XPost: soc.history, soc.rights.human, za.misc
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From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net

South Africa’s Racist Founding Father Was Also a Human Rights Pioneer

How did Jan Smuts reconcile his belief in freedom abroad with his
efforts to suppress it at home?

By Saul Dubow

Mr. Dubow is a professor of Commonwealth history at Cambridge
University.

May 18, 2019

https://t.co/4mXtcuvFG0

The ranks of diplomats gathered in Paris during the spring of 1919
included a most unusual member of the British imperial delegation: a
youthful South African politician and general named Jan Christiaan
Smuts. One of his country’s founding figures and a leading force
behind the formation of the British Commonwealth, the League of
Nations and the United Nations, Smuts helped shape the emergence of
the post-World War II liberal order — even though, all the while, he
helped craft segregationist white rule in South Africa. How did he
reconcile his promotion of human rights abroad and suppression of them
at home? And how should we weigh this complicated, flawed but
important figure, a century later?

Smuts carefully cultivated a persona as a warrior, statesman and
philosopher. As a leader of the Dominion of South Africa, he was a
signatory to the peace at Versailles. He was also a veteran of the
Boer War who, while operating on horseback behind British lines,
carried a copy of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and the New
Testament (in Greek) in his saddlebag. Unlike many Afrikaner
hard-liners, Smuts supported the process of reconciliation with the
victorious British, and he succeeded in turning military defeat into
political success: He was the principal architect of the unified South
Africa which came into existence as an independent nation in 1910.

This compact was threatened at the outbreak of war in 1914 when a
group of Afrikaner militants, seeking to avenge the loss of the Boer
republics, joined forces with Germans in South West Africa in an
attempt to overthrow the South African government. Smuts supported his
Boer War compatriot, Prime Minister Louis Botha, who put down the
insurrection at home and initiated a series of daring raids into South
West Africa in 1915. The German colonial forces surrendered in July, a
notable early victory for the Allies in the first world war.

Later in 1915 Smuts led a grueling military campaign in German-held
East Africa, an area twice the size of Germany, which resulted in the
end of German rule, and with it the kaiser’s hopes of uniting his
country’s holdings on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to create a
colonial “Mittelafrika.” Smuts’s rapid success changed African
colonial history and connected South Africa with other British settler
colonies in Africa.

With the defeat of Germany in Africa, Smuts proceeded to London, where
a conference of representatives from the British Empire had gathered
to support the war effort and give shape to an emergent commonwealth
that would review the terms of imperial membership. Smuts, his
reputation burnished on the battlefield, was well-placed to guide that
process. In May 1917, addressing both houses of the British
Parliament, he made the case for a commonwealth as “a dynamic,
evolving system of states and communities under a common flag.” This definition recognized the growing pressure from the imperial white
dominions — like South Africa — that the commonwealth should not be dominated by Britain, but should coexist as a group of equals
committed to a higher cause. As the historian Mark Mazower has shown,
this idea for the Commonwealth served as a model for “an even larger
future political community,” a League of Nations.
Jan Smuts fought the British in the Boer War. Fifteen years later, he
was a member of Lloyd George’s Cabinet.

Smuts was by now a close ally of Prime Minister Lloyd George of
Britain, who invited him to join the British War Cabinet. He quickly
became Indispensable. He drew up plans for an integrated Air Ministry, resulting in the creation of the Royal Air Force. Acting on Lloyd
George’s behalf, he intervened on the question of home rule in
Ireland, where his standing as an opponent of British imperialism gave
him special leverage. Smuts also used his outsider status to talk down
angry Welsh coal miners in Tonypandy, reminding them that the Boer War
was “a war of a small nation against the biggest nation in the world.”
He sealed the loyalty of the miners by persuading them to sing: They
answered with a rousing rendition of “Land of My Fathers.”

