Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests.

Given that much of liberal thought in South Africa stands centre stage along with the life history of Helen Suzman, allow me to start with a quote by one of South Africa’s other great liberals, Alan Paton: “Liberalism is not a creed of this or any century. It is a generosity of spirit, a tolerance of others, an understanding of otherness, a commitment to the rule of law, an abhorrence of authoritarianism, a love of freedom”.

These words embody the life and values of Helen Suzman. In these words lie an eternity of wisdom related to the myriad challenges liberalism faces both at home and abroad. Equally, it contains an eternity of wisdom about what liberalism is and what it is not. It contains the very essence of where liberalism can make its greatest contribution in the 21st century – in its message of tolerance, not ideological predispositions for their own sake. There has never been a time in the history of the world when the core tenet of liberalism was more sorely needed to buttress the many strains in global, and even local, relations than liberalism’s core message of tolerance.

This exhibition was opened a few weeks ago with, amongst other goodwill wishes, a beautiful letter of dedication from former President Nelson Mandela and his wife Graça Machel. In it they paid an unstinting tribute to Helen’s life – a life that speaks so forcefully from the pictures and documents in this exhibition. A life aptly captioned – ‘Helen Suzman – Fighter for Human Rights’.

Helen was indeed a fighter for human rights during the darkest hour of apartheid and is to this day. I can assure you that the Foundation that bears her name will continue to do so and have a renewed focus in this area.

In his foreword to Helen Suzman’s memoirs ‘In No Uncertain Terms’¹, then president of the African National Congress (ANC) and future president of a newly democratic South Africa, Nelson Mandela, paid the following glowing tribute to Helen Suzman: “This book relives a magnificent battle against apartheid. Without apologizing for her using the South African parliamentary process, Helen’s participation in opposing the complete absence of democracy in South Africa under Nationalist Party rule must be applauded. This book provides extraordinary historical facts and a succinct account of the political process contained within the apartheid machinery. I recall that on one of her many visits to Robben Island I engaged Helen on the subject of beginning a process for the early release of all the political prisoners. In 1915, the Afrikaner rebel leader Christiaan de Wet had been released before he had served his full sentence for having committed high treason. I told her that his crimes had been more serious than the collective crimes of any individual serving a life sentence after the Rivonia Trial. He had been responsible for the deaths of 300 people and the military occupation of several areas in the Orange Free State. He had also caused damage to government property amounting to more than half a million pounds. I felt that the Rivonia trialists had been sentenced to life for struggling against apartheid rule without the benefit of any privilege of access to the machine of government, as had de Wet. She replied in the tone that this book suggests of her strength and her complete understanding of the strategies of the Nationalist Party government. She said to me, ‘There is a vast difference between your case and that of de Wet. The government could afford to release de Wet because his rebellion had been crushed. Yours is in the future’. I believe that this book should be read by all interested in South Africa as a political history and as an account of the political courage of a remarkable woman”.

We are all here this evening not only to mark the closing of this exhibition dedicated to the remarkable woman of whom Mandela speaks, but also to celebrate her and her lively and living legacy I hope to serve - always placing the interests of the Foundation that bears her name and the values it aims to protect first.

I have an often-macabre sense of observing Kafkaseque story lines when confronted by some of the worst aspects of South Africa’s apartheid past. It is with a sense of near bewilderment that I read Helen’s Solo Years², incredulously looking at the vagaries of the system she fought, through her eyes, with the benefit of considerable historical distance.

Whilst my generation straddles the dying days of apartheid and the dramatic birth of a new democratic dispensation, and therefore has some basic knowledge of apartheid, entire generations of born-free South Africans will need reminding of many aspects of our past such as Helen Suzman’s remarkable lonely and solid opposition within a system that she could easily have chosen not to engage. To those who so often try to denigrate Helen’s contribution I can simply say that Helen could easily, to paraphrase Robert Frost, have opted not to embark on the road less traveled, thereby leaving the history of her country the poorer and the lives of many prisoners on Robben Island untouched by her remarkable courage against the former oppressive regime.

