SMUTS, JAN CHRISTIAAN

Jan Christiaan Smuts (May 24, 1870-September 11, 1950), statesman, soldier and philosopher, was born at Bovenplaats, near Riebeek West in the Cape Colony. After graduating with honours from Victoria College, Stellenbosch, Smuts won the Ebden scholarship, which enabled him to enter Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1891. By the end of 1894, he had won unprecedented academic distinction in the law tripos, and in the honours examination of the Inns of Court. 

PHOTO CAPTION: Jan Christiaan Smuts. SOURCE: EA Library

On his return from England in 1895, he practiced at the Cape bar, wrote for the local press and actively supported C.J. Rhodes. After the Jameson Raid he altered his political allegiance. In 1897, he settled in Johannesburg and, in 1898, he was appointed State Attorney of the South African Republic. He improved the administration of justice and became involved in critical diplomatic negotiations with Britain. He decided that Sir Alfred Milner was determined to destroy the republic’s independence yet he urged Paul Kruger to try to prevent war. Smuts himself made a last bid for peace by directly approaching the British Agent. By September 1899 Smuts believed that war was unavoidable: he drafted a strategic plan and wrote a propaganda tract, “A Century of Wrong.”

During the Anglo-Boer War it was not only as an advisor and administrator that Smuts furthered the Boer cause. He also revealed himself as a man of action. He snatched £500,000 of republican gold and coin away from Pretoria before British forces entered the capital. In the field he proved an adept pupil of General J.H. de la Rey, with whom he operated in the Western Transvaal. From September 1901 until May 1902 his commandos harassed British columns in the Cape Colony and Smuts induced hundreds of colonial Afrikaners to join his force although he did not succeed in fomenting a general rebellion. Smuts was legal adviser to his government at the peace negotiations and reformulated the relevant peace clause so that blacks could not be enfranchised into the former republics prior to the establishment of self-government.

In 1903, unwilling to be associated with the Milner regime in the Transvaal, Smuts, (together with Louis Botha and de la Rey), refused to become members of the legislative council and in 1905 he played a prominent role in the formation of a new Boer political party, Het Volk, and commenced his close political association with Botha.

“Conciliation,” the main thrust of the party’s policy, evolved by Botha and Smuts, was prompted by political expediency as well as by conviction, but Smuts never deviated from it. In later years Smuts probably exaggerated the importance of his meeting with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in London in 1905 as a factor which persuaded the British government to grant responsible government to the Transvaal.

Botha appointed Smuts colonial secretary and minister of education in the Transvaal in 1907. Smuts’ education act, which was criticised for not granting Dutch the same status as English, was one of the first indications that he did not fully share the aspirations of many Afrikaners. Smuts was the most important architect of the constitution of the Union of South Africa and in Botha’s successive ministries he occupied the portfolios of the interior (1910-12), mines (1910-12), finance (1912-15) and defense (1912-19). In July 1913, Smuts and Botha were forced to accede to the demands of white mine workers. Smuts broke a subsequent strike in January 1914, by using his newly formed defense force, but his summary deportation of nine of the ring-leaders aroused widespread condemnation. Since 1907 Smuts’ attempts to control Indian immigration to the Transvaal had been opposed by the methods of Satyagraha inspired by M.K. Gandhi. By July 1914 Smuts and Gandhi reached a measure of compromise and the Indian Relief Act was passed.

Smuts believed that the Great War of 1914-18 could lead to the repartition of Southern Africa and so offer the Union opportunities of territorial expansion. The decision of the Botha government, ratified by Parliament, to accede to the British request to invade German South West Africa provided the occasion for a Boer rebellion; Smuts’ failure to make an unequivocal statement regarding the use of volunteers in the campaign was a contributory factor. By early 1915 Botha and Smuts had suppressed the rebellion, but their popularity among their own people declined further; Smuts, particularly, was reviled for refusing to reprieve the rebel, Jopie Fourie, who was sentenced to death.

In April 1915 Smuts assumed command of the southern campaign in South West Africa and cooperated with Botha in conquering the territory. In February 1916 Smuts, at the request of the British government, took command of the campaign in East Africa. In January 1917 Botha sent him to London to attend the imperial war conference: he opposed imperial federation and expounded a doctrine of a British Commonwealth of free and equal states. Smuts stayed on in Britain, became a member of the British war cabinet, and played a vital role in the prosecution of the war.

