Humble birth
On
24 May 1870 a man was born in humble circumstances near a little
hamlet in the Cape Colony (now the Western Cape Province of South
Africa) called Riebeeck West, who in later life was to hob-nob with
Kings and Presidents, scientists and soldiers, philosophers and
politicians, nobles and peasants, from around the world.
The
brilliance and potential of Jan Smuts was recognised by Cecil John
Rhodes and Paul Kruger; he fought against the British in the Boer War
and came to be seen as a devoted friend of Britain in two subsequent
World Wars.
Jan
Christian (often familiarly called “Jannie”) Smuts was the second
child of Jacobus and Catharina Smuts of the farm Bovenplaats in the
Malmesbury district where he grew to the age of 12 before getting any
formal education, and that only after his older brother, Michiel,
died in 1882.
Education and love
He
was in his very young days a thin, frail child with piercing blue
eyes and a reserved, shy and rather silent nature. But at the
boarding school to which he was sent he was soon recognised as an
outstanding pupil, and he decided to go to Victoria College in
Stellenbosch (the forerunner of the University of Stellenbosch).
To
gain entrance to the College he had to pass a matriculation
examination, including a paper in ancient Greek, which he had not yet
been taught due to his late start at school. He set himself the task
of learning the Greek needed for the exam and in six days, without a
teacher, he not only passed the exam but was top of the list of
candidates in that subject.
While
at Victoria College two things happened to the shy, stiff young man
(he was just 17). First he discovered love, in the form of Miss
Sibylla Margaretha Krige, known affectionately as Isie, daughter of a
local man, Japie Krige, who was strongly anti-English, as so many
Afrikaners were at the time. He would write of her in his diary, some
years later: “(She being)..
less idealistic than I, but more human, recalled me from my
intellectual isolation and made me return to my fellows.
Second, his studies of the English Romantic poets and of Walt
Whitman, led him to re-assess the stolid Christianity he had
inherited from his family. He began to question and to search for
answers, and, given his nature, would do so doggedly, until satisfied
that he had everything necessary to understand.
This
second aspect of his time at Victoria College led him to change his
mind from studying to become a pastor, towards studying the law.
In
1891 he took a double-first in literature and science, and then
applied for the Ebden Scholarship which was offered by the University
of the Cape of Good Hope. He won the scholarship and duly left for
Cambridge in September 1891 aboard the Roslyn Castle.
His
time at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he studied law, was marked
by outstanding academic achievements and a broadening of his
interests into areas such as botany (in which he would later make
some useful contributions), archaeology, philosophy and poetry.
While
at Christ’s College Smuts was deeply impressed by the poetry of Walt
Whitman and even found the time to write a book about him, entitled
Walt Whitman: A Study in the Evolution of Personality. The
book was published until 1973, when it was put out by Wayne State
University Press.
In
December 1894 he sat for the examinations of the Inns of Court,
passing them at the head of the list, and was called to the Middle
Temple. His college, Christ’s, offered him a fellowship in law, but
he preferred to return to South Africa, which he did in 1895.
Back in South Africa
He
was called to the Cape Bar and went into practice as a barrister, but
was not particularly successful. He took on some writing work for the
Cape Times, especially reporting on the Cape Parliament. This aroused
his interest in politics, an interest that would be with him for the
rest of his life.
Smuts
soon came to the attention of the Cape Premier, Cecil John Rhodes,
who hired Smuts as his personal legal advisor.
Smuts
was soon overwhelmed by the Rhodes charisma and vision, defending
Rhodes against attacks from Afrikaners who saw in Rhodes’s imperial
ambitions a threat to their own independence. In October 1895 Smuts
made a long and impassioned speech in support of Rhodes, earning
sharp criticism from many quarters as a result. Smuts was not moved
by the criticism.