Smuts declined an invitation to lead the British wartime campaign
against the Ottomans in Palestine. But he saw the geostrategic
advantages of a Jewish homeland in proximity to the Suez Canal, and
saw analogies between the nationalist aspirations of Jews and Boers,
both of whom deserved “historic justice.” A close friend of Chaim
Weizmann, Smuts played a considerable behind-the-scenes role in
formulating the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain announced
its support for a Jewish homeland. In 1919, he traveled to Budapest on
behalf of the Foreign Office to meet with the Hungarian Communist
leader Bela Kun in an effort to negotiate the military frontier
between his country and Romania, regaling Kun with stories from the
Boer War.

Britain was gratified by the way in which this former anti-imperial
fighter transmuted into a loyal exponent of the Commonwealth and a
willing supporter of the wartime government. Winston Churchill, who
had been captured in South Africa while working as a journalist during
the Boer War, was a lifelong admirer of Smuts, and relied heavily on
his counsel during World War II. In 1917, Churchill welcomed Smuts to
London in the most fulsome terms: “At this moment there arrives in
England from the outer marches of the Empire a new and altogether
extraordinary man.” But Smuts’s forays into international politics
came at a cost. He was increasingly vilified at home by Afrikaner
nationalists as the “handyman of the empire” — a term originally used
as praise by British newspapers.

Along with his vital contribution to defining the Commonwealth, Smuts
played an important part in conceiving of the League of Nations
itself. Concerned about how to achieve long-term peace in Europe, and
watchful about the threat of Bolshevism, he argued that the terms
imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles were overly harsh: The
same spirit of magnanimity — or “appeasement,” in Smuts’s words — that
had achieved a workable peace between Britons and Boers ought now to
be demonstrated in the case of German reparations. Smuts encouraged
John Maynard Keynes to write his seminal critique of the treaty, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” and in 1918 wrote a proposal of
his own: “The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion.”

The ideas contained in this pamphlet envisioned the League as a means
to fill the vacuum left by Europe’s broken empires. Smuts saw the Commonwealth as an “embryo league of nations because it is based on
the true principles of national freedom and political
decentralization.” In spare prose, Smuts topped his talents as a
lawyer with a sprinkling of inspirational idealism, translating
President Woodrow Wilson’s aspirational Fourteen Points into a
workable instrument for a peace “founded in human ideals, in
principles of freedom and equality, and in institutions which will for
the future guarantee those principles against wanton assault.”

Lloyd George commended Smuts’s ideas. Wilson was enthused as well: He
invited Smuts to his residence at the Hôtel Crillon in Paris in
January 1919, and incorporated some of Smuts’s ideas in his own
proposals for the League. Smuts and Botha were unable to persuade the
Peace Conference to allow Germany’s former colonies in the Pacific and
Africa — which Smuts caricatured as “inhabited by barbarians, who not
only cannot possibly govern themselves” — to pass directly to New
Zealand and South Africa. Still, the Boer generals got the next best
thing: Under the League’s mandate system, in which it acted as the
trustee for less “civilized” nations deemed not ready for independence
(and which Smuts helped design), South Africa effectively took over
South West Africa, governing until it finally gained its independence
as Namibia in 1990.

Smuts’s approach to politics was shaped by, of all people, Walt
Whitman. While studying for a law degree at Cambridge, he wrote a
treatise, “Walt Whitman: A Study in the Evolution of Personality,” in
which he argued that the American poet exemplified an expansive
conception of freedom rooted in pantheism and human potential, rather
than religiosity. Smuts went on to develop this approach as “holism,”
which he outlined in another treatise: Evolution pushed humans and
societies to join ever larger wholes, from small local units to
nations and commonwealths, culminating in global forms of association
like the League.
Smuts’s approach to politics was shaped by, of all people, Walt
Whitman.

Smuts felt a different affinity with another famous American, Woodrow
Wilson. In the latter stages of drafting the 1919 Treaty, Smuts was
privately critical of Wilson, fearing that he was capitulating to
those who wanted to punish Germany, and so endangering long-term peace
in Europe. Yet when the president left office in 1921, much diminished
in health and prestige, Smuts defended him, declaring the League of
Nations “one of the great creative documents of human history.” Smuts
and Wilson had much in common as intellectual statesmen. As
high-minded Christians, both raised in rural societies shaped by
slavery, they shared formative experiences. They were also inclined to moralizing white paternalism and an acceptance of racial segregation.

