(Reviewer: Ralph Zulman, Vol. 71, No. 1, Pesach 2016)
In Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness, the author Richard Steyn succinctly summarizes the life of his subject as follows:
Jan Smuts was an Afrikaner of extraordinary intellect, versatility and resilience. A scholar, lawyer, guerilla leader, military commander, philosopher, scientist, political and international statesman, his uniqueness as a human being lay in his deep spirituality, his physical bravery, his love of nature, the Spartan quality of his personal life, and the pleasure he derived from simple things. Like Job, above all, he was a seeker; a lifelong searcher after religious truth and those eternal values that could be applied to politics and other spheres of human endeavor. Like Job, his faith was sorely tested throughout a tumultuous, 80 year-long life marred by personal tragedy, inner struggle and despair, and the bitter enmity of many Afrikaners who had once revered him.
Steyn, a graduate of Stellenbosch University, practiced as a lawyer before switching to journalism. From 1975, he edited the Natal Witness, and was editor-in-chief of The Star from 1990-95. He served as Standard Bank’s Director of Corporate Affairs and Communications from 1986-2001, before returning to writing and book reviewing. Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness is divided into two parts: ‘Life &Times’ (18 Chapters) and ‘The Man’ (28), in addition to an author’s note, prologue, notes, select bibliography, index and numerous photographs.
In a recent tribute, Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC wrote that a proper understanding of Smuts in terms of the political and human rights of black people has to be contrasted with the position that faced Mandela in the latter years of the last century. Smuts chose to “sidestep the problem” while Mandela, in different circumstances, “confronted it head on and was not distracted by other issues”. If Smuts “lacked the compassion and forbearance of a Lincoln or a Mandela, his other spiritual intellectual and moral qualities made him an exceptional human being”.
This is a man whom the current generation of South Africans has chosen to ignore or forget. The author believes that it is now time to revisit our history through the “life and times of one of our finest sons, of whom Churchill said: ‘He did not belong to any single state or nation. He fought for his own country, he thought for the whole world’”.
September 11 (or 9/11) was a day of a tragedy in New York. Many years earlier, on 11 September 1950, it was day upon which Smuts died of a heart attack at his home in Irene. He was 80 years old. His passing, as the Rand Daily Mail put it, was as “the toppling of an oak tree under which we have sheltered for generations”. On hearing the news, the then Prime Minister Dr D F Malan was visibly upset, so much so that that a cabinet minister told a reporter that he had never seen him so affected. The ‘Oubaas’, who had dominated South Africa’s political life for almost half a century, was no more. British Prime Minister Clement Attlee commented, “A light has gone out in the world of free men”. A visibly emotional Sir Winston Churchill told parliament that “in all the numerous fields in which he shone – warrior statesman, philosopher, philanthropist- Jan Smuts commands in his majestic career the admiration of all. There is no personal tragedy… in the close of so long and complete a life as this … we and lovers of freedom and civilization in every land salute his memory”.
Not all South Africans remembered the Oubaas with as much affection. Die Transvaaler wrote: “The outstanding tragedy was that he stood entirely apart from the struggle and emergence of his own people”. It was, however, obliged to concede that he served the world “with distinction”.
The Rand Daily Mail commented editorially that that no one had been invited to speak on national radio on behalf of South Africa’s million 8 ‘natives’.
Steyn writes that Smuts and Mandela were two men who “left deep footprints on the sands of time.” Furthermore, “Mandela has rightly been canonized for seizing the opportunity to bring South Africans of all races together for the first time in his country’s history. But Jan Smuts, of an earlier time and in different circumstances, also deserves an honored place in our pantheon of heroes.”
Jan Christiaan Smuts was born on 24 May 1870 on the farm Bovenplaas, Riebeck West. A frail and sickly child, he grew up tending sheep and cattle and had no formal schooling until he was twelve. He was, “A solitary contemplative soul who much preferred reading his books to playing games with his fellows, when he went home for the holidays, his parents often found him wandering around the farm, lost in contemplation.”
