirs.
In No Uncertain Terms is not only an inspiriting chronicle of Suzman's fight for justice, but an important record of those years in which the notorious apartheid legislation was enacted, sanctions were imposed by the outside world, and finally a great surge of hope swept the country when President F.W. de Klerk released Nelson Mandela in February 1989.
Like all soldiers who see the war from the trenches rather than the anodyne comfort of the war room at HQ, Suzman is intent on recording the skirmishes--the victories rare, the defeats plentiful--and the actions of both friends and enemies. The personal details of her life are minimal, not because they are uninteresting but because they are secondary to Suzman's task of describing her "part in opposing the evolution of this bizarre scheme (apartheid) and its manifestly drastic and unjust consequences."
Early years
The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, Suzman was born in 1917 and grew up in relative
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