In arguing for peace and justice at Versailles, Smuts took no account
of the delegation from the African National Congress, which petitioned
the British government to help in pushing back against South Africa’s increasingly oppressive segregationist laws. In doing so, they made
explicit reference to Wilsonian ideals. The delegation, ably led by
Solomon Plaatje, gained an audience with a sympathetic Lloyd George,
who referred their claims to Smuts. But Smuts did not meet with them,
and dismissed their views as unrepresentative and exaggerated.

Still, Smuts could not avoid what he and others called “the native question,” especially when he returned to South Africa in 1919,
becoming prime minister and minister of native affairs after Botha’s
death that year. The experience of black African colonial troops in
World War I — the discrimination they faced, versus the soaring
promises of self-determination that came out of Versailles — had set
off a wave of unrest and nationalist awareness across much of the
continent. An American-trained Baptist preacher, John Chilembwe, led a
revolt in Nyasaland (now Malawi) in 1915; it was put down, but
Chilembwe’s martyrdom did much to encourage the development of
nationalism in his country.

South Africa, with its white population intent on securing supremacy
over its African, Indian and “colored” populations, was especially
tense in the postwar years. White leaders, including Smuts’s
government, were increasingly determined to institute comprehensive
racial segregation; that, combined with a weakening economy, led to an
upsurge of black militancy. Black sanitary workers, known as “bucket
boys,” went on strike in 1918, followed by black mineworkers in 1920.
At the Cape Town docks, Clements Kadalie founded the Industrial and
Commercial Workers’ Union in 1919. Through the 1920s, this
organization spread rapidly in the countryside, spurred by millenarian
hopes of black Americans coming to their aid.

As prime minister, Jan Smuts could not accept blacks as political
equals seeking rights of citizenship. Throughout his career, he
preferred to think of the “native problem” in abstract terms. Smuts
relied on anthropological theory to justify segregation on the basis
of fundamental cultural difference, and cited new fossil finds,
pointing to South Africa’s singular importance in hominid evolution,
to suggest that prehistoric differences between different races were
profound and perhaps unbridgeable in the present. Smuts was nowhere as
hard line as some of his white compatriots, but neither was he in
favor of black political rights. Like many paternalistic and
“moderate” whites, he was inclined to defer problems of race equality
to the future.

That wasn’t always possible, and Smuts had little compunction about
using the police and army to put down rebellions — white as well as
black. In 1919, a self-declared Christian prophet, Enoch Mgijima,
formed a community calling themselves the Israelites. Some 3,000 of
his followers gravitated to the agricultural settlement of Bulhoek,
where they took up residence in the vicinity of white farmers.
Tensions rose. Defiant Israelites refused to obey orders to disperse.
On May 23, 1921, the police mobilized. Warning shots were fired, but
no one moved. The police opened fire, and an estimated 180 white-robed Israelites were killed. In the aftermath, Smuts was blamed for
inflaming the situation by reneging on a promise to meet Mgijimi.

In 1922, in the newly mandated territory of South West Africa, a
rebellion by a Nama clan, known as the Bondelswarts, was put down by
South African aerial bombing, killing more than 100. Because this
incident came under the terms of the League of Nations, it drew
international attention and, once again, criticism of Smuts’s
aggressive response to nonwhite unrest. Smuts, though, was unmoved;
before Parliament, he declared, “It leaves me cold.”

Smuts’s policies and reputation at home did little to tarnish his
standing as a global force for self-determination and human rights. In
1945, at the conference held in San Francisco to create the United
Nations, it was Smuts who proposed adding the phrase “fundamental
human rights” into the preamble to its charter.

Yet Smuts once again refused to engage with the African National
Congress, whose leader, the American-educated medical doctor Alfred.
B. Xuma, was pressing for the recognition of black citizenship rights
in terms of the Atlantic Charter. When the two men met by chance at a
press gathering in New York in November 1946, where Xuma was lobbying
the United Nations to prevent Smuts from annexing South West Africa,
Xuma is said to have remarked wryly: “I have had to fly 10,000 miles
to meet my prime minister. He talks about us but won’t talk to us.” At

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