International Boer BOOKS
ROBERT BIRLEY
With this second volume Sir Keith Hancock completes his life of Smuts (Smuts: The Fields of Force, 1919-1950, cur 70s), certainly one of the most notable biographies of our time. The difficulties are obvious. Smuts, as Sir Keith says, lived his life 'on many fronts.' This volume has to deal with thirty years of intense political struggle in South Africa, with the evolution of the British Empire—in particular the settlement with Ireland—with the approaches of the Second World War, the war itself, the creation of the United Nations, and all the time with Smuts as philosopher. Moreover, the period of South African history with which the book deals deserves, as Sir Keith says, 'to be called a Dark Age, because it has been so little illuminated by historical study.'
But there is another reason why it is reason- able to speak of this as a Dark Age. Looking back now, twenty years after Smuts's electoral defeat in 1948, followed two years later by his death, the two decades after the First World War seem to have been of little significance for South Africa. The great decisions were made in the next twenty years: the establishment of the Republic, the departure from the Com- monwealth, the policy of apartheid and of the Bantustans. And, in the end, perhaps what hap- pened in the rest of Africa will seem even more important. Nothing in this narrative of the second half of Smuts's life would have led one to expect that the next fifteen years would see the African peoples north of the Zambezi gaining their independence.
The result is that, while in this country Smuts is still regarded as one of the great figures of the twentieth century, in South Africa he now seems to count for little or nothing. When his statue was erected in Cape Town in 1964, in a spot where not many would see it, it created little stir except on aesthetic grounds, for it is heartily disliked by most South Africans as a work of art. Smuts's words are very rarely quoted. He is no father-figure to the United party; to the Nationalists he is still 'Slim' Janie, a word which Sir Keith translates very charit- ably as 'shrewd.' He seems to have dropped from sight.
Smuts was indeed a mysterious figure. It was strange that the son of a Boer farmer should go to Cambridge in the 1890s. After this it was perhaps not so unexpected that Smuts should be both a South African and a world figure. But it meant that he was a very unusual South African. As Sir Keith puts it, 'This spacious vision that Smuts had of Africa was something that the majority of his fellow Afrikaners could not understand; his policies were outward- looking, theirs were inward-looking; his impulse was trek, theirs was laager.' The Afrikaners are the most introspective of people. It is strange that for so long their chief statesman should have been someone who was continually breaking out of his own country into the world. This led to the supreme paradox of Smuts's career, that he was responsible for the intro- duction into the Charter of the United Nations of the reference to `fundamental human rights.' (Smuts's draft used the phrase 'basic human rights,' fundamentar being substituted later.)
He could have done nothing which would more embarrass his own country in due course. It was to embarrass him also. In August 1946, the Native Representative Council, an advisory body of sixteen Africans with six white native commissioners which had been set up in 1936, passed a resolution that the policy of Smuts's government was 'the antithesis and negation of the letter and spirit of the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Charter.' Forty years earlier, in 1906, Smuts had sent John X. Merriman, the leader of the Cape Liberals, a copy of the famous memorandum with which he had per- suaded Campbell-Bannerman to grant self- government to the defeated Boers, and Merri- man had replied, 'What struk me at once in reading your admirable remarks on liberal principles was ... that you ignore three-quarters of the population because they are coloured.' Is it right to see in Smuts's policies something schizophrenic, as Merriman did?
In the end, then, any study of Smuts must face the problem of his attitude towards the 'non- whites.' Sir Keith covers fully his dealings with the Indians, but he never seems quite to get to grips with the question of his relationship to the native population. At any rate there is nothing in this volume to compare with the chapter in the• first entitled, 'The Stranger within the Gates,' which was a most penetrating study of the colour problem in South Africa. It should be compulsory reading for all who feel disposed to give judgment on this issue.
