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.