Dear Editor 

I was surprised to note in ANC ­parliamentary spokesperson Moloto Mothapo's intended appraisal of Helen Suzman's political career ("Suzman was against apartheid, but she was not for liberation", M&G, April 26) that I was quoted in such a way as to appear to have cast the long-standing MP for Houghton in a damning light. Mothapo wrote: ‘The indisputable fact is that Suzman served in a discredited political system .... Michael Morris, in Apartheid: The [sic] Illustrated History, eloquently describes her as a "token in itself of the political complacency of the bulk of white society".'

In vivid contrast, what is actually written (in Apartheid, An Illustrated History) is: "In 1962, when the outspoken liberal Helen Suzman entered Parliament for the first of her 13 years as the sole representative of the Progressive Party - a token in itself of the political complacency of the bulk of white society - she noted: ‘I am ... the only person in this House apparently who belongs to a party that does not have to indulge in swart gevaar [black menace] tactics ... It seems to me that my party is the only party in this country [apart from the unrepresented Liberal Party] which does not shake with fear at the implications of accepting South Africa as what it is, and that ... is a multi-racial country.'

Either a lapse of attention led to Mothapo's misreading the plainly meant parenthetical clause in question, or he chose, cynically and mischievously, to misuse my text.

Neither is excusable.

Michael Morris

Cape Town 

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