Being so young during those dark days, matriculating in the year of former president Nelson Mandela’s release, the only vivid recollections I have of the former regime is watching the signing of the Nkomati accord as part of ‘solid Christian national education’ in 1985, and, as a then standard six pupil, watching the news in 1986 with the ever wagging finger of Helen’s self-confessed bete noir PW Botha declaring consecutive states of emergency. This was always accompanied by the sight of eerily yellow caspirs in the townships and rubber and real bullets, shattering the lives of countless South Africans and simultaneously the tranquil bastions of my own unusual Afrikaner household.

Little did I then realise that I would have the enormous privilege of serving in a fully democratic Parliament for a period during the birth of our new democracy.

Before saying anything relevant to the Foundation or its future, I would like to thank Helen for the endless support, encouragement and insights offered during my political career in Parliament.

From the introspection that surrounded the formation of the Democratic Alliance (DA), to my opposition to floor-crossing, to both our opposition to the death penalty, to the many complex issues inherent in my weighing a return to politics, albeit briefly, in 2004, the quiet guidance of Helen Suzman stands central amongst a bouquet of my own memories… the memories of an ‘accidental politician’. My own path to politics could not have been more different from Helen’s. I was a proverbial ‘policy-wonk’ parachuted into party politics by current DA Leader Tony Leon and unaccustomed to the complex corridors of constituency work in a PR system let alone the vagaries of party political palace intrigue.

Among my numerous memories of Helen, two stand out in memory – one very recent.

During the height of South Africa’s formal investigations into the country’s Strategic Defence Procurement Programme and the wrangling around it in the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA), I had a brief interlude in Johannesburg one weekend where I accompanied Helen and a friend on a trip to the Apartheid museum near Gold Reef City. After receiving my ‘black’ identity ticket, I finally made my way through the various separate entrances and rejoined Helen, who had already discovered that the role played by liberals in the anti-apartheid struggle had nearly been successfully airbrushed out of history – except for a token picture of her. Helen has subsequently, in typically feisty fashion, had this travesty corrected.

I recall Helen taking me by the hand to a wall that contained an endless list of apartheid-era legislation. She observed: “And you think you are having a difficult time in SCOPA, look at that wall! I had to fight every single piece of this legislation by myself!” Needless to say I returned to SCOPA that Monday much humbled by Helen’s experience.

More recently, I had the opportunity of revisiting Robben Island as part of a fellowship from UCT and Duke Universities. Our tour guide, the impressive former prisoner Modise Phekonyane, did not realise what an impact his actions would have on me. As we approached former president Nelson Mandela’s cell I stood transfixed initially as he handed me the key to unlock the cell. I cannot find adequate words for the rush of feelings that overpowered me in that single instant – immeasurable sadness for the suffering in that cell, immense anger at the former regime, pride for the courage of Helen Suzman in defying the authorities and visiting these cells. Modise paid tribute to Helen and told our group that whilst the international aid agencies were mostly kept at the gates of Robben Island, Helen’s lone figure peering into their cells served as a reminder that they had not been forgotten and that their plight was being addressed with whatever means Helen had at her disposal.

There can be no doubt that Helen made a difference to the lives of the prisoners on Robben Island. In the archive of Nelson Mandela – captured in ‘A Prisoner in the Garden’, there are clear indications that the former regime’s prison authorities tried their damnedest to keep Mandela’s correspondence to her away from Helen Suzman.

