Smuts, Jan Christiaan

I

Introduction

Smuts, Jan Christiaan (1870-1950), South African statesman, Boer general in the South African War against Britain, leader of the post-war policy of conciliation, member of the British Imperial War Cabinet in both World Wars, founding champion of the League of Nations, and Prime Minister of South Africa (1919-1924; 1939-1948).

II

Early Life

Smuts was born on May 24, 1870, near Malmesbury in the British-ruled Cape Colony (see Cape Province) where his Afrikaner family had farmed since the 18th century. He displayed remarkable intellectual ability at school and won a scholarship to the University of Cambridge in England, where he graduated with distinction in law in 1894.

On his return to South Africa he was appointed attorney-general of the South African Republic (Transvaal) and played a key role in advising the government of Paul Kruger in the build up to the South African War with Britain. He helped shape the republic’s military strategy and took an active part as a commando general, especially during the guerrilla phase of the war. In 1902 he persuaded reluctant Boer commanders to sign a peace treaty with the British, and in the post-war period he joined with fellow-Transvaal general Louis Botha in proposing reconciliation with British South Africans as the only way to safeguard white supremacy. The policy was rewarded with favourable terms in the resulting Union of South Africa (1910). Smuts drafted the clause that excluded black Africans from the franchise throughout the Union except in the former Cape Colony.

III

The World Stage and National Politics

Smuts’s aptitude for war was revealed again in World War I, both in the South African capture of German South West Africa (Namibia) in 1915 and in leading the British East Africa campaign in German Tanganyika (Tanzania) in 1916 and 1917. He joined the British Imperial War Cabinet in 1917 and played an important role in the Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919. He argued unsuccessfully against the harsh reparations imposed on Germany as likely to lead to future conflict, and he drew up the outline of a constitution for the League of Nations. Later, following World War II, during which he also served in the British War Cabinet, he drafted several crucial clauses for the charter for the United Nations, including that on human rights.

His achievements in South African politics were not so illustrious. He succeeded Louis Botha as prime minister of the Union in 1919, but his five-year term was marred by his brutal suppression of any sign of rebellion, notably a millenarian sect in the eastern Cape, a Bondelswart protest in South West Africa, and a white mineworkers strike of 1922 in Johannesburg (see Rand Revolt). His ruthless use of the military left many dead in all three cases. The latter cost him the support of the white working-class electorate, especially the Afrikaners, who never forgave him. Characterized as the stooge of British and Jewish capital, Smuts lost the 1924 election to the Afrikaner National Party led by J. B. M. Hertzog. He betrayed any hope of a more liberal “native policy” towards black Africans when he fused his South African Party with Hertzog’s Nationalists to form the United Party in 1933, with Smuts the junior partner. This was the government whose Natives Representation Act of 1936 purged the last remaining non-white voters from the common voters’ role, depriving the majority black African population of any citizenship rights, with the result that no black African voted again in a South African election until 1994.

In 1939 he became prime minister again when Hertzog left the United Party over the issue of entry into World War II. Against strong opposition from Afrikaner nationalists, who preferred neutrality, Smuts secured a small parliamentary majority of just 13 to take South Africa into World War II on the Allied side. During the war years he eased some restrictions on the movement of black Africans in urban areas, not from principle, but as a pragmatic solution to a labour shortage in the absence of so many white workers serving in the war. This played into the hands of the Afrikaner nationalists who used the fear of “black swamping” to campaign against and defeat Smuts in the post-war election of 1948. Smuts died at his home near Pretoria on September 11, 1950.

IV

Legacy

Undoubtedly a great international statesman, Smuts was more highly regarded abroad than in his native South Africa. Though always retaining a loyal following among English-speaking South Africans, as much for his support of the British Empire as for his charm or intellectual ability, it was sometimes felt that he had betrayed the liberal alternative in matters of race. But Smuts was never a liberal on “native policy”; he helped shape some of the key pieces of segregationist legislation; he just was not quite so dogmatic as his rival nationalists. By the latter he was reviled for his support of “foreign” mining capitalists and thereby his betrayal of the Afrikaner cause. In the apartheid South Africa that followed 1948 this great white South African statesman was largely forgotten.