In his time there was no middle way of viewing Jan Christiaan Smuts.
He was a world leader who was either adored or reviled. Most of the world recognised him as a soldier, statesman, philosopher, but many of his compatriots at home, who believed they knew him better, thought him to be irretrievably flawed.
With hindsight it is possible more easily to see Smuts as a whole. . .a man of far vision and precipitate action, of courageous depth and shallow vanity. A man who loved humanity and ideals, but despised human frailty and had no time for ordinary individuals
.
History will no doubt be rewritten to show that it was he who subjugated Africans in the 20th century, by failing to extend the franchise to black people in three of the four Provinces that made up Union in 1910. In reality, it was not he. Although later, when he almost had the power to extend the franchise - he calculated that it would be folly to do so until the bitterness between Boer and Brit had abated. Only failure could result, he believed, through the inevitable take-over of government by white racist voters.
Indeed, Afrikaner Nationalists, and English-speakers, both communist and ultra-conservative, combined in rebellion and polical action to bring down his unifying party. His response was ruthless, and entirely successful. In the end, however, after two world wars, it was nationalism which won the all-white Parliament - and held on to it by means learned from Fascism.
Those brown and black people who had been allowed to vote were cast into the cold.
Whether his historic calculations and his predictions were correct, or merely an excuse, is not possible to prove. Modern prejudice is that they were an excuse. But the reality of his times, and his global rather than petty nationalist outlook, suggests otherwise. He dealt harshly and precipitately with Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, yet conversed with him as an equal. . . as most white South Africans and many in Europe and America would not have done at the time. Paradoxically he also pandered to a key block of voters in Natal by encouraging discriminatory laws against Indian citizens.
Almost all SA laws were discriminatory in those days, but whether he approved of them in principle is open to debate. There can be no doubt, however, about the sincerity - and probably the correctness – of his belief that to end racism against blacks before he had ended racism between English and Afrikaner would be dangerous for all, and probably an end to the young Union. . . which, it has to be said, was itself a racist botch-up.
Even the generally accepted view of the impatient Smuts, unsympathetic to ordinary people, is not completely true.
I remember, as a callow youth with nothing whatever to contribute, spending hours alone with the old man in his stark little bedroom at Irene. Sometimes General Smuts - lying on his bed with his shoes on in that spartan little corrugated bedroom in those closing days, would talk - ostensibly to me, but in reality to himself. . Much time he spent in silent thought. . . yet in the long silences he still wanted individual company; even a young reporter whom he hardly knew.
What I do remember from those few private visits was something I had not detected in the stern public figure of General Smuts: a kindly old man, interested in others, especially youth.
I remember wondering whether this could be the general who ordered the bombing and shooting of rebellious strikers in Johannesburg, or the execution of fellow-Afrikaners for treachery in his ‘bush war’.
Piet Beukes, who as Smuts's deputy Director of Information knew the Oubaas well, begins in his book, "The Holistic Smuts", (Human & Rosseau) an analysis of the man. But, as he himself says, it is only a beginning. The sub-title of the book, "A Study in Personality", is misleading in that the work is more about Smuts's philosophy than his character.
At the age of 19 Smuts wrote an essay in which he declared the Person to be the highest manifestation of Truth.
Later, in his introduction to Holism and Evolution, he explained how he had come "to realise that Personality was only a special case of a much more universal phenomenon, namely the existence of wholes and the tendency towards wholes and wholeness in nature."
He explained wholeness as much more than a sum total of Being or Experience. He saw it as the fundamental character of every personality and of every form and structure in the universe.
Smuts identified a progressive scale of wholes, arising from material bodies through plants and animals to man and his personality, and through this to the ideals and artistic creations of the spiritual world. The holistic force he saw as the core to all existence. To express the concept, he coined the word "Holism" (from the Greek word holos meaning whole).
Holism as a pattern of evolution not only reconciles the inner and external factors of Darwin’s theories, but also accounts for the creative unity of life, according to Smuts.
"The glories of art and literature, the peace of the mystic's religious experience, the creative ideals which lift life beyond the limitations of its lowly origin - all these experiences and developments have built a new spiritual world on the humble foundation of survival values," said Smuts in adding Holism to the theory of evolution.
He believed that the growth of personality was a key to evolution in its higher form. Thus personality, to reach self-realisation, needed to be freed of internal forces, such as greed and hatred, and of external forces imposed by tyranny.
In 1934 - a life-time ago, in a different, hugely conservative world - he was warning against the shrinking of human rights.
"Individuals prostrate themselves before national leaders . . .
The guarantees of private rights and civil liberties are going. Minorities are trampled upon; dissident views are not tolerated. . .intellectual freedom is disappearing. . .Freedom of conscience, of speech, of the Press, of thought and teaching is in extreme danger. . .
One party in the State usurps power, suppresses its opponents and becomes the State."
He was speaking in the era before Hitler was heard of. He could have been speaking in 1948. Or tomorrow.
Smuts the international statesman and champion of human rights was two generations ahead of his time. Smuts the local politician clashed with Mohomadas Gandhi in contradiction of his own philosophy. The author of "The Holistic Smuts" keeps coming back to this aberration.
Why was Smuts, one of the founders of Union and of League of Nations; drafter of Freedom Charter of the United Nations - why did he do nothing to overcome racial discrimination while he was in power in South Africa?
Smuts gave his own answer, referred to above. Beukes concurs that it was to the effect that he had to resolve the racism between Boer and Brit before he could tackle the bigger question. His view might have been founded on more than just the art of the possible in politics. It is likely that, as the focal point of the bitter division between Afrikaners (let alone Afrikaners and English-speakers) he believed that his only priority was to restore harmony among the whites.
Today Smuts would have different priorities. It is interesting to speculate