Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts, OM, CH, ED, KC, FRS (24 May 1870 – 11 September 1950) was a prominent South African and Commonwealth statesman, military leader, and philosopher. He served as a Boer General during the Boer War, a British General during the First World War and was appointed Field Marshal by King George VI during the Second World War. In addition to various cabinet appointments, he served as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 until 1924 and from 1939 until 1948. From 1917 to 1919 he was one of five members of the British War Cabinet, helping to create the Royal Air Force. He played a leading part in the post-war settlements at the end of both world wars, making significant contributions towards the creation of the League of Nations and the United Nations. He did much to redefine the relationship between Britain and the Dominions and Colonies, leading to the formation of the British Commonwealth.
This article is about Jan Smuts' rise from obscurity to high office, from his return to South Africa in 1894 until the outbreak of the Second Boer War in 1899. After setting up a law practice in Cape Town, the Anglophile Smuts was drawn to the charismatic Cecil Rhodes. After the Jameson Raid, he felt betrayed, and moved to the South African Republic. Transforming himself into a hard-line Anglophobe, Smuts found himself office at the heart of Paul Kruger's government. As confrontation with the British Empire loomed, Smuts played a crucial role in the failed peace talks.
In Cape Town
Return to South Africa Smuts returned to the Cape in June 1895. News of his achievements in Cambridge had reached Cape Town; he was feted by local academics as an example of South African intellectual agility. He returned confident that his qualifications would lead to a successful legal career in the Cape; a career which would enable him to settle his debt with Professor Marais and to allow him to marry.
Smuts duly established his practice, but his briefs were few. With limited legal work he looked elsewhere to supplement his income. He managed to find a little work tutoring in Law, but his primary occupation quickly became freelance journalism. He wrote on a range of subjects, from articles on Cape flora and fauna to literary reviews, but it was to the world of politics that he was chiefly drawn.
Cape politics at that time was dominated by two men and one big idea. Cecil Rhodes and Jan Hofmeyr jointly proclaimed the ideal of unity; unity of the white population, Briton and Boer, and unity between the colonies and republics of Southern Africa.
Rhodes’s vision Rhodes was one of the richest men in South Africa; chairman of both De Beers Consolidated Mines & Consolidated Gold Fields - the dominant diamond mining company in South Africa and one of the largest gold mining houses, respectively. Rhodes was also chairman of the British South Africa Company, granted a Royal Charter in 1889, giving it the right to develop the country beyond the Limpopo - present day Zimbabwe and Zambia. Rhodes was a fervent British imperialist, committed to the spread of British influence over the world, most especially in Africa. Southern Africa was divided into four separate entities; there were two British colonies, the Cape and Natal, and two Afrikaner republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Rhodes, in common with many at the time, saw this region as essentially an economic and social whole. He was convinced that future depended on the realisation of this inherent unity, on the creation of a union both political and economic.
Rhodes was a British imperialist; ultimately he wished to see a united South Africa under the British flag. However, he realised at the outset that this was not something which the Cape Afrikaners would support, much less those in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. He therefore reinvented himself as a 'colonialist', he began to emphasise the primacy of local interests, putting them above the idea of subordination to imperial power. This gained him the support of Hofmeyr, the Afrikaner Bond party, and a large portion of the Cape vote. Rhodes was elected Prime Minister of the Cape in 1889.
The Afrikaner Bond party was the dominant political party in the Cape. Formed in 1879 with the purpose of removing British power and influence from South Africa, under Hofmeyr's leadership it lost its anti-British animus. Hofmeyr shared Rhodes's vision of unity and led his party in support of Rhodes. In order to maintain the support of the Bond membership, Rhodes agreed concessions with Hofmeyr; Rhodes introduced legislation to provide legal equality between the English and Dutch languages, and the imposition of mild tariffs on agricultural produce, gaining him the goodwill of the Cape Afrikaners, the majority of whom were farmers.
The Transvaal question Traditionally the Cape had been the economic and political heart of South Africa. The discovery of diamonds there, in Kimberley in 1870, had only reinforced this dominance. However, the entire balance of power in South Africa was to change in 1886 when vast gold fields were discovered in the Transvaal, near Witwatersrand. Almost overnight the Transvaal changed from being the most rural, backward, and impoverished state of South Africa to being the provider of 25% of the world's gold.
The discovery of diamonds in the Cape had led to a vast inflow of investor capital. Railways were built, opening the country up, and migrants flooded in; in their wake came social and material development. When it came to the Transvaal however, this kind of development was strongly resisted. President Paul Kruger, known affectionately as Oom Paul (Uncle Paul), was a deeply conservative man. He was concerned that the religious and moral character of the Transvaal would change with the growth of the mines. Towns such as Johannesburg had already transformed from quiet villages into vast mining camps, filled with prostitution and drunkenness - vices utterly repugnant to the Calvinist Afrikaners. A common sentiment was 'the mining industry is the ruin of the true Transvaal in mind and spirit' (quote from Transvaal official, SP1, 22, p77).