Smuts spent only four years at school instead of the usual seven and passed out second in the Colony’s standard eight examinations in 1886 at the age of 16. He then went to Stellenbosch to matriculate (which he did with distinction) and thereafter to study for a degree at the town’s Victoria College. There, he was painfully shy and kept away from other students, who regarded him as aloof. He began courting the girl he was eventually to marry, Sybella Margaretha Krige (better known as Isie). He started to show an interest in politics and Afrikaner unity, and commended Rhodes by echoing his views on the need for a unified Africa.
After graduating, Smuts was awarded the Ebden scholarship to Cambridge. It was probably at Cambridge that he became inspired by the notion of an Afrikaner-led empire in southern Africa stretching from Table Bay to the Zambesi. His achievements in the law finals were spectacular. He became the first person at Cambridge to take the parts of the Law Tripos in the same year and was placed first with distinction in each.
In June 1895, Smuts returned home to find a faithful and welcoming Isie on the quayside to meet him. Her parents were unable to pay for her medical studies and she was forced to take a lowly paid job as a country school teacher. It was some time before her impecunious husband-to-be was earning enough money for them to marry (which they did in 1897).
Smuts settled in Cape Town, where he set up practice as barrister but, despite his “stellar reputation”, he found briefs hard to come by. According to his biographer FS Crafford, the reason for this was his austere personality.
Smuts was fervently nationalistic. Though sympathetic to the ideals of the Transvalers, however, he regarded Paul Kruger as “narrow-minded and inward looking and too disposed to employ Hollanders instead of Afrikaners.” Rhodes, by contrast, offered “an inspiring vision of a greater, united nation of Afrikaners”. Smuts was warned by his fellow Afrikaners that Rhodes was not to be trusted. The Jameson Raid laid bare Rhodes’s ‘machinations’, and Smuts found himself to be in the ‘quick-sands’. He then joined John X Merriman on an anti-Rhodes platform, where the two denounced the “Englishman’s duplicity.” Thereafter, he renounced his British citizenship and “threw in his lot with his fellow Afrikaners in the north”.
At the young age of 28, Smuts was appointed as Transvaal’s Attorney General and he and Isie moved to Pretoria. He drew extremely close to Kruger; the two men were “hardly different in character.” Despite discussions with Milner, who had been sent to South Africa in 1897 in the aftermath of the Jameson Raid, “To universal astonishment – war broke out between the two Boer Republics and the ‘all-powerful British Empire.” The war lasted three years, and although eventually defeated, the Boers “[captured] the imagination of the watching world” and inflicted “lasting damage on British imperial prestige and self-confidence.” Chapters 4 to 6 (entitled ‘The Boer Strategist’, ‘Fighting the British’ and ‘Aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War’) deal with Smuts’ role in the war.
Smuts was, by common consent, the architect and designer of the Union of South Africa, with his “painstaking handiwork” in this regard coming together on 31 May 1910, shortly after his fortieth birthday. There was no man alive that he admired more than Prime Minister Louis Botha, his fellow Boer leader, although their characters were different in every respect. Smuts was much more dominant in parliament than Botha. In 1915, the first five-year term of the Union Parliament came to an end. That year’s election was a bitter affair, which left its mark on him.
The atmosphere of peace and goodwill which accompanied the birth of Union was short-lived. Among the issues was the ‘Indian question’ and strikes. Smuts succeeded in putting down a rebellion by miners, and earned much praise for his successful role in the defeat of Germany in German South West Africa in 1914/5. Within a month of his arrival in Mombasa, he was able to transform the military situation in German East Africa, and by January 1917, he had accomplished what the British government wanted him to do there. Smuts, like Churchill believed that the way to make history was to write it oneself. He declared that “… South Africa, instead of being a small puny country, gnawing at its own entrails, will have a larger freedom and a better life and will become the great country which is its destiny.”
Smuts was given a “rapturous reception” in London. In 1918, he was made a Privy Councilor and Companion of Honour by the King and presided over an Irish Convention (he also, as a private citizen under the pseudonym ‘Mr Smith’, met with the Sinn Fein leadership). With the war at an end, he resigned from the British war cabinet and went to Paris to represent South Africa at the Peace Conference. The Conference eventually resolved, in terms of a formula devised by Smuts, to separate the territories to be assigned to the League of Nations into ‘A’,’B’ and ‘C’ mandates. South West Africa fell into category ‘C’ and was entrusted to South Africa on terms which amounted to virtual annexation. In 1921, he attended the Imperial Conference, where his most “pressing purpose” was to settle the status of the Dominions.
