THE NATIVE PROBLEM

As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, Jan Smuts had considered that South Africa faced two fundamental problems: first, consolidation of the white race, and secondly, white policy towards the other races (native, Asian and Cape Coloureds).

I sympathise profoundly with the native races of South Africa whose land it was long before we came here to force a policy of dispossession upon them. And it ought to be the policy of all parties to do justice to the natives and to take all wise and prudent measures for their civilisation and improvement. But I don’t believe in politics for them. Perhaps at bot­tom I do not believe in politics at all as a means for the attainment of the highest ends; but certainly so far as the natives are concerned politics will to my mind only have an unsettling influence. I would therefore not give them the franchise, which in any case would not affect more than a negligeable [sic] number of them at present. When I consider the political future of the natives in SA 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.

An example of Smuts’ approach to the politics of South Africa throughout the first three decades of the Union is best shown in his discourses with private persons of a liberal disposition, the most notable being the author Olive Schreiner, who had a large reading public throughout the English-speaking world, and with whom he had a close relationship over many years at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was a passionate advocate for a range of socio-political issues, often exhibiting contradictory intuitions - she was anti-capitalist, pro-Boer, pro-Native, anti-Whitehall, all things at one and the same time. Some of Olive Schreiner’s letters to Smuts made swingeing comments about white trade union leaders who produced white-only unions and ‘protected’ skilled jobs for whites only. A letter of 16 April 1911 referred to the ‘little handful of oligarchic white men, who call themselves “working men” to keep down the millions of their fellow citizens’. She had written, prophetically, that

the continual association with creatures who are not free will ultimately take from us our strength and our own freedom, and men will see in our faces the reflection of that on which we are always treading and looking down. If we raise the dark man we shall rise with him; if we kick him under our feet he will hold us fast by them.

Smuts shared that passionate feeling, but his warm-hearted approach was controlled by a cool head. He knew instinctively that the issue of the franchise was not for today, but should be left to the morrow. His political struggles with such liberal causes did not detract from the strength of his friendships, which were recipro­cated.

Toni Morrison, addressing the American literati in her essays entitled Playing in the Dark,¹⁰ has forcefully reminded ‘all of us [that we] are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes.’ But those of us who have conducted public inquiries - rather akin to the task of the his­torian - are acutely aware of the hazard of judging human conduct from afar.

... one moment

¹⁰ T Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA/London, Harvard University Press, 1992).

Weighs like another. Only in retrospection, selection.

We say, that was the day. The critical moment.

Yet Smuts can speak for himself, as in this letter to a friend from 1942:

What will it profit the country if justice is done to the underdog and the whole caboodle then, including the underdog, is handed over to the wreckers?

There speaks the experienced voice of pragmatism. If Smuts retained an aspiration for native representation in Parliament, he left unresolved his personal contradiction of denying the franchise to fellow citizens with fundamental human rights - as Professor Hancock, in his magisterial biography of Smuts (vol II at page 485), neatly observed: ‘that expressed in a nutshell the mechanics of the struggle for power within an electorate established prominently upon the principle of racial discrimination’.^[267]

During the early part of the twentieth century Smuts had pro­vided no answers to the second problem - indeed his constitution­making of 1910 worked positively against such an immediate solution - and deliberately left it for others in the future to solve. He was generally unreceptive to theories about universal franchise and regarded himself as a pragmatist. He thought that development about voting rights would emerge in the course of political power, whereby the whole population would exhibit its responsibility and power, and not abuse that power as regards the native population.

In 1941 Smuts, having only recently (in 1939) become Prime Minister of South Africa for the second time, was directly engaged in Britain’s grim resistance to Nazi Germany; it was his parliamen­tary stance that declared South Africa at war with Germany. In the following years he became instrumentally engaged in the establish­ment of the United Nations. It was at the very least a time for rethinking, if not an instant reshaping of the ever-present problem of the development of the non-white population in his own coun­try. As one looked to the world after the ending of hostilities, Smuts did start to look beyond the political horizon, but time was short.

At the insistent invitation from Churchill, Smuts made his sec­ond wartime visit to England at the end of 1943. On 25 November 1943, Smuts addressed a private meeting of the United Kingdom branch of the Empire Parliamentary Association in the Houses of Parliament on the topic of Thoughts on the New World (the meeting was subsequently fully reported on the editorial page of the Times¹²). In short, the race and colour problem was prospectively visualised by Smuts, although predictably with persistent prevarication. He said:

You can have no simple, straightforward approach to a problem such as the vast diversity of race and colour, culture, and levels of civilization existing in our Empire. That is the sort of problem with which we have dealt in the past, and which will face us even more in the future... I know it is one of the questions on which people are thinking deeply and with which they are very much concerned nowadays. Many well­meaning people think you can by short cuts arrive at a solution. But you will not. Simplification will not help you. Simplification will mean fal­sification of the real difficulty. It is only by a long process of experience and patient experiment that you can deal with situations such as these.