Within the broad domain of the intellectual discourse in contemporary South Africa, there are at least four core challenges liberals and liberalism face:

• Ensuring that Helen Suzman and her wonderful contribution to our country’s history of liberation will never be forgotten, along with contributions by other great liberals such as Colin Eglin, Peter Brown and Alan Paton, amongst others;
• Ensuring a lively liberal presence in society broadly and in civil society in particular (beyond the reach of narrow party politics) to remind all of us that there are liberals who presided over our transition to democracy in all organisations and in all walks of life in South Africa;
• Demonstrating liberalism’s continued relevance in a society grappling with the legacy of apartheid and aiming to consolidate liberal democracy under a liberal democratic constitution – thereby striving to reconcile individualist-centred core beliefs with redistribution and egalitarian social justice;
• Finding a sound intellectual bridge between the individual and the collective and between freedom and equality and applying it in practical terms to our complex society.

None of these are easy tasks and they pose intellectual questions and predicaments that have engaged liberal thinkers such as Kant, Spinoza, Rawls and Isiah Berlin, amongst others, for centuries. But they are tasks worthy of the challenge they pose. Tasks that may result in the rousing reward of inculcating a value-system infused with liberal ideas that is reconciled, whether perfectly or imperfectly, with the core tenets of the Freedom Charter in the final South African Constitution.

It can never be in the interests of the liberal discourse to engage in a localised version of a binary Bush-like doctrine of being ‘with us’ or ‘against us’ in aiming to further this dialogue of values. Indeed one can argue that it would be the exact antithesis of liberal tolerance to do so.

The challenge for the liberal cause is to capture the imagination of current and future leaders with solid contributions to contemporary policy challenges in South Africa’s national discourse and not merely to identify ‘enemies’ or ‘inherently illiberal’ opponents. This is an unhelpful and self-defeating labeling process that does little to further a dialogue of values and societal discourse about where we are in consolidating liberal democracy in South Africa.

There has rarely been a time in our country’s history when there has been a greater need for civil society to contribute not only to the ongoing project of the consolidation of our fragile newly-won democracy, but also to the system of values that will shape the future direction of our collective destiny as South Africans.

In a thoughtful paper on the role of civil society that is proving to be prescient of many of the challenges we face, Prof. Adam Habib highlights the need for a plurality of civil society to be recognised and internalized:

“These diverse roles and functions undertaken by different elements of civil society, then collectively create the adversarial and collaborative relationships, the push and pull effects which sometimes assist and other times compel the state to meet its obligations and responsibilities to its citizenry. The plurality of civil society and the diverse sets of relations it engenders with the state is thus the best guarantee for the consolidation of democracy in South Africa”.³

There can be no doubt that civil society must play a prominent role in acting as a counterweight by accommodating diverse views in an environment that is still relatively hostile to differences of opinion.

It is my intention, with your support and commitment to the values for which Helen fought so courageously, to ensure that The Helen Suzman Foundation continues to play an ever-expanding role in civil society in pursuance of the liberal democratic values enshrined in the South African Constitution.

There can be no greater role to play than pursuing an infusion of constitutionally-inspired civic values that will cement the consolidation of our liberal democracy in often challenging political times. Indeed, civil society can only survive the numerous challenges confronting it with the active support of philanthropists, donors and all those, across party, class and race divides, that prize its role as part of a vibrant and growing democracy.

The core mission of The Helen Suzman Foundation will remain, largely, that which I inherit from my various predecessors, with certain strategic and measurable goal-driven differences. This mission of the HSF is founded on the following broad set of principles:

• Supporting South Africa’s government in the areas in which its policies are sound, responsive to public needs and likely to strengthen liberal democracy, and
• Remaining rigorously independent of any political party.

To this I would like to add:

• Supporting the building of a political culture, respectful of difference, that seeks tolerance as its primary value, including a tolerance on all sides of the political divide in South Africa, for the concept of alterations in power and clear respect for undisputed legitimate mandates;
• Continuing Helen’s ‘fight for human rights’ by focusing on the Bill of Rights and assiduously researching and tracking its progressive realisation through policy development, Constitutional Court rulings and service delivery priorities;
• Creating a strong liberal-values-centered agent of South African civil society that can contribute to an African Union-wide discourse on values and the role of liberal values in the consolidation of democracy on a continent slowly emerging from the ravages of war and civil strife.

