Jan Christian Smuts

Prime minister of South Africa (1919-1924, 1939-1948)

• Born: May 24, 1870
• Birthplace: Bovenplaats, near Riebeeck West, Cape Colony (now in South Africa)
• Died: September 11, 1950
• Place of death: Doornkloof, Irene, near Pretoria, South Africa

In addition to a distinguished military career in three wars and as prime minister, Smuts helped create the South African Union and integrate it within the British Commonwealth. He influenced the shaping of the League of Nations and the United Nations.

Early Life

Jan Christian Smuts was born on the farm of his parents, Jacobus Abraham Smuts and Catharina Petronella de Vries, near Riebeeck West, a rural community north of Cape Town in what was then the British Cape Colony in South Africa. Up to the age of twelve, when he was finally sent to school after the death of his older brother Michiel, Smuts lived the life of an illiterate farm boy and developed a love for the outdoors that would stay with him as a sophisticated general and statesman.

As soon as he entered school, the farm boy transformed into an avid reader and studious loner; Smuts did so well that he was admitted to Victoria College, Stellenbosch, from which he was graduated with highest honors in both science and literature at the age of twenty-one in 1891. Winning a scholarship, Smuts sailed to England to attend Christ’s College, Cambridge; he performed so brilliantly that 1894 became known as “Smuts’s year” at Cambridge. Yet while Smuts showed scholarly excellence throughout his academic career, he always remained isolated from his peers, who did not share a distaste for sports and less healthy pastimes with this lean, pale student, whose tall stature and blond hair betrayed his primarily Dutch ancestry.

Choosing to return to Cape Town rather than accepting a professorship at Cambridge, Smuts learned that his lack of social graces barred him from becoming a successful lawyer; his colleagues as well as his potential clients came to dislike his aloofness and impatience with any signs of inefficiency. By cultivating a second occupation as a journalistic writer and taking his first steps as a politician for the Afrikaner Bond Party, however, Smuts aroused the interest of Sir Cecil Rhodes, then prime minister of the Cape Colony, who had already noticed the brilliance of the boy during a prior visit to Stellenbosch.

It was Rhodes who used the young Afrikaner Smuts in a tactical maneuver to placate the Boers of Transvaal shortly before springing a surprise attack on them. Rightly feeling betrayed by Rhodes, Smuts left the Cape Colony for the South African Republic in Transvaal under President Paul “Ohm” Kruger in Pretoria. After a short and again unsuccessful spell as a lawyer in the “boom town” of Johannesburg, Smuts became state attorney of the republic at age twenty-eight and abandoned his British nationality. The outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 saw him in Pretoria with his wife, Sibella Margaretha “Isie” Krige, a fellow student at Victoria College, whom he had married in 1897 and with whom Smuts stayed close throughout his life. Six of their children survived infancy.

Life’s Work

After the regular forces of the Boers were defeated by the British, Smuts was made general and given a commando group that in 1901 and 1902 embarked on a course of raids that led them dangerously close to Cape Town. During this time, Smuts emerged as an excellent leader: The pale scholar felt at home again in the outdoors, and his men quickly came to admire their somewhat reclusive and demanding general. At the peace conference in 1902, Smuts showed the first signs for his vision of a British Commonwealth that should replace the Empire; he decided to trust the promise of the British commander in chief, Lord Kitchener, for a constitution for South Africa and negotiated peace. This achievement also laid the foundations of a lifelong love-hate relationship between Smuts and his fellow Afrikaners; nevertheless, Het Volk (the people), the Boer Party after 1902, elected Smuts to go to England to achieve “responsible government,” a form of limited self-government, from the new British prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman.

After his success in England, Smuts teamed up with the congenial Louis Botha to achieve his next great goal. While the popular Botha was elected prime minister of Transvaal, as colonial secretary Smuts tirelessly worked for the formation of the Union of South Africa. Established in 1910, the Union had a strong central government and granted equal rights to British and Boer subjects. For almost ten years, the Union was successfully led by Smuts’s alliance with Botha, who “reigned” as prime minister, while the general applied himself to both grand-scale projects and daily administrative duties as minister with no less than three portfolios: mines, defense, and the interior.

Smuts’s use of force to restore order in the face of increasing labor conflicts in the gold and diamond mines brought him in conflict with the South African Labour Party; the question of the treatment of the Indians brought Smuts the enmity of Mahatma Gandhi. However, after a prolonged industrial dispute in 1913 and 1914, World War I temporarily ended the interior strife and saw General Smuts’s return to the battlefield as the second youngest general in the British army.

In a quick campaign against inferior forces, Smuts’s relentlessly driven troops helped Botha conquer German South West Africa in 1915; in 1916, against a similarly outclassed opponent in German East Africa, Smuts’s extraordinarily executed strategy of outflanking the enemy, and his success in hostile tropical conditions, secured large territorial gains and the de facto defeat of his adversary. Following this, though still only thirty-seven years old, Smuts was sent to London to represent South Africa at an imperial conference and in the Imperial War Cabinet in 1917. He swiftly became instrumental in the organization of the Royal Air Force, before turning his mind toward peace. He helped U.S. president Woodrow Wilson clarify his ideas regarding a League of Nations, and at Versailles he spoke for a nonvindictive peace.

