I meet Helen Suzman for lunch at the Inanda Club, an old-money haunt of manicured gardens and attentive service.

The woman who was for years one of South Africa’s best-known critics of apartheid has chosen to eat at the club’s Varandas restaurant, a thatched-roof cottage reminiscent of both Olde England and the African veldt that could only exist in Johannesburg. The food, as so often in Jo’burg, is Portuguese.

Suzman, now 88, called ahead to warn me she would be late, as she would be arriving from a reunion at her alma mater, the University of the Witswatersrand. “It’s Helen!” she shouted into her cellphone above the sound of her three barking dogs. The traffic might be bad, she said, as a swathe of suburban Johannesburg had been shut off for a racecar demonstration. I sit waiting, gazing out at the rolling lawn and listening to the incongruous sound of revving engines in the distance.

Suzman arrives on time, well-coiffed and chic in black-framed sunglasses and a white trouser-suit, but leaning on a cane. She orders a starter, chicken livers (”I just had a big tea”), but declines to join me in a drink. “It puts me to sleep immediately at lunchtime, but I never fail to have a Scotch every night.” She says she acquired the habit in childhood from her father, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania.

Suzman tells me about the reunion, which was for people who graduated 40 years ago or more. I ask her whether she met any old classmates. “Not one,” she exclaims, her voice rising plaintively. “Either all dead or emigrated.”

Apart from the routine disappointments of old age, Suzman is coping with the unique indignities of historical revisionism. As an MP for the tiny liberal opposition in the apartheid-era parliament, she harried the ruling National party for three and a half decades on issues ranging from the behaviour of the security services to the treatment of political prisoners.

She endured insults from her opponents (President P.W. Botha once called her “a vicious little cat”), but managed to put on the record official crimes and excesses that the press, under the government’s powers, could not report.

In 1997 then-president Nelson Mandela awarded Suzman the Order of Meritorious Service, South Africa’s highest honour. But his successor, Thabo Mbeki, has been less kind. In one of his characteristically acid weekly online letters last March, he attacked Suzman and other liberals by quoting the late African National Congress leader Oliver Tambo, who once disparaged Suzman’s middle class liberalism after she visited him when he was in exile in 1971.

“This sweet bird from the blood-stained south flew into Zambia,” Tambo said, “and sang a singularly sweet song: ‘I am opposed to apartheid; I am opposed to the isolation of South Africa; I am opposed to violence; I am opposed to guerrillas... ‘” Tambo later praised her and the record was corrected in a later edition of Mbeki’s weekly online letters, though not by the president himself.

Under Mbeki’s leadership the ANC have embraced their old Afrikaner oppressors, but tend to demonise the English-speaking moderates who worked for change within the apartheid system. Tony Leon, leader of the liberal opposition Democratic Alliance party, is routinely jeered in parliament. Mbeki shuns meetings with him.

After inquiring politely about me, Suzman asks why I wanted to meet her. I tell her that I want to hear why she thinks the English liberals have been seemingly squeezed out in the post-apartheid order.

“Airbrushed would be a better expression,” Suzman says sharply. After Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum opened in 2001, she castigated its organisers for ignoring the contribution of liberal writers such as Alan Paton and English-language newspapers such as the Rand Daily Mail. The exhibit contained a single photo of Suzman, “sort of down on the ground”, she says archly. “It’s now a bit better since I wrote my nasty letter, as is my wont.”

Outside South Africa, Suzman has been honoured for speaking out while most whites did nothing. She was made a honorary Dame of the British Empire in 1989 and was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

But while Suzman was travelling the world collecting honorary degrees, her South African critics point out, thousands of black anti-apartheid activists died violently, and often anonymously. Suzman opposed the imposition of economic sanctions and the ANC’s tactical use of violence, arguably two of the main factors that toppled apartheid. One recent letter-writer to Johannesburg’s Star newspaper attacked her as a hypocrite, saying she stank of “Chanel and manure”. When I ask her about the insult, she says wearily: “There was a Hate Helen week. I had written one of my letters criticising something of the ANC, which they can’t stand, you see.”