On 27 August 1919, Louis Botha died, and Smuts, at the age of 49, became South Africa’s new prime minister. In early March 1920, South Africa held another general election, and Smuts’ South African Party government was re-elected with a slender majority. Smuts called another general election in 1921, securing what the UK hailed as a “resounding victory”. The victory was, however, a ‘pyrrhic’ one.
The forcible end to a mining strike in 1920, in which eleven African miners were killed and 120 injured, was “a prelude to even greater conflict.” In late 1921, the Chamber of Mines announced plans to do away with the colour-bar in semi-skilled jobs. The following year, mobilizing a 20 000-strong security force, Smuts saved the country from anarchy around the Reef as strikers picketed mines and threatened ‘scabs’. The strikers were driven relentlessly from their strongholds. 43 members of the army, 21 policemen and 81 civilians lost their lives in the fighting and 650 civilians were injured. Around this time, Smuts made an attempt to draw Rhodesia into the Union as a fifth province but failed, with white Rhodesians voting against it by a narrow margin of 2785 votes.
In 1923, Smuts attended what was to be his last Imperial Conference. At home, without consulting his cabinet or party, he resigned and called a general election. The SAP was badly beaten and Smuts lost his seat. At the age of 54, he found himself to be a prophet without honour in his own country, “even in his own Transvaal bailiwick”. He had been prime minister for a little over five years.
Although politically frustrating, the years 1924-1933 were some of the most “fulfilling and productive of Smuts’ life.” He found time to read, think and write, completing his book, Holism and Evolution. Albert Einstein, who read it, wrote that there were “two mental constructs that would direct human thinking in the next millennium: his own theory of relativity and Smuts’ theory of relativity”. (By contrast former United Party member Dr Bernard Friedman, among others, was “trenchant in his criticism of Smuts as a political leader and scornful of his holistic philosophy.”) In 1929, disillusioned at the thought of having to spend another five years on the opposition benches, Smuts took refuge in solitary walking, plant collecting and reading and – as always – thinking. His favorite hobby was the study of botany. According to Dr Poole Evans, he was the first political leader to discover the vital role that grasses play in the life of a country.
Smuts was much in demand as a public speaker across the United Kingdom and North America. Showered with academic and civic honours, he embarked, in 1930, on a tour of America and Canada, giving 26 addresses in 18 days in support of the Jewish cause in Palestine and the embattled League of Nations. He left for home “exhausted but happy”. On board ship he learned “to his consternation that the government had introduced a Quota Bill to restrict Jewish immigration to South Africa; worse still, his entire SAP caucus, with the exception of five Jewish members and two others had supported the Second Reading”. Arriving at Parliament during the Third Reading, an infuriated Smuts took his party to task so effectively that during the final division of the Bill, every SAP MP voted against it. Government members taunted him for being the “King of the Jews” (see also Crafford – Jan Smuts, p314). While the Quota Bill was being fought, Smuts received what he regarded as the greatest honour in his life – an invitation to preside over the Centenary Meeting in London of the Association for the Advancement of Science in September 1931.
Soon after the 1929 election, economic depression swept South Africa and the rest of the world. Smuts took office under J B M Hertzog as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice. The Hertzog-Smuts coalition “held together for six years, largely because of Smuts’ determination to keep Afrikaners and English South Africans together in the common interest”. Addressing the House of Assembly on 4 September 1939, Hertzog claimed that in going to war, Germany was “only trying to recover from the humiliation of Versailles” and that therefore, South Africa should “remain neutral unless the Union’s interests were directly threatened.” Smuts’ understanding of world affairs, by contrast, brought home to him that neutrality was never going to be an option for South Africa. He told the house that Hitler was intent on world domination. Hertzog’s motion that South Africa remain neutral was defeated 80-67, whereupon he resigned and Smuts was called upon to form a new government. This he did “without great enthusiasm”. Aged nearly 70, he was prime minister of South Africa once again.