After the armistice he drafted proposals for the creation of the League of Nations, Smuts attended the peace conference with Botha and pleaded for an amelioration of the peace terms, although some of his own proposals actually increased Germany’s burdens. He devised the mandate system but did not intend it to be applied in Africa.

Botha’s death in August 1919 resulted in Smuts becoming prime minister and minister of native affairs. His precarious Parliamentary position after the 1920 general election was bolstered by the Unionist Party merging with his South African Party. As minister of native affairs, Smuts was no great innovator: his two pieces of legislation, the Native Affairs Act (1920) and the Native (Urban Areas) Act (1923) epitomised his segregationalistic and paternalistic attitude to race relations. In 1922 Southern Rhodesian voters rejected Smuts’ terms for incorporation in the Union. Smuts, during this term of premiership, was castigated for sanctioning the use of armed force to preserve law and order: at Bulhock in May 1921 against an African millenarian sect; on the Witwatersrand in March 1922 to suppress a revolt which had started as a strike by white mine workers; and in South West Africa against the Bondelswart people in May 1922.

A series of setbacks in by-elections led Smuts to go to the polls in 1924. His party was defeated by the National-Labour party pact. A further electoral defeat followed in 1929. During the nine years that he was out of office Smuts completed his philosophical work, Holism and Evolution (1926), extended his studies in botany and palaeontology, and delivered the Rhodes Memorial Lectures at Oxford in 1929.

As leader of the opposition, he did not object to the principle of a distinctive South African flag, but insisted that the sentiments of English-speaking South Africans should be respected. He approved of the inauguration of an iron and steel corporation but was opposed to a state-controlled monopoly. He was critical of, and refused to support, General J.B.M. Hertzog’s bills regarding African and Coloured voters. The economic crisis of the thirties, together with altered political conditions and attitudes, led to a coalition in 1933 and in 1934, a fusion of the parties of Hertzog and of Smuts and the creation of the United Party. Smuts became minister of justice and deputy prime minister.

In 1936 Smuts, together with most of his followers, voted in favour of Hertzog’s revised Representation of Natives Act. Smuts declared that the stipulations of the Act together with the Native Trust and Land Act provided a satisfactory quid pro quo for the removal of African voters in the Cape from the common roll.

In September 1938 Smuts agreed with Hertzog that in the event of Britain becoming involved in a war in Europe, South Africa would remain neutral, but would continue to fulfill her obligations as a member of the Commonwealth including those concerning the Simonstown naval base. A year later, however, he countered Hertzog’s neutrality motion in Parliament and after it had been decided by 80 votes to 67 that South Africa would declare war on Germany, Smuts became prime minister, and minister of external affairs and defense.

Smuts did not introduce conscription but relied on volunteers to serve, initially in Africa, and subsequently in Europe. Smuts himself made nine visits to the Middle East and Europe to confer with Allied leaders, who set great store by his advice. In 1943 he was made a British field marshal. To combat subversion at home, Smuts issued emergency regulations which permitted the government to intern suspects, but these restrictive measures were, in the circumstances, not unduly harsh. In the 1943 general election, the government parties gained an enhanced majority over a divided opposition. In the final months of the war, Smuts assisted in San Francisco in the formation of the United Nations Organisation and he suggested and drafted the declaration of human rights which formed the preamble to its charter.

Aware of increasing unrest in the Union and of growing world criticism of South Africa’s race polities, Smuts appointed the Fagan Commission to report on African labour and urbanisation. However, before its report of March 1948 could be implemented, the United Party lost the general election of May 1948 to the National and Afrikaner Parties which advocated the policy of apartheid. For the last two years of his life Smuts was again leader of the opposition and despite his failing powers, he fulfilled his parliamentary duties until his death at Doornkloof near Irene.

Jan Smuts is considered not only one of South Africa’s most outstanding statesmen, but a leading international diplomatic figure in the twentieth century world. Smuts was a paradoxical figure, an international peacemaker and humanist, who willingly wed violence and legislation to maintain subordination of South Africa’s black majority.

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