What
did move him was his “betrayal” by Rhodes who at the end of 1895
had connived at and funded the raid into Kruger’s Zuid Afrikaansche
Republiek (ZAR) by forces under the command of Leander Starr Jameson,
the infamous Jameson Raid, which was the spark to the tinder of
Anglo-Boer relations. Smuts was absolutely devastated by the news of
the raid. He had placed much hope on his relationship with Rhodes,
hope that his careers in the law and politics would soar with
Rhodes’s backing had turned to dust. Rhodes, who had personally
predicted great things for him, had let Smuts down in the worst
possible way – Rhodes had done precisely what Smuts had with such
passion said he would not do, plot against the ZAR and Afrikaners
generally.
Smuts
packed up his chambers in Cape Town and decamped to Johannesburg, the
dusty, bustling centre of the burgeoning gold mining industry, in
August 1896.
In
April 1897 he married Isie Krige and they settled together in
Johannesburg. Neither of them liked the overgrown mining camp and
Smuts’s law firm was not prospering when in June 1898 Kruger in his
often autocratic way fired the Chief Justice of the ZAR, John Gilbert
Kotzé, because of an unfavourable judgement. Smuts took it upon
himself to write a legal opinion in favour of Kruger, who had been
heavily criticised in legal circle for his action.
Kruger
was already aware of the brilliant young legal mind from the Cape and
on 28 June Smuts was given second-class citizenship of the ZAR and on
the same day Kruger appointed him State Attorney.
Smuts had achieved an amazing turnaround – from enthusiastic supporter of Rhodes and the imperial vision to becoming the right-hand man of Rhodes’s implacable enemy and ardent opponent of the imperial dream, Kruger.
The Anglo-Boer War
When
this war broke out in October 1899 Smuts was at first kept in
Pretoria as Kruger’s right hand man, applying his considerable energy
to organising the Boer war effort on several fronts, including the
diplomatic one.
Eventually,
when Pretoria fell to the British forces in June 1900 the ZAR
government was transferred to Machadodorp in the then Eastern
Transvaal, now Mpumalanga Province, and Smuts raised an army of 400
to 500 men and rode off to conduct guerilla raids on British supply
columns.
Smuts
rode into battle with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (probably
in the original German) and a Greek New Testament in his
saddle-bag. This is an early evidence of the strange disconnect
between his high intellectual leanings and the almost crude practical
actions of the man: the commando which he led was responsible for the
massacre in 1901 of some 100 blacks at the mission station of
Modderfontein, not the last time his name would be associated with a
massacre of blacks. Canon Farmer, the missionary at Modderfontein,
wrote, “I should be sorry to say anything that is unfair about the
Boers. They look upon the Kaffirs (sic) as dogs & the killing of
them as hardly a crime …”
The
enigma of how a person with such a broad mind and depth of culture
can participate in such brutality is an enduring issue.
When
the Boers in March-April 1902 realised that continuing the fight was
no longer worth the cost in death and destruction, Smuts was one of
the six-man delegation that set out by train for Pretoria and
negotiations with Milner in Melrose House.
Smuts
took a leading role for the Boer side in these negotiations, even to
the extent of having a private chat with Milner, the High
Commissioner, and Kitchener, the Commander of the British forces. The
three drew up a preamble to a peace agreement but this was later
rejected by General De Wet on behalf of the president of the Orange
Free State.
Smuts
and the Attorney General of the Cape, Sir Richard Solomon, together
with J.B.M Hertzog and Milner, then drafted the agreement which was
finally signed at Melrose House.
Peace to Union
No
sooner had the dust and smoke of war started to settle and Smuts was
involved in politics again. He helped draft a new constitution for
the Transvaal Colony, as the ZAR had now become, and in the elections
of 1906 won the Wonderboom seat. He was almost immediately invited
into the Cabinet formed by his war-time comrade General Louis Botha
and given the portfolios of Colonial Secretary and Education
Secretary.
As
Colonial Secretary he had to negotiate with the leader of the Indian
community, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
Smuts
was, however, still strongly in favour of a united South Africa and
pushed hard for the formation of the National Convention to work out
the process of unification and the shape of a future union of the
four colonies in South Africa.