At first sight Smuts's policy towards the Africans seems to be intolerably inconsistent, if not double-faced. In May 1917, in a speech at the Imperial Institute in London he could give expression to what seemed to be the most orthodox view of apartheid, in the sense of separate development. 'Instead of mixing up black and white in the old haphazard way, which instead of lifting up the black degraded the white, we are now trying to lay down a policy of keeping them apart as far as possible in our institutions ... the blacks will, of course, be free to go and to work in the white areas, but so far as possible the administration of white and black areas will be separate, and such that each community will be satisfied and develop according to its own proper lines.' Verwoerd seemed to do little more than echo this. Twelve years later in his Rhodes Memorial Lectures at Oxford Smuts was speaking of migratory labour for the Africans as a means of civilising them, while their traditional cul- ture would be preserved if their wives and families stayed at home in the nature reserves. Move on another twelve years and we find him speaking to the Institute of Race Relations in Cape Town,- denouncing 'segregation' as a failure and saying that 'you might- as well try to sweep the ocean back with a broom' as attempt to prevent the Africans with their families moving from the reserves to 'the big European centres of population.'
But in some ways it was in his attitude to- wards the African that Smuts was most typical of his own people. From his earliest years, his dominant feeling when he contemplated the colour problem was one of helplessness and, therefore, of fear. At the age of twenty-two he had written that 'the race struggle is destined to assume a magnitude on the African continent such as the world has never seen.' Before the Boer War he was saying that 'unless the white race closes its ranks in this country, its position will soon become untenable in the face of that overwhelming majority of prolific barbarism.' Just before the war ended he spoke optimistic- ally of the war between the white races passing away like a great thunderstorm, but 'the native question will never pass, away.' When I con- sider the political future of the natives in South Africa,' he wrote not long afterwards, 'I must say that I look into shadows and darkness; and then I feel inclined to shift the intolerable burden of solving that sphinx problem to the ampler shoulders and stronger brains of the future. Sufficient unto the day, etc.'
I•t is only if one recognises this sense of help- lessness that one can appreciate what Smuts tried to dolor the Africans. He was succeeded by a government which did not feel in the least helpless and knew just what it wanted. In con- trast Smuts's policy, even if it was more humane, may seem to be haidly worth considering. But in the end history may suggest that Smuts was capable sometimes of pointing the way to a policy which could have saved South Africa from disaster. Sir Keith mentions, but does not perhaps adequately stress, the importance of the Act of 1945 which revolutionised the finances of the education of the Africans. The return to the old system in 1953 has done more to cripple the Africans than any other decision of the Nationalist government during its twenty years of rule. It is one of the great tragedies of South African history that the Fagan Com- mittee, set up by Smuts to consider the native problem, presented its report only two months before the defeat of the Union party in 1948. Rejecting• the territorial separation of the Africans and the system of migratory labour, it regarded the people of South Africa as one nation. Sir Keith claims justly that it embodied the social philosophy of Smuts's later years and . we can no doubt see in this the influence of Jan Hofmeyr. Smuts's difficulty was that he realised that any such policy would probably mean the victory of the National party. His fears were justified. His life ended in defeat, and the South African government was launched on its hope- less attempt to reconcile apartheid and indus- trial development by means of migratory labour.
In the preface to his second volume Sir Keith tells us that he drafted a chapter on the mytho- logy of Smuts, but abandoned it. Perhaps he was right. It may be too early for this. At the moment Smuts can hardly be called a myth in his own country, for he is too largely forgotten. But in his own lifetime he certainly seemed to be of the stuff from which myths are made, one of the most skilful enemies of the British Empire who was to be largely responsible for refashion- ing it, the defeated rebel who twice came to its aid in times of extreme crisis. And some- thing more, perhaps. I remember hearing him speak at Chatham House in 1934 on British foreign policy and as I listened my heart sank. How could anyone with his wisdom and experi- ence suggest that Germany would soon return to the League of Nations? And yet the most vivid impression has remained with me ever since then, the only time I ever saw him, and it was one of greatness. Were we all wrong to be so impressed by him? Sir Keith Hancock's life shows us, I think, that we were not.
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