General Smuts: South Africa

Anonym 18/06/2010

GENERAL SMUTS: THE FATHER OF RECONCILIATION? An appreciation by Phillip Taylor MBE and Elizabeth Taylor of Richmond Green Chambers The World Cup may have raised South Africa’s sporting profile, but for our money, her history is much more fascinating – hence the interest and timeliness of Tony Lentin’s latest historical biography of General Smuts. General Smuts was South Africa’s Prime Minster at the time of the Second World War, fighting on Britain’s side as a British Field Marshal. In Churchill’s opinion, he was “one of the most enlightened, courageous and noble-minded men of the twentieth century.” The first thing you notice when you open the book is the quotation from Smuts’s remark to Sir Alfred Milner in 1905: ‘History writes the word ‘reconciliation’ over all her quarrels.’ One wonders whether Nelson Mandela was familiar with this utterance, took it to heart and enshrined it in the title of his ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ initiative which continues to inform and inspire the continuing if difficult development of contemporary South Africa, with its agonizing mixture of almost intractable problems. Well, who knows? It seems apparent however, that ‘reconciliation’ has become part of the collective mind-set of South Africa. Historians are aware (but general readers all too often aren’t) that Smuts’s achievements and influence were by no means local to South Africa. He was, as author Tony Lentin points out, ‘the heart and conscience of the Paris Peace Conference’ in the aftermath of the First World War and is credited substantially for advocating the cause for magnanimity in victory, in the form of a ‘different peace’ with Germany, rather than the punitive and vengeful peace which (understandably) eventually emerged. An inspiration to Woodrow Wilson, America’s idealistic president, Smuts is credited with creating the plan which led to the formation of the League of Nations and inspired the Covenant of the League. Lentin’s unshakeable belief in the importance of Smuts’s role at the Paris Peace Conference presents, in his words, ‘another perhaps less familiar aspect of what happened at Paris.’ Focusing on Smuts’s pivotal but frustratingly thwarted role at the Peace Conference, this eminently readable biography depicts a complex personality; a Renaissance man of numerous gifts and talents. The narrative follows his career first, as an assiduously studious academic at Cambridge, followed by a career as a barrister, followed by exploits as a commando leader in the Second Boer War and his subsequent statesman-like role in the development of South Africa as an independent dominion. However, Smuts seems also to have been a man of contradictory impulses, particularly in his attitude to Nazi Germany. Whilst he found Nazism absurd and repulsive, he saw it as a psychological consequence of the Treaty of Versailles ‘whose revision he continued to urge even as the threat from German increased’, says the author. Some of the reasons for this stance are revealed in the book. Smuts believed in the inherent superiority of European civilization, primarily Anglo Saxon and Germanic. Compared with those of some of his contemporaries, his attitudes toward South Africa’s indigenous population were positively liberal, if paternalistic, yet as he told Parliament in 1945 ‘it is a fixed policy to maintain white supremacy in South Africa.’ Nonetheless, despite some of his more unpalatable views, Smuts, towards the end of his life, apparently thought carefully about how, if he had remained in power, education and democracy might be extended to the black majority. The magnanimity which was always his ideal and his watchword, undoubtedly served as an inspiration to Nelson Mandela, whose interesting and apposite opinion of Smuts, (from Long Walk to Freedom) appears in the book: ‘I cared more that he had helped the foundation of the League of Nations, promoting freedom throughout the world’, wrote Mandela, ’than the fact that he had repressed freedom at home.’ Smuts died in 1950. Could he have foreseen the cruelties and horrifying injustices that were to be engendered by the apartheid regime? One would like to think not.