In pursuing our strategic mission the core focus is on the expansion of liberal democratic thought and action.

There is a need, beyond mere labels and bland ideological checklists, to give a clear indication of what liberal dissent is comprised of. For liberalism to offer a credible societal critique, it must respect the moral high ground of the past but not abdicate its responsibilities to speak truth to power.

At the risk of pre-empting some aspects of future strategic discussions, the HSF will take its mandate forward by:

• Expanding its publishing activity to help to fill the large gap in vigorous public debate in South Africa. This may include:
  • Increasing the frequency with which Focus is published;
  • A greater utilization of web-based media to enhance publishing and host discussion forums on liberalism, South Africa’s transition and the entrenchment of liberal democracy and the Constitution;
  • The publication of longer-term research and more in-depth policy analysis beyond Focus and,
  • Where relevant to the core set of values, the development of formal submissions on policy and legislation before the South African Parliament and governance structures to enhance the voice of liberal contributions to specific policy dialogues where either these values, and/or the core values in the Constitution are at stake.
• Examining in-depth the dangers to open pluralist democracy and civic freedom in South Africa and in many other emerging and newly liberated societies and drawing out clearly comparative similarities and differences as an ‘early warning system’ for our collective democratic consolidation project.
• Exploring strategies for development and reform that are sustainable, compatible with individual freedom and that empower disadvantaged people to take control of their lives.
• Enhancing its relationships with the global liberal family and liberal institutes on the African continent to ensure a stronger global voice at a time when core aspects of the liberal belief system are potentially increasingly under threat as global intolerance seems to be an ‘easy sell’.
• Utilising Helen’s vast array of honourary doctorates from various institutions globally to enhance the research profile of the HSF.

There are a number of key and core strategic and tactical differences between furthering the cause of liberalism inside the political arena and inside broader civil society respectively. There is a clear distinction between the liberal cause inside active politics and the liberal cause outside of active party politics in society and civil society at large. Whilst the former has much to do with matters of ensuring political choice and the ultimate pursuit of political power, and many agents, including civil society, play a role in this complex process of democracy, the latter has to do with the role of infusing society with a set of values.

Politics is often the arena of crude power configurations whilst civil society is the arena in which a more coherent debate can arguably be had about values and their relative persuasiveness. In the arena of politics principles are often sacrificed in favour of power. In civil society the rallying cry is that principles and values are to be protected against all forms of power manipulations and/or contortions.

The battle for the entrenchment of liberal values in South Africa is neither a ‘groundwar’ nor an ‘airwar’ against a single identifiable ‘opponent’ – the ANC – though it is too often classified as such.

This is the easiest route. The more difficult road to travel is the one where one has to convince those who are hostile of the value of liberalism’s intellectual core.

The real challenge is in carving out a space for core values in a country where various ‘isms’ and ideologies, primarily ‘nationalisms’, stand centre-stage in the heart of the party political spectrum in different forms of ‘broad church’ style alliances.

This is the tragic inheritance of our complex past and it forms part of an incomplete transition that is not easily confronted in the party political arena where more heat than light often informs the highly adversarial relations between players.

Changing this often unproductive discourse requires the effort of many actors outside the political arena in civil society. As Van Zyl Slabbert said, it takes more than Parliamentary involvement to truly build Popper’s open society: “… Opposing a closed society in Parliament is a necessary but insufficient step towards creating the conditions for a more open society in South Africa. There are many other extra-Parliamentary initiatives playing an important role in this regard such as the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), The Helen Suzman Foundation (HSF), the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), organized labour, the South African National Non-Governmental Coalition (SANGOCO), the various Bar associations, universities, foreign foundations such as Ford, Carnegie, USAID, Rockefeller, DFID, Naumann, Adenauer, and Ebert, embassies and research organizations such as MarkData, Markinor and Research Surveys”.⁴

However, despite these distinctions there is one shared challenge confronting South Africa’s entire political elite, civil society and each and every citizen and it is this - to ask, and answer - honestly, the question of what it means to live in a constitutional democracy based on liberal democratic values and, perhaps, most importantly, whether those of us asking these questions of ourselves fundamentally believe in the set of values inherent in such a statement.

Furthermore, given that our Constitution is the product of the laborious birth of a founding charter forged by elected representatives comprising our first democratically elected Parliament, the question of values is never far away when there are debates about Constitutional amendment.

Undoubtedly our Constitution qualifies to serve as the fundamental law of our post-apartheid constitutional democracy and, as such, requires our collective eternal vigilance.

A negotiated constitutional pact cannot be undone or tampered with without unleashing a key debate about the values and principles underpinning our society. Did the transition create the mere veneer that we share core values or was there a true meeting of the minds? If not, what are the implications for our collective future and for the values we want our society to be built upon? If not, how do we continue to put our differences aside to pursue the common goal of a strong democracy that can not only assist our continent in building democracy but the entire world where peoples of different beliefs and opinions can see the example, and prospect, of making common cause. Surely when we cease to believe this ourselves we do immeasurable harm to a world desperate for a success on which to base its hope that difference can be accommodated and even celebrated as a strength.

We need to strive to inculcate the values of the South African constitution and carve them into the hearts and minds of entire generations of born-free South Africans of all races as the living legacy they can inherit from the troubled past of the land of their birth. If we succeed in this challenge under the banner of a liberal democratic constitution, there can be no more worthy tribute to generations of South Africans that included fellow travelers such as Helen Suzman and Nelson Mandela whose lives were joined despite the worst attempts of an oppressive state to keep them apart.

In launching the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory Project, former State President Nelson Mandela warned us against ‘forgetting’: “The history of our country is characterized by too much forgetting. A forgetting which served the powerful and dispossessed the weak. (Of course there are other forms of forgetting. As a very old man now I have been forced to make friends with forgetting.) One of our challenges as we build and extend democracy is the need to ensure that our youth know where we come from, what we have done to break the shackles of oppression, and how we have pursued the journey to freedom and dignity for all. We will fail our youth if we leave them in ignorance of what has given them the opportunities which they enjoy. At the same time, for those of us who are older and have lived through the transition from apartheid to democracy, the processes of remembering offer us healing and a means of respecting the many comrades who made it possible.”⁵

It is our duty as citizens to ensure that we never forget the remarkable story of our devastatingly complex history. Nor can we ever forget the role of South Africans of all races, classes and associations that contributed to the liberation of the country – in Helen’s words – with what they could from where they were with what they had at their disposal.

The challenge today is no different. It is a call to all of us to secure our democratic future. To quote Van Zyl Slabbert’s words: “The new South Africa is open enough to accommodate all kinds of liberals to help strengthen it and prevent it from becoming closed once again.”

In conclusion, all that I can promise Helen and all of you, the broad liberal community across South Africa, is to aim to do what Helen lived – what I can, from where I am with what I have in the furtherance of democratic consolidation in our beloved country under the proud and accommodating banner of tolerance and liberalism.

[1] Suzman, Helen (1993), In No Uncertain Terms, London: Sinclair-Stevenson (Reed Consumer Books Ltd).

[2] Helen Suzman’s Solo Years, a collection of speeches edited by Phyllis Lewsen, Jonathan Ball, 1991.

[3] Habib, A. (2003), State-Civil Society Relations in Post-Apartheid South Africa, RAU Sociology Seminar 2003/27, 10 October 2003.

[4] Slabbert, Van Zyl, (2006), ‘Threats and Challenges to South Africa becoming a More Open Society’, in Shain, M. (Ed.) Opposing Voices – Liberalism and Opposition in South Africa Today, Jonathan Ball Publishers, Johannesburg & Cape Town.

[5] Nelson Mandela, 21 September 2004, in A prisoner in the Garden – Opening Nelson Mandela’s Prison Archive, Penguin 2005.