Back in South Africa, Botha died and Smuts became prime minister for four crucial years in 1919. His party suffered when J. B. M. Hertzog and his Nationalists engineered a breakaway by the right-wingers, and South Africa was plagued by a recurrence of the prewar social unrest. On the international front, Smuts successfully negotiated the discussions leading toward the Anglo-Irish Treaty. His plan for the inclusion of Southern Rhodesia in the Union was defeated, however, two years before a poorly timed general election sent him into a long period of opposition, during which he wrote his philosophical work, Holism and Evolution (1926).

It was another war that returned Smuts to the helm of South Africa; willing to declare war on Nazi Germany in 1939, Smuts replaced Hertzog and led his country into World War II on the side of the Allies. As British field marshal, Smuts advised Winston Churchill on a strategy for the repulse of the Axis in North Africa, and after Erwin Rommel’s defeat, he stressed the importance of a second front in Italy and the Balkans, an idea that was finally responsible for the British intervention in Greece. Peace brought Smuts to San Francisco in 1945, where the charter of the United Nations was drafted. Sadly, at home his defeat in 1948 brought to power the Nationalists and their fateful policies. Still active in policies of the Commonwealth, but from a position of opposition to the new government of South Africa, Smuts died on his farm, named Doornkloof, on September 11, 1950. He was eighty years old.

Significance

Throughout his life, Smuts proved himself to be one of the best supporters of the idea of the British Commonwealth. His political vision always focused on the concept of a larger political organization comprising independent units contributing to the whole, and in his philosophical works, he identified himself as a “holist.” Contrary to the claim of the Afrikaners, some of whom never forgave the general his seeming “betrayal” of his special obligations to his people, Smuts always kept in mind the interest of the Afrikaners in the context of a large political unit, the Commonwealth.

Smuts fought exceedingly well in the Boer War, which was made unavoidable by the intransigence of the British high commissioner for South Africa, Lord Milner, who rejected all conciliatory compromises, most of which were drafted by Smuts, at the Bloemfontein Conference in 1899. After this war, Smuts directed all of his energies toward the formation of a strong, unified South Africa, which was meant to become one of the cornerstones of the Commonwealth; he understood that to succeed as a union of different nations governed by a shared political idea of individual freedom and common responsibility in world affairs, the British Empire had to transform itself, giving its members constitutions of their own, self-government, and limited autonomy.

Brave and capable in war, Smuts showed himself generous and farsighted in peace; twice he advocated clemency for a defeated enemy, and twice his belief in a community of all responsible nations led him to advocate the idea of a world organization. In racial questions, Smuts was not ahead of his time, yet he fought the Nationalists in 1948 and opposed the implementation of their apartheid policies.

Bibliography

Crafford, F. S. Jan Smuts. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1943. Impartial biography by an Afrikaans-speaker; paints Smuts “warts and all.” As a result of its wartime origin, Crafford’s study overemphasizes Smuts’s role in World War II and overindulges in prophecy toward the end; overall, useful and accurate.

Friedlander, Zelda, ed. Jan Smuts Remembered. London: Wingate, 1970. Collection of eighteen essays by people associated with Smuts. Covers the full range of his achievements and interests; perceptive and varied portrait enhanced by photographs that bring Smuts the man to life. Mostly well written and enjoyable.

Friedman, Bernard. Smuts: A Reappraisal. London: Allen and Unwin, 1975. Friedman’s work is not a biography; it severely criticizes Smuts for a perceived lack of sympathy for the natives’ cause.

Geyser, O. Jan Smuts and His International Contemporaries. Johannesburg, South Africa: Covos Day, 2001. Focuses on Smuts’s career as an international statesman, describing his role in world affairs and his relationships with the leaders of other nations.

Haarhoff, T. J. Smuts the Humanist. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1970. Focuses on Smuts’s philosophical work and his political vision. Somewhat dry on his relation to the classics but otherwise a perceptive portrait of Smuts as a thinker. Includes a useful bibliography.

Hancock, W. K. Smuts. Vol. 1, The Sanguine Years, 1870-1919. Vol. 2, The Fields of Force, 1919-1950. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1962, 1968. The definitive biography of Smuts. Clearly written and historically accurate, it draws on the primary material contained in the Smuts Archive at Cape Town. Hancock’s emphasis is on Smuts in his historical context, not on his personal life.

Kruger, D. W. The Making of a Nation: A History of the Union of South Africa, 1910-1961. London: Macmillan, 1969. Solid background information; Smuts’s historical role is discussed in the light of the challenge of his times.

Millin, Sarah G. General Smuts. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1936. Millin gets off to a rather novelistic start with her first volume, but recovers thereafter and succeeds in painting a perceptive, open, and sympathetic view of Smuts, whom she clearly admires.

Owen, Frank. Tempestous Journey: Lloyd George, His Life and Times. Vol. 5. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955. Relates Smuts’s importance and influence under David Lloyd George, the British prime minister during World War I; puts in context the general’s military and political achievements in that era.

Smuts, J. C. Jan Christian Smuts. New York: William Morrow, 1952. Accurately written by Smuts’s son; reveals Smuts the father as well as the public man. At times too flattering, but it is not a eulogy.