Ninety years ago, Louis Botha was into his seventh year as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa. Far north, in the Somme, South African troops were battling it out. Further East, Lenin's men were rolling out their tanks in what was to become the Russian Revolution. Back home, folk were bracing themselves for the onslaught of the flu epidemic.

This was world into which Helen Suzman was born on November 7, 1917. Yet she's reluctant to stand up and be counted among the few who lived through the turbulent times that followed and are still alive to tell the tale.

"Are you preparing my obituary?" she inquired in her pointed fashion, earlier this week. On the contrary, I assured her, we're marking a milestone. "Oh for goodness' sake," she retorted. "A retired old creature like me. Who cares?"

On the eve of her 90th birthday, there are few who can hold a candle to Dame Helen. She's remarkably lucid and discerning, still skilful in repartee, and conceding to age only in a physical way. She broke her leg 18 months ago and, although the bones knitted well - "I can give anybody a good kick," she says, as she shoots her small leg into the air - she can no longer walk due to a balance defect and gets around with the aid of a Zimmer frame. But this has done little to cramp her style.

Helen Gavronsky was born into a white world, in a country that was overwhelmingly black. Yet the colour imbalance didn't strike her as odd, back then.

"That's how South Africa was," she says. "I remember, as a child of 12, writing out a 'special', as it was known, a pass, for a grown man, our domestic help, so he could be out of the house after eight in the evening, otherwise he could have been arrested."

That's just the way things worked in her Parktown suburb.

Little would unsettle that existence until she entered the University of Witwatersrand and began to study Native Law and Administration under Prof Julius Lewin.

"And he awakened me. I began to understand what pass laws really meant, the migratory native system and the difficulty for Blacks in moving around their own country."

But what she learnt at Wits stayed at Wits. "My father didn't agree with my liberal views. He thought I was crazy."

By then it was already too late. The barbarity of the system had captivated her 16-year-old mind and marked the beginning of a lifetime of resistance cloaked in liberalism. "It was the illogic of the system that got to me."

Soon after she graduated, in 1937, she married Dr Mosie Suzman (whom she describes as "a physician's physician") and they had two daughters. Some years later, in 1945, she returned to Wits and taught Economic History, widening her grasp of the unfairness of South Africa's social scales. Former General-Secretary of the South African Communist Party, Joe Slovo, was a student of hers, as was Eduardo Mondlane, who became head of the Mozambican liberation movement, Frelimo.

She found a natural home in the party formed by Gen Jan Smuts in 1933, later called the United Party. But her world was shaken in 1948, when out came Smuts and in went Dr DF Malan of the National Party. "And we all woke up." It was the dawn of apartheid.

Her first reaction was to abscond. "I said to Mosie, 'Let's get out of here, because now that they're in, it will take us another 40 years to get them out'. How right I was," she says.

But Mosie was having none of it, "So I decided if we were to stay, we had to do something about it."

Five years later, she joined the ranks of the opposition in parliament in Cape Town, where she would live for the following 36 years until she retired in 1989, commuting home to Johannesburg as often as she could.

"And I was a good MP, a very good MP," she will have you know. "Conscientious, always in my seat when important matters were under discussion. And awake," she exclaims looking at me wide-eyed, "not like today when either the benches are empty, or those people who are in their benches are fast asleep."

The 1958 election marked the beginning of Dr Hendrik Verwoerd's days as prime minister. "South Africa has now embarked on a course of extremism with a fanatic at the helm," Suzman wrote at the time.

In response, Suzman co-founded the Progressive Party a year later, but a snap election in 1961 decimated the fledgling Progs and only Suzman kept her seat. During the 13 years that followed, she became the lone dissenting voice in a sea of Nats.

She rose to the challenge and relentlessly exposed the system.

The Nats would try to rein her in, arguing she was asking questions for the sake of embarrassing South Africa. "It's not my questions that are embarrassing South Africa, but your answers," would come the reply.

She lived by her campaign slogan, "See for yourself", and encouraged others to do as she did. And although she admits she didn't know many black people back then, she was detrmined to know how they lived and struggled.

"I travelled into the townships. I visited the resettlement areas. I went to the prisons. Really, it was a cruel system."

She fought against the death penalty at a time when this country executed more people than any other. She visited the chambers in Pretoria Central: "Those hanging ropes chilled me to the spine, you know."

She toughened her stance and sharpened her tone, but there's no denying that she bellowed from a privileged perch, without fear of detention or house arrest, unlike many of her black counterparts.

