INTERNATIONALISM

Significantly, the Covenant of the League of Nations in 1919, for which Smuts took some responsibility for framing, contained no provision for human rights, apart from references in Article 23 to ‘fair and humane conditions of labour’ for everyone and to ‘just treatment’ of the native inhabitants of dependent territories.

¹² The speech and the editorial were printed in the paper on December 3 at pp 5 and 8, with a further, explanatory, editorial on December 7, when the newspaper also printed a lengthy letter to the Editor from Dr Margery Perham (a life-long liberal friend and critic of Smuts). the contrast between 1919 and 1945. If during the inter-war years he continued to do nothing (niksdoen -Afrikaans for doing nothing - as his liberal friends were wont to say) and to watch, the policy of separate development of the races gradually disintegrated. A small token of such disintegration was exhibited by Smuts being prepared to arm the non-white population, were the Germans during the First World War to have invaded South Africa. That at least infuriated the Afrikaners. By the 1940s, he had become, perhaps belatedly, convinced that the country had to tackle the Native problem. Even before his commitment in 1945 to the charter of the United Nations, he had acknowledged the need for change. Addressing the Institute of Race Relations in Cape Town in February 1942 he at least dis­pelled the oft-repeated criticism that he had cared chiefly for primi­tive Africans, to the neglect of the urgent and nascent problems of African urbanisation.

Isolation has gone and segregation has fallen on evil days too. But there are other phenomena springing out of these conditions...

When people ask me what the population of South Africa is I never say it is two millions. I think it is an outrage to say it is two millions. This country has a population of over ten millions, and that outlook which treats the African and Native as not counting, is making the ghastliest mistake possible. If he is not much more, he is the beast of burden; he is the worker and you need him. He is carrying this country on his back.

But by the 1940s such high-sounding expressions about racial issues came too little and too late. His plan for the forthcoming gen­eral election of 1948 included recognition of African rights in the urban areas but specifically did not envisage any immediate exten­sion of African parliamentary representation. Therein lay the com­plexity of Smuts’ problem. On the one hand there was his deep love of public duty as Prime Minister and on the other his countervail­ing liberalism. The inherent contradiction between the humanitar­ian in him and his South African (particularly, Afrikaner) heritage created the politician’s dilemma.

If there existed in terms of realpolitik insufficient leeway for radi­cal change, such as to fend off the Nationalists and to avoid the loss of power at the general election, Smuts’ years of drifting on policy

Jan Christiaan Smuts: Middle Templar Extraordinary 309 towards racism had already - in all likelihood, unintentionally - paved the way for the advent of apartheid. But at the brink of the electorate’s decision in 1948 there occurred an event of political significance.

The event was precipitated, not by the black community under the growing strength of the African National Congress, but by the Asian population.

The Indian Government withdrew its High Commissioner, and took the issue to the first meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations. Smuts travelled to the United States to hear Mrs Ranjit Pandit unleash an attack on Smuts and South Africa. The Charter was essentially non-discriminatory. By that standard, South Africa’s racial policies were indefensible. Smuts’ only plausible defence was to claim, legalistically, that the Act was exclusively the concern of South Africa’s domestic jurisdiction, and not for interna­tional intervention. India won the day. As Bill Schwarz in The White Man's World^[268] describes the event: ‘the author of the Preamble to the UN Charter found himself the first to be arraigned for violat­ing its principles.’ Just so. Smuts’ correspondence at the time dis­played not anger, but bewilderment. (India was at the forefront of the UN non-recognition of South Africa’s sovereignty over Namibia: Smuts had gone to the UN to face the music.) It is conceivable that, for Smuts, that one defining moment would have propelled him towards a realisation that the Indian victory at the UN had produced an early example of the outcrop of international human rights law which, at his life’s end, was beginning to envelop the post-war world.

It was not until Smuts had been two and a half years in his grave that the Indian Government mounted an attack on the whole front against South Africa’s policies on colour.

The first of the two problems identified at the outset by Smuts - the welding of the two European races - by 1950 was still unfin­ished business. The second problem of African integration as citizens of the Union of South Africa that Smuts had designed could only have been aspirational and required personally an unresolved contradiction. All that might lead one to conclude that he died a failure, two years after losing power. Not so, for one is entitled not only to judge him in the context of the burgeoning South Africa, but also to speculate how he would have responded to the early years of apartheid.

There has been a long-standing difference among social histori­ans in their interpretations of the effectiveness of separate develop­ment of the races between 1910 and 1948. By different assessments of the cohesion and homogeneity of the apartheid State from 1948 onwards, one argument is that there was, generally speaking, an unbroken lineage from the first decade of the twentieth century through to the Smuts era, culminating in the advent of apartheid. An alternative view is one of a more fractured development in which segregation did not become a coherent policy until the 1920s, and even then was distinguishable from apartheid in its rigorous political form. Bill Schwarz concludes his impressive discussion of the two views and their varieties, that Smuts never had to confront the politics which was necessary to ensure that segregation contin­ued into the 1950s, ‘and we shall never know how he would have responded politically to such a situation’. My supposition is that the non-white population, increasingly urbanised and politically active, were, in Smuts’ eyes at least, on the cusp of civilised behav­iour in the Western European style. Forty years earlier (in 1906) Smuts had observed that ‘the burden of solving’ the problem of political change for the non-white population would have to be solved in the future.

Jan Christiaan Smuts: Middle Templar Extraordinary 311 must have forced him, ineluctably, to rethink his personal, internal contradiction. Even the most ardent apologist could not deny that Smuts was innately a supremacist and segregationist: his ancestry and cultural heritage ensured that instinctive posture. He struggled unsuccessfully to reconcile the supremacy of the white population with his commitment to liberty and democracy. The events in New York in 1946 stung Smuts too late for action or for meaningful words. Within two years he was out of office and, two years after that, he died.

The international dimension of the immediate post-war years crucially influenced the opponents of apartheid. By that time, the politics of colour had become a distinct feature of internationalised controversy. The consequences of South Africa’s domestic policies inevitably became issues of that country’s foreign policy. The rest is a lamentable tale of the second half of the twentieth century, until the miracle of 1994 and the end of apartheid.

At Smuts’ death, the British Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, aptly remarked: ‘A light has gone out from the world of free men.’ So I conclude as I began, standing before the statues of Smuts and Mandela in Parliament Square. Viewed from the perspective of the entire twentieth century, the juxtaposition of the two men’s statues might reasonably seem to the fiercer critics of the system of apart­heid to be paradoxical. Viewed, however, from the standpoint of the two halves of the century, the statuary proximity of Jan Smuts and Nelson Mandela - the two giants of the South African nation, each in his own half of the twentieth century - is entirely apposite and congruent.