The nation was divided. Oswald Pirow, Hertzog’s Minister of Defence, was pro-Nazi, and many die-hards opposed to the war joined him or the more militant Ossewa Brandwag. In 1940, Hertzog and Malan formed a new Herenigde Nationale Party/ Volksparty. The 1943 election became a battle between Smuts and Malan, Herzog having died earlier. The election of 110 pro-war MPs against 43 for the anti-war parties gave Smuts “his most emphatic mandate ever”. In 1945, Smuts signed the UN Charter in San Francisco. The visit in 1947 of King George V1 and Queen Elizabeth and their two daughters offered him “a welcome distraction from his domestic difficulties”.
Mustering as much energy as he could, Smuts approached the general election in May 1948 over confidently. The result came as “a stunning shock to the Nationalists as much as to Smuts himself”. He lost his seat in Standerton, by 224 votes. Malan came to power with less than 40 percent of the total vote. Smuts determined to “soldier on.”
Smuts loved the land and acquired several farms. Doornkloof, at Irene on the outskirts of Pretoria he treasured most. It was an “anchorage, a refuge where he could set aside his onerous political burdens and do what he loved best – commune with nature.” There, he led a patriarchal Afrikaner life. The house was completely unmodernised and “always gloriously untidy”. On 11 September 1950, accompanied by Isie, “he went on his last drive.” After supper that evening, while being helped into bed by his daughters, he “slumped forward and lost consciousness.”
The offer by the Malan government of a state funeral was declined in favor of a military ceremony. A bilingual funeral service was conducted.
Smuts’ defining characteristic was his intellect. He possessed “not only a daunting intelligence but a photographic memory”. Another of his outstanding qualities was his physical courage. In the author’s opinion, “whatever present-day critics of Smuts, with the benefit of hindsight, might say of him, both friend and foe agreed that his readiness to bear the burden of leadership throughout his long life, despite soul-tormenting personal challenges and setbacks, was simply astonishing. [He] never lost the desire or determination to be of service to his country.”
Spirituality (his proficiency in Greek enabled him to read the New Testament in its original form) was the element of Smut’s character that distinguished him from most of his peers. As with his politics, his religious beliefs gave rise to public controversy and drew criticism from his enemies. He never yielded to despair. Regarding the opposite sex, he once confessed that he had a weakness for women, not in “the sexual sense but from some inner affinity and appeal”.
Smuts’s own instincts were paternalistic and pragmatic. He foresaw that a future South Africa faced two fundamental problems: white disunity and a white policy towards other races. A practical compromise on race was always to elude him.
Smuts had a long-lasting friendship with Chaim Weitzman, a founder and first president of Israel, and he had been a driving force behind the Balfour Declaration of 1917. In a letter to Weitzman in 1944, Smuts commiserated with him over the inability of the Jews to establish their homeland, saying that Arab pressure was forcing the British government to move slowly. In May 1947, he responded to a “sad letter” from Weitzman that much as he (Smuts) longed for an undivided Palestine, partition seemed to be the only way out. On the eve of his election defeat in 1948, Smuts announced South Africa’s recognition of the state of Israel – ensuring that it was among the first countries to do so. Much against his family’s wishes, the ailing Smuts journeyed to London by air to speak at a dinner in honour of Weitzman and launch an appeal for funds to plant a forest in Israel to be named after him. He paid tribute to Weitzman and his achievement of leading his people back to their ancient home, something which bore comparison to Moses.
Steyn fittingly concludes his book as follows: “While many of his countrymen derided him for being an Englishman at heart, in Britain and around the world, General Smuts was revered for being a true and patriotic Afrikaner – the finest example of his tribe.”
Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness provides a detailed, interesting and insightful overview of the life of a man who played so vital part in the history of South Africa. It is highly recommended for all those interested in learning more about this remarkable individual.
Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness by Richard Steyn, Jonathan Ball Publishers, Johannesburg & Cape Town, 2015.
Mr Justice Ralph Zulman, a long-serving member of the editorial board of Jewish Affairs and a frequent contributor to its Reviews pages, is a former Judge of the Appeal Court of South Africa.