The
National Convention sat from October 1908 to the early part of 1909,
when all the delegates accepted Smuts’s draft constitution. Smuts and
Botha then travelled to London to present the draft to the British
Parliament, which ratified the constitution quickly, and the Union of
South Africa came into being on 31 May 1910, eight years to the day
after the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging.
Louis
Botha was appointed Prime Minister and Smuts his deputy.
Problems in the young union
n
1913 this government passed the infamous Natives’ Land Act which
effectively restricted ownership of land by blacks to about 7% of the
land in the country, the balance being open for ownership by whites
only. The foundation of territorial segregation was laid.
Also
in 1913 occurred one of those instances which showed the ruthless
side of Smuts, the “Grey Steel” (Grey Steel is the title
of a 1939 biography of Smuts by H.C. Armstrong) man who would
seemingly without compunction deal death to opponents.
A
mine management decision to cap wages of less skilled workers led to
a strike which quickly turned violent. This needs to be seen against
the background of what was termed back then the “poor white”
problem.
As
a result of the large scale and widespread destruction of Boer farms
(according to one estimate about 30000 farmsteads were destroyed, and
about 20 villages) during the Boer War thousands of Afrikaners were
left destitute, with few skills that were relevant in the
rapidly-modernising South African economy. They migrated in large
numbers to the growing industrial towns of the Witwatersrand where
they tended to congregate in shack settlements.
Parliament
appointed a Select Committee on European Employment and Labour
Conditions which reported that “These are people who have sunk into
a demoralising and corrupting intercourse with non-Europeans with
evil effects on both sections of the population.”
As
Robert Davies (incidentally, he is now the Minister of Trade and
Industry in the Cabinet of President Jacob Zuma) wrote in his book
Capital, State and White Labour in South Africa 1900 – 1960
(The Harvester Press, 1979): “… in some cases unemployed whites
and Africans lived together in the same shanties, and there were even
cases of whites begging food from Africans, or performing odd jobs
for Africans in return for food and shelter.”
On
14 July 1913 a mass meeting of white mine workers was organised for
which Smuts at the last minute refused permission. The meeting went
ahead anyway and afterwards a large crowd gathered outside of the
Rand Club in Johannesburg, the favourite gathering place of the
mining magnates.
Smuts,
as Minister of Defence, sent in troops to control the strikers who
had turned violent. The strikers refused to disperse when ordered to
do so by the police, who then opened fire, killing 51 strikers.
When
the government nationalised the railways in early 1914 a general
strike was called, to which Smuts responded by deporting, totally
without legal sanction, nine of the leaders. He simply had them taken
from the cells where they were being held, taken to Durban where they
were put aboard the steamship Umgeni, bound for London.
At
least in part the reaction of Smuts and the ruling party can be
explained by their perception of the growing relationship between the
“poor whites” and the blacks, a relationship which was seen as,
in Davies’ words, “a factor undermining the efficacy of the
ideology of racism as a means of exerting social control over
Africans.”
In
a speech in London in 1917, when Smuts was a member of the Imperial
War Cabinet, he revealed the underlying racism of his outlook:
“Natives [this was the term used generally by whites for blacks at
the time] have the simplest minds, understand only the simplest ideas
or ideals, and are almost animal-like in the simplicity of their
minds and ways.”
Later
in the speech he was to say, “To apply the same institutions on an
equal basis to white and black alike does not lead to the best
results, and so a practice has grown up in South Africa of creating
parallel institutions — giving the natives their own separate
institutions on parallel lines with institutions for whites.”
This
from the same mind which would later produce a passage in his
monumental book Holism and
Evolution
(first edition 1924; now published by N & S Press, 1987): “For
we are indeed one with Nature; her genetic fibres run through all our
being; our physical organs connect us with millions of years of her
history; our minds are full of immemorial paths of pre-human
experience. Our ear for music, our eye for art carry us back to the
early beginnings of animal life on this globe.”
