Deceased anti-Apartheid activist, Helen Suzman, was critical of South African government

Alex Perry:

I met Suzman for tea in her lush garden in her Johannesburg home in June last year. She was, she said, "slowly fading away," tinnitus in her ears making her head "ring like a church bell." But, as I hoped, she was still feisty and outspoken. We chatted about the old days, about how she had managed to negotiate a visit to meet Mandela in prison on Robben Island off Cape Town in 1967, about what had made him such a unifying leader. Inevitably, that drew comparisons with today's A.N.C. "[Thabo] Mbeki [Mandela's successor as president, who was forced out of office by his own party] has made so many bad decisions," she said. "It's been an enormous disappointment."

She listed Mbeki's questioning of the link between HIV and AIDS, his inept ministers, corruption that she said "was everywhere you look," his support for Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe ("so distressing") and the black empowerment program which, while intended to help those discriminated against under apartheid, has, she claimed, succeeded only in making a few of the politically connected very rich, and had "driven one million white South Africans out of the country, skilled people we needed."

"Power does funny things to people," she said, "and the leadership of the A.N.C. went in the wrong direction. There was this thirst for revenge. And so it's all still based on color. People now wonder what the point is of educating their children to be a doctor or an engineer if the job will go to someone less qualified. They [the A.N.C.] have been unable to move on from the past: everything has a racial background. If I criticize Mbeki because of his disastrous policies on AIDS, it is because I am a racist."