These migrants, or uitlanders as they were known, had the potential to change the Transvaal forever; by 1895 the Transvaal government estimated there to be 30000 Afrikaner voters (or burghers, as they were known), to 60000 uitlanders.Exact figures are uncertain, the first census of the Transvaal was only taken in April 1904. The Transvaal government made policy on the assumption that there were 60,000 uitlanders to 30,000 burghers (these figures refer to adult males only). This was a conservative estimate, others claimed the ratio to be 4:1 or even 10:1. Despite these figures, subsequent scholarship has suggested that there was in fact parity between the burgher and uitlander populations, although given the nature of mining there may have been more uitlander males. See JS Marias, The Fall of Kruger's Republic, p2 Kruger made every effort to keep the balance of power firmly in the burgher's favour. Initially, from the time of the first gold discoveries to 1890, uitlanders could obtain the right to vote after five years residence. In 1890, as the extent of foreign immigration became clear, this residency requirement was increased to fourteen years, combined with a stipulation that applicants must be over forty years old. In an attempt to compensate a new body, the Second Volksraad, was created with limited competence in designated legislative areas, all subject to the ratification of the Volksraad. Uitlanders could gain the right to vote for this body after two years residence and the right to stand for election to it after four years.Marais, The Fall of Kruger's Republic, p53 Despite this, the fact remained that at the same time as gold revenues served as the Transvaal's main source of income, the uitlander mineworkers were denied any effective say in government.
As well as these forces within, Kruger was also fighting against external forces that he saw as threatening the Transvaal's independence. Kruger, who as a twelve-year-old boy had participated in the Great Trek, was profoundly distrustful of British regional power. He had played a key part in resisting the British annexation of 1877 both; efforts culminating in the 1881 Pretoria Convention and later the 1884 London Convention. These conventions guaranteed the Transvaal's independence subject only to Britain's right exercise control over certain areas of policy, principally over the Transvaal's foreign relations. Kruger was determined to prevent any further British encroachment, either militarily, economically or politically.
Distrustful of Rhodes's motives, the Transvaal refused to consider a proposed Southern Africa customs union and strongly resisted further development of rail links to the Cape. Indeed, far from acting as a unifying force, the question of railways and economics led to a trade war in 1894. With the growth of the vital gold industry, the land-locked Transvaal was dependent on the ports of the Cape and Natal – both under British control. Kruger was intent on removing this potential economic stranglehold. He looked to the east, beginning negotiations with the Portuguese colonial authorities. The Transvaal secured from Portugal the right to construct a railway line to the port of Delagoa Bay, a line which was completed in 1894. Kruger then drastically increased customs rates on south-bound cargoes, in an attempt to force the mining companies off the Cape and Natal lines, on to the new route. The situation rapidly escalated, culminating in the Transvaal prohibiting all imports coming in via the Cape. The issue was only resolved when Britain informed the Transvaal government that their actions were a breach of the London convention,Article XIII, Prohibition on Transvaal imposing discriminatory import/export tariffs on goods from British territories compared with tariffs in operation on those originating from foreign countries that unless the restrictions were removed the British government would be obliged to intervene.
There was notable political opposition to Kruger within the Transvaal, not merely from the largely pro-British uitlanders but from many burghers, men of undoubted patriotic and republican feeling. However, while Kruger retained a majority and remained in power, there was little chance of the necessary rapprochement emerging that would lead to participation in an economic, much less political union.
Smuts’s political genesis Smuts was in full agreement with Rhodes's public platform of South African unity, sentiments which the young Smuts had begun to advocate in his 1888 Victoria College address and in his 1891 Ebden essay. Smuts saw union as being self-evidently beneficial, the only possible point of contention being whether it would be a union dominated by Britain or one dominated by the Afrikaners. There was another way though, one exemplified by the Rhodes – Bond relationship; union between the states and colonies would be accompanied by union of the white races. The question of unity would not fall upon the stale old argument of whether Briton or Boer would have the upper hand; the unified South Africa would be run by a unified race of South Africans. Smuts saw this alliance between Rhodes and Hofmeyr, this union of the two white races, as a permanent and insoluble part of Cape life, an optimistic sign of the future to the rest of South Africa. Smuts, determined to do what he could to aid this process, used his newspaper articles in support of Rhodes; defending what he saw as the man of vision against his parochial and small-minded rivals. As Smuts was to write in 1902: