When Roger Southall launched Smuts & Mandela: The Men Who Made South Africa at Ike’s bookshop in Durban he met a young man, probably no older than 20, apparently without much education but eager to learn and with an obvious love for books and reading.
“Mandela he was familiar with,” says Southall. But who was this Smuts?
An extreme example, perhaps, but not surprising. Of SA’s two “founders”, Smuts is largely forgotten. Today he falls between those who are of middle-age-to-ancient, probably white, and have read Richard Steyn, and those who wonder after whom a road that runs through Joburg is named (the airport having long since become ORT).
That may be changing a bit as publishers find Smuts still sells: Afrikaner writers are busy reclaiming Smuts, once considered a volks-veraaier; academics Bongani Ngqulunga and David Boucher are having another look in Reappraising the Life and Legacy of Jan Smuts; an annotated edition of Commando (Deneys Reitz’s Boer War biography and a paean to Smuts) is out; Reitz’s trilogy, Adrift on the Open Veld, which contains a lot about Smuts, has been reissued and even been translated into Afrikaans, Deur die Sterre Gelei.
Southall knew the history of Smuts — of course he did — but not intimately. It was only when his wife’s book club began circulating Steyn’s biography, Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness, that he decided to take a keener interest in one of SA’s great men of history. (Not that Southall has much truck with Thomas Carlyle’s theory — now largely debunked in favour of Marx’s — that influential and unique individuals, mostly male, determine history. But then the old Scot was writing in Victorian times when that other Nelson along with Napoleon were still fresh in the memory).
Smuts appealed to Southall as someone “extremely interesting and complicated”. Having previously dealt mostly with contemporary SA and the politics of resistance, he began to think how his reading (among others of Keith Hancock, Smuts’ pre-eminent biographer, whom he found “fascinating for all its limitations”) linked up with the present? “The obvious link was Mandela,” says Southall.
He writes in the book that “assessing political leadership across different historical eras is fraught with dangers” — then dives in. In his preface, Southall admits that, like many social science scholars of his generation, he paid too little attention to the white political arena, especially the first three prime ministers of the union: Louis Botha, Smuts and JBM Hertzog. “I knew shamefully little [of them],” he says. He found them fascinating, then proceeded to include the most famous of the three with Mandela in what is a brilliantly structured book, in both the writing and the comparisons of the two men.
Smuts and Mandela were freedom fighters, Southall asserts. Smuts fought British imperialism on the side of the two Boer republics from 1899 to 1902 while Mandela eventually came round to armed struggle as the only way to bring SA’s white rulers to the negotiating table. Both were also founders of SA: the one called on to help fix a country broken by war, the other to restore a nation broken by brutal racial division.
Smuts playing a critical role in establishing union in 1910 and Mandela in taking the “new” SA to democracy in 1994. Both also put much effort into reconciliation, Smuts between two antagonistic white tribes, Mandela between white and black.
What Southall has achieved with his book is a remarkable leap of history, bringing together two contrasting figures from contrasting eras, and he does it with generosity, compassion and dispassion.
He recalls a comparison by FS Crafford, one of the early biographers, to Smuts being “the Alexander Hamilton of the [SA] convention” — the white-men-only set of meetings between 1908 and 1909 of delegates from the four provinces after the Boer War to establish the Union of South Africa in 1910. Like Hamilton, a revered American founding father who did much of the legwork in drawing up the constitution of the US in 1789, Smuts, as the leading intellectual of the convention, did the heavy legal lifting to create a unitary SA state.
Unlike Hamilton, it’s safe to say, no-one is going to write a musical about Smuts. There may still be one about Mandela (where is the next Mbongeni Ngema?) even though his legacy might even now be fading. Southall, who’s been reading Pieter du Toit’s The Super Cadres: ANC Misrule in the Age of Deployment, believes history will not treat Mandela kindly.
This brings the Smuts & Mandela author to his starting point. One of the “numerous factors”, he writes, that make it difficult to write about both men in a single book is “to overcome the contemporary mantra that continues to shape much popular assessment of the two: ‘Smuts bad, Mandela good’.
“I don’t think history is an exercise in simply saying good and bad. It’s a murky business [with] nuances and so forth. And there are very few individuals who have come out looking right, quite frankly, and I don’t think Mandela does either.”
Even in that “murky business”, it’s now accepted that Smuts was the sinner to Mandela’s saint — a racist, as were many of his contemporaries. Judged by today’s cancel-culture standards, even well-known white liberals of Smuts’ time like John X Merriman or WP Schreiner might not escape.
It’s the Smuts contradiction that’s hard for newcomers and even old hands to understand today: while crafting lofty human rights ideals on a world stage, he was establishing segregationist white rule at home. With cognitive dissonance was not fashionable at the time, most white people accepted this as business as usual, white liberals put up some resistance and black political leaders held an innocent faith in Smuts’ supposed good intentions. AB Xuma went as far as New York to gently, if vainly, twist Smuts’ arm.
Ngqulunga and Boucher recall the meeting between the then president of the ANC and Smuts, a world statesman, in 1946 at the first UN General Assembly. Smuts is said to have asked: “Xuma? What are you doing here?” To which Xuma replied: “I have had to fly 10,000 miles to meet my prime minister. He talks about us but won’t talk to us.”
At least the two spoke; when Mandela and Smuts were in proximity they didn’t. Mandela, then in first-year law, only listened as Smuts addressed students at the University of Fort Hare in 1939. He “found Smuts a sympathetic figure”. It’s a sign of how politically naive Mandela must have still been and how accommodating many black people still were.
Thirty years earlier, with the British parliament having passed the South Africa Act (which brought into being the Union of South Africa), black people clung to what Southall calls “pious hopes” of the Cape franchise, which included some black men, being extended to the other three provinces (two of them recent belligerents in the Boer War). By 1936 the dashing of those hopes should have been obvious to Mandela.
Smuts by that time was a member of the Fusion government (a coalition of Hertzog’s Nationalist Party and the SA Party of Smuts and Botha, the GNU of its day). As deputy prime minister to Hertzog, Smuts was guilty of one of the most pusillanimous political acts in SA history: support for Hertzog’s “Native Bills”, which scrapped the Cape franchise and created the first building block of apartheid.
It may have been expedience on the part of “Slim Jannie”, as political opponents, believing Smuts to be devious, often called him. Or to save the Fusion government from a split at the time, one that did come three years later on the issue of a looming world war. Or it might have been that deep down, Smuts never planned to extend the Cape franchise. He revealed in letters to Merriman: “I don’t believe in politics for them ... so far as the natives are concerned politics will to my mind only have an unsettling influence. I would therefore not give them the franchise, which in any case would not affect more than a negligible number of them at present.”
It was the fear of being overwhelmed, by potential black voters and actual Afrikaner voters that haunted Smuts, as it did most of his followers. Southall, who acknowledges a “huge debt” to Steyn for bringing the old Boer War leaders and early prime ministers back to life, disputes Steyn’s theory (and Shakespeare’s line) of Smuts being “Unafraid of Greatness”, the subtitle of the biography. “[It] is fundamentally wrong,” Southall has written previously, “and that as prime minister during the years following World War 2, he failed the greatest test that history had put to him.”
Southall has written that despite Smuts’ “professed liberalism, he was on the wrong side of history regarding the issue of the black vote, despite his long-held realisation that what (in its time) was termed ‘the native question’ was the most important existential issue confronting SA society [and] ... he consciously and consistently ducked the issue.”
What Southall says he found frustrating about Smuts was that “this is one of the most intelligent men who has ever walked this earth and yet he could not see through, basically, what his own racial beliefs were. Something which, at the same time, I think he thought was inevitable. That he was not prepared to hurry through a lot. And I think that’s what history has condemned him for.”
And as for his scepticism of Mandela’s place in history, he writes: “How his legacy is assessed over successive generations will continue to change, depending on the destination of SA’s journey. If SA really does become a ‘failed state’, as the doomsters predict, there will be much need for re-examination of whether this failure has its roots in the constitutional settlement Mandela did so much to bring about. For the moment, however, Mandela continues to inspire us to maintain our hope in constitutional democracy. What other hope do we have.”
Indeed — especially when one of Mandela’s successors has declared that he plans to overthrow that settlement once his MK party comes to power — that threat no longer seems all that empty.
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