One
of the enigmas of Jan Smuts!
After World War I
In
1914 when Botha, in support of the British war effort, invaded German
West Africa (now Namibia) the decision was bitterly opposed by many
of the old Boer generals and their followers.
One
member of the South African Defence Force, who had previously fought
on the Boer side in the Boer War, Jopie Fourie, joined in a rebellion
against the South African Government. He was captured near Rustenburg
in the then western Transvaal (now part of North west Province) on 16
December 1914, court martialled and executed by firing squad on 20
December. He instantly achieved martyr status among Afrikaners of the
anti-Smuts camp.
At
the end of the “War to end all wars” in 1918 Smuts attended the
Peace Conference in Paris, where he argued strenuously, though
unsuccessfully, for a less punitive settlement with Germany, arguing
presciently that the terms eventually forced on Germany would breed
resentment and hatred and would be destructive of peace.
When
Botha died in 1919 Smuts became Prime Minister and was very soon
embroiled in conflict again.
The
first conflict arose out of a prophecy of the end of the world made
towards the end of 1919 by a preacher in the Eastern Cape, Enoch
Mgijima. Mgijima told his numerous followers that the world would end
in 1920 and that they should go to a place called Ntabelanga, near
Bullhoek in the district of Queenstown.
About
3000 of his followers squatted there on government land without
permission and refused to budge in spite of efforts by local
officials to negotiate with them. Evnetually a small army of 993
policement and 35 officer was assembled at Queenstown and on 24 May
1921 the 500 followers of Mgijima, called “Israelites”, were
surrounded and the order was given to shoot. The Israelites, being
armed only with sticks and knobkieries, were mowed down. About 163
were killed, 129 wounded and 113 taken prisoner.
This incident has ever since been known as the “Bullhoek Massacre” and blame for it is usually laid at the feet of Smuts.
The
following year another conflict between miners and the mine magnates
began, again precipitated by the latter’s decision in January 1922 to
reduce the wages of miners.
Smuts
tried to negotiate but the miners, remembering 1913 and 1914, did not
trust him at all. Smuts then decided that the Government should
remain neutral in the struggle: “The Government will remain
severely impartial. We will make a ring round you disputants and let
you fight it out.”
The
Union Federation representing the miners then began to set up a
militia, convinced that the opposition party in Parliament, led by
former Boer General J.B.M. Hertzog would come to their aid.
The
Federation asked for a round table conference to discuss the issue as
miners all over the Witwatersrand began to agitate, refusing to work.
The answer of the Chamber of Mines was rough: “We will waste no
more time . .. trying to convince people of your mental calibre and
we see no reason why we should discuss our business with
representatives of slaughtermen and tramwaymen.”
The
revolt spread and Johannesburg was in a panic. Smuts came poste haste
from Cape Town ad took charge of the situation. He ordered the army
to attack and for planes to bomb rebel positions.
The
rebellion was smashed and about 200 miners were killed. It was
typical Smuts strong-arm tactics and it cost him the election of
1924.
Once
he was no longer the Prime Minister Smuts set about writing the book
that had been germinating in his mind for some time – Holism and
Evolution, – dealing with “some of the problems which fall within
the debateable borderland between Science and Philosophy.”
Part 2 …
Smuts looms very large over South African history, from the Boer War to the aftermath of the Second World War.
In this first part I have covered his enigmatic life up to the end of his first stint as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, a country whose character he had a major role in shaping.
In Part 2 I write about his emergence onto the world stage during the Second World War and his defeat in the 1948 elections.
Copyright Notice
The text and all images on this page, unless otherwise indicated, are by Tony McGregor
who hereby asserts his copyright on the material. Should you wish to
use any of the text or images feel free to do so with proper attribution
and, if possible, a link back to this page. Thank you.
©
Tony McGregor 2011
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