In No Uncertain Terms

Helen Suzman’s In No Uncertain Terms is the sort of political memoir that makes modern political autobiographies look like heavily sanitised LinkedIn posts written by committee. Here, instead, is a woman who spent decades irritating almost everybody in South African politics with the deeply unfashionable habit of saying exactly what she thought, often in rooms where saying such things was considered socially inconvenient, professionally catastrophic, or technically illegal.

Suzman was, for many years, effectively the lone parliamentary voice openly challenging apartheid from within the South African system itself. Which sounds noble and cinematic in retrospect, but at the time mostly involved endless hostility, political isolation, angry speeches, and large numbers of people wishing she would please stop asking awkward questions. The title is therefore less a clever flourish and more an administrative summary of her entire personality.

This is not a soft-focus memoir of tea with statesmen and reflective walks through history. It is sharp, opinionated, dryly funny and occasionally gloriously exasperated. Suzman writes like somebody who spent years surviving hostile chambers by weaponising intelligence and sarcasm. Readers hoping for vague diplomatic niceties may instead find themselves enjoying accounts of political trench warfare conducted through committee meetings, parliamentary procedure and sheer stubbornness.

There is also something wonderfully old-world about the book itself. Published in 1994, right as South Africa was undergoing immense transformation, it sits at a strange historical crossroads. The old order was collapsing, the new one was still uncertain, and Suzman had somehow lived long enough to see many of the people who dismissed or attacked her eventually pretend they had agreed with her all along. History has a habit of doing that.

As an object, this Jonathan Ball Publishers edition has the reassuring seriousness of a proper political memoir from the pre-digital age. No influencer branding. No “lessons for leadership.” No chapter titles involving the word “journey.” Just several hundred pages of somebody extremely articulate explaining how a deeply divided country functioned behind closed doors.

Condition is Good, which in political memoir terms probably means it has survived several decades without being hurled across a room during an argument about sanctions, constitutional reform, or South African electoral politics. A solid copy from the ever-unpredictable shelves of Crappy Old Books, where books about moral courage sit quite happily beside damp railway timetables and inexplicable 1970s craft manuals.

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