Warming to the topic, she defends the role liberal politics played in ending apartheid: “I think it sort of prepared a big section of the population for the changes that finally came.”

I tell her about a thought experiment that has preoccupied me since I moved to South Africa in 2003. Had I been a white South African, I say, I probably would have been a liberal rather than an ANC supporter. As an undergraduate at my US university in the 1980s, like thousands of other students I signed petitions urging my university to divest from South Africa. But I was uncomfortable with the ANC’s tactical support of violence and alliance with the Soviet Union.

And yet it was precisely sanctions and rising violence that forced the National Party to the negotiating table. Hasn’t history proved her, and me, wrong?

Suzman seems unperturbed: “There’s no doubt that sanctions were important,” she says, but she opposed them because the majority of people who lost their jobs as a result were black. President F.W. de Klerk, she claims, “could have stayed in power for another five to 10 years” at most. He would have shrunk from ordering the army to shoot his own people, she says. I feel Suzman has not answered my question: wasn’t it precisely violent rebellion in the black townships that pushed de Klerk toward compromise?

Suddenly a waiter appears at our table. Unprompted by either of us, he says: “It’s a blessing to me to see this woman in the shop.” We both fall silent. He goes on: “She has got a very good history, special to us as black people.” I wonder if he is angling for a bigger tip, but when I study his face for insincerity, I find none. He continues: “When you go back in history and try to watch these movies and TV to understand what is happening, you can see she is someone who played a very good role in our society.”

Suzman inquires after his age: 39. She looks uplifted by the encounter, but after he leaves she is dismissive. “He’s very unusual among young people,” she says, though older people whom she helped often stop her in public to thank her.

Suzman regrets having retired in 1989, one year before Mandela was released from jail. She later wrote an autobiography and played a minor role in the talks that prepared 1994’s election. A private citizen, she still makes occasional interventions in current affairs in what she calls her “nasty letters”.

She laments the quality of current parliamentary culture: “What I hate about the present parliament is the seats - there are so many absent - and the way they read speeches which have obviously been written by somebody else, and which they don’t feel strongly about,” she says. She also talks disapprovingly about the “roar of hatred” that ANC MPs emit when Leon speaks - worse, she claims, than the occasional anti-Semitic or anti-female heckling she faced.

I ask her what she makes of the scandal surrounding Jacob Zuma, Mbeki’s former deputy, whose arraignment on corruption and rape charges has bitterly divided the ruling alliance. “I make of it only one thing - that Mbeki is unpopular,” she says. She is dismissive of his series of public meetings held recently to quell discontent in some poor constituencies over the quality of public services. “I don’t think that fools anybody,” she exclaims. “I personally never kissed a baby.”

So does she feel as if her life’s work has been worth it? “Absolutely,” she says without hesitation. “There’s no doubt that South Africa is a much better place today than it was. There is no detention without trial, the pass laws are gone and South Africa is no longer a pariah nation. We’re back in international sport and the children in South Africa are getting to know each other thanks to a new education system.”

We talk briefly about Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and South Africa’s seeming diplomatic support for it. “I think the man is nuts,” Suzman says. She found the uproarious applause he received at Mbeki’s inauguration to a second term last year “terrifying”.

Our conversation turns to the state of the world beyond South Africa. Suzman criticises Tony Blair’s failed push for broader detention powers for terrorist suspects, which remind her of similar measures South Africa took in 1963. She quotes William Pitt: “Necessity is the excuse of every infringement of freedom,” she says. She is bleak about the future. “I think the next century’s going to be worse,” she says.

As sharp as Suzman is, we seem to have fallen into the kind of general-interest conversation I might have with any educated South African.

We finish our lunch, and she instructs me to keep an eye on my editors: She has been the victim of some bad headlines in the foreign press (one read “She Used to Fight the Whites, Now She Fights the Blacks”). Only when she stands do I remember I have been lunching with a frail old woman born in 1917. I help her up the dining-room steps; in turn she gamely offers me a lift to my car, which I decline.

Varandas, Inanda Club, Johannesburg

1 x Coca-Cola

1 x Windhoek lager

1 x chicken livers

1 x Chilean salmon

Total: R169.85