Suzman started her political career under the United Party’s umbrella. They were the official opposition to the National Party, who engineered, built, and maintained apartheid from 1948 to 1994. When Suzman voted against the Separate Amenities Bill in 1953, her first year in Parliament, she voted against party line. The United Party had decided to support the bill, which proposed separate and unequal amenities provided for blacks, coloreds (an all-encompassing group of people labeled thus because they were part-black, Indian, Malay, or Chinese), and whites.
She split with the party in 1959 over the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Bill, which introduced the concept of Bantustans – independent black rural homelands. The idea was to create two separate South Africas – one for the whites, and one for the blacks.
The Bill, later put into practice, led to gross abuse of Africans’ ability to live and work where they wanted and failed to take into account the reality of South African society – for example, the inter-relatedness of black and white economies and the class of urban Africans who had never lived in the rural areas. Bills such as these led to the government’s practice of uprooting thousands of urban-dwelling Africans, loading them into vans, and dumping them in the desert, miles from the city, with tents and without the means to provide water or food for themselves.
Suzman and a few others who split from the United Party started the Progressive Party, which opposed race discrimination and lobbied for a non-racial franchise. Nevertheless, they did propose that the franchise should be qualified on the basis of economic achievement or education, which would have disenfranchised many Africans initially. Although many African and white leaders of the resistance movements in South Africa appreciated all that Suzman had done for them, they did not agree about this “qualified” franchise. Later in life, Suzman also rejected the idea of a qualified franchise.
For thirteen years, from 1961-1974, Suzman was the only member of the Progressive Party in Parliament. By default, then, she became the “voice” for millions of South Africans who lacked the vote. For example, she was the one lone vote against South Africa’s ninety-day detention law. She wanted it to be so clear that she was the only one standing against this law that she requested Parliament to physically “divide” – which meant that she stood alone on one side of the room against a roomful of Nationalist and United M.P.s who voted the bill into effect.
