Cyril Ramaphosa is the candidate most suitable to become the next president of SA, Helen Suzman said yesterday.

"I would like Ramaphosa or someone who is experienced in running a very important organisation to become president, said Suzman at her Johannesburg home.

Suzman said Ramaphosa's experience at the National Union of Mine Workers would stand him in good stead in the job of president.

She said she had met him when she was involved in relief work after the Vaal Reef mine disaster, when 104 miners died in an accident in 1995. "I was very impressed with Ramaphosa; he was extremely sensitive and practical and cared about the job."

Suzman, a Member of Parliament for over three decades - a lot of that time as the only voice in parliament against apartheid - was speaking on the eve of her 90th birthday today.

She said that from a childhood filled with tennis and swimming lessons at an all-white girls' convent, it was only at university that she became sensitised to the realities of apartheid SA.

"I had a very good lecturer in what was then known as native law and administration and he taught me about all the discrimination and hardships of black people."

While a lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand, Suzman decided to go into politics.

"After the National Party won the elections in 1948, we decided that the Nats were in for good and I decided that if I stay here I must do something."

In 1953 she was elected to Parliament as a member of the United Party. In 1959 she became a member of the Progressive Party and from 1961 to 1974 was its only representative in Parliament.

Suzman - who was married to a physician and had two daughters by the time she entered politics - said there was a mixed response to her decision to get involved in the sphere.

"I think my husband didn't mind. I think he was quite glad to get rid of me for six months of the year," she said. "But the children, I think, did have a difficult time. It certainly affected them."

"As Member of Parliament I was very interested in what I was doing. I had the opportunity and I used it. I was a very conscientious MP."

Suzman left Parliament in 1989 after 36 years.

"I thought it's good to go when people want you to stay rather than when they are saying "God, how do you get rid of her?'"

Suzman says stories of white liberal resistance to apartheid are ones largely left out of current re-tellings of the history of the anti-apartheid struggle. "I think they've completely airbrushed any efforts made by white liberals.

"People don't know what really went on.

"We must now put the past behind us. We must try to forge ahead and get skills going and education and better state hospitals and change the whole emphasis on how to deal with the pandemic of Aids," she said.

"Race ... should be forgotten. It should be on merit that people are judged, and behaviour; those are the things that matter."

Suzman said her greatest life lesson was: "Go see for yourself; don't take what the Press tells you; don't take what other people tell you; go see for yourself".

"In Parliament they would hate my views but they could never deny them ... "

In his tribute, Nelson Mandela said Suzman was a "great example to us all on how to advance with age, without retreating".

"Her courage, integrity and principled commitment to justice have marked her as one of the outstanding figures of our history.

"Helen, you have been a friend and supporter to many of us in our darkest hours. Today we can look back at those days from the safety of our democracy. We remember your regular prison visits, your letters and support. You gave us hope," Mandela added.