Mrs Helen Suzman turns 90 on 7th November, less than a fortnight from now. She has this year come in for the usual quota of small-minded attacks, none of which can diminish her illustrious track record. After one such attack Des Lindberg wrote, ‘For Suzman to have dared to offer the white electorate the possibility of escaping from the claustrophobic South African blockhouse without perishing was inventive, reassuring, and empowering.’

Her long fight for justice began at the South African Institute of Race Relations more than 50 years ago, when the Smuts government in 1946 appointed a commission of enquiry under a former minister of native affairs and chief justice, Henry Fagan, into laws affecting Africans in urban areas. Smuts had acknowledged that urbanisation was unstoppable: ‘You might as well try to sweep the ocean back with a broom.’

The Institute commissioned Suzman and Ellison Kahn (who died earlier this month), both lecturers at Wits, to prepare a submission on its behalf. She the economist and he the lawyer were an inspired combination. Wrote Suzman, ‘It took us about six months and during that time I learned a great deal more about the severe restrictions on the mobility of South African blacks and the difficulties they had in leading family lives and earning a living. I was appalled. It was this experience that brought me into politics.’

The submission to the Fagan Commission made a number of proposals fundamentally at variance with the thrust of policy on urban Africans, which they said was damaging race relations and ‘flying in the face of democracy and freedom’. The proposals included recognition of the permanent urbanisation of Africans on a family basis with a right to acquire freehold land, gradual elimination of the migratory labour system, compulsory primary education, and statutory recognition of African trade unions.

The pass laws were ‘economically and morally indefensible’, bewildering even to the trained lawyer, futile anyway, and should be abolished. The African reserves should be developed as a source of livelihood for a settled stable African peasantry rather than as reservoirs of labour. Suzman and Kahn also recognised, however, that not even utmost development of the reserves would enable them to provide an adequate standard of living. Many of their people should therefore be allowed to move into mining, commerce, and industry in the urban areas.

The Suzman/Kahn memorandum had a big impact on Fagan. His commission reported that legislation since 1920 had been based on the ‘untenable proposition’ that urban Africans were ‘all temporary migrants’. In reality, the urban areas contained not only migrant workers but also ‘a settled permanent native population’. Moreover, Fagan said, ‘the movement [of blacks] from country to town has a background of economic necessity [which] cannot be stopped or turned in the opposite direction’.

But the general election in 1948 saw Smuts defeated and DF Malan’s National Party (NP) elected to power. Reverse the flow of blacks from country to town is precisely what the NP tried to do, especially after Hendrik Verwoerd became minister of native affairs in 1950. The NP appointed its own commission under Professor FR Tomlinson, which reported a few years later that substantial territorial separation between black and white was still possible - provided massive resources went into the reserves. This condition was never fulfilled. The Nationalists wanted apartheid on the cheap.

Not until PW Botha repealed the pass laws in 1986 did the NP finally bow to the fundamental reality that Suzman, Kahn, and Fagan had identified nearly 40 years before. In the intervening years millions were arrested and imprisoned under the pass laws in cruel attempts to put a stop to black urbanisation. Seldom can a government anywhere have tried so relentlessly to do the impossible despite all the evidence that it was impossible. The consequences – skewed land ownership, huge housing backlogs, and rural poverty among them - are still with us.

Suzman is celebrated for her parliamentary career, her visits to prisons, her battle for human rights, her defence of the rule of law, and for the innumerable ways in which she fought the inhumanity that was apartheid. But she was right not only on the moral and human issues. She was right also on the demographic and economic issues.