For that Suzman offers no apologies. "That's what I was. A member of the opposition. And I exposed the system as best I could."

Did she ever think of going the whole hog and joining the ranks of the ANC?

"Oh no," she replies. "I thought they were too radical. To start with, they were pro violence. And anyway, I liked the party I was in. Besides, they (ANC) liked white communists, not white liberals. They just whitewashed us out of history."

She endured her fair share of hairy moments at the mercy of the Nats. "I was in the House when we heard that Dr Verwoerd had been assassinated. And the minister of defence, who should've been able to control himself, P W Botha, came rushing towards me and wagged that famous finger and said, 'It's you, it's you liberals who've done this!' and thundered out of the House."

They never spoke again. She remembers him as "pretty awful. Rude and arrogant. And you couldn't have an intelligent debate with him. He was a raucous bully."

But there were good days, too, like when the Pass Laws were repealed in 1986 and the National Party MP Albert Nothnagel crossed the floor and shook her hand. He went on to tell his conservative audience, "Without any assistance, she took up the cudgels in this House for many years . . . and she could see further than many other people in South Africa . . . I hardly think there will ever again be anyone in the history of this country who will do as much for human rights as she has done."

She was 72 when she left parliament in 1989, with only one regret, "That I didn't stay on one extra year to watch all the Bills that I'd opposed being repealed."

Helen Suzman set about writing her memoirs, In no Uncertain Terms, published in 1993. Soon after Mosie died. And alone, Helen settled into retirement to watch the South African dream unfold.

Thirteen years on, she has hope, but little optimism for the country.

"It's not working," she says. "Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying it was better under apartheid. But this system of proportional representation doesn't work. It's not democratic."

In six weeks from now, fewer than 3 700 voting ANC delegates will decide who will lead the party into the next general election, and undoubtedly preside over 47 million South Africans in the years to follow.

"South Africa has become a one-party dominant state," she said. "Today there aren't constituencies, as such, with voters; instead, you have people you never actually voted for and who you therefore can't vote out. There's no accountability."

Mandela may have served the country well, "but I thought he should've served another five years. I think the country wasn't settled in. One more term of office and reconciliation would've been sort of solid."

She applauds Mbeki's government for not following Mugabe down the route of nationalising assets, and for lifting so many black people into the middle class. "But it's impossible for me to forgive his Aids denialism. It's been a disaster. His so-called silent diplomacy on Mugabe has been a disaster. The crime situation is pretty disastrous, and that's mainly because of unemployment," she said.

And although the government spends generously on education, the education system is "pretty awful".

"And I don't think the government spent nearly enough when it came into power on training people. I mean, we've got an acute shortage of engineers, architects, but also mechanics - ordinary people to fix the lights and do the plumbing.

"The health system and the public hospitals are a disaster. And retaining Manto Tshabalala-Msimang as a minister of health is an absolute disgrace," she says, "given her record, the criminal charge from Botswana and her attitude on Aids. We've lost about 1.5 million people who have died and 4 to 5 million are affected."

And of the cornerstones of our democracy, she says, "The press is under threat. The judiciary is under threat with this whole Judge John Hlophe thing. To my great distress, they didn't kick him out. Hlophe's not fit to be a judge."



The end is nigh where Mbeki is concerned, in her view. "I think Zuma's got a better chance. Not that I approve of that either."

It's almost 20 years since Suzman retired from political life, but she still lives and breathes it, even if it's from the armchair of her Illovo home.

She's still a member of the Democratic Alliance - "although I don't agree with everything they do". "It's just the physical energy that I don't have any longer to get exuberant about these things."

Not even about the "unlikeable" (controversial writer) Suresh Roberts, I wonder, who viciously attacked her with his pen earlier this year? "No, I really have nothing to say about him. I just think he's not important."

And so she continues, opining as passionately as she always did.

For a woman not far off 90, she's doing remarkably well. She plays bridge twice a week. She maintains a respectable social life, occasionally attending cinema and theatre ("but this damn frame is a nuisance, finding a corner for it, you know").

Her most recent outing took her to see the German film, The Lives of Others. She listens to Bandstand on the radio each Saturday evening, enjoying 1940 replays. "And that makes me very sad, you know. I used to be a very good dancer."

No complaints, she says. And few regrets. "Only that I didn't ever become a better golfer."

And there she pauses. It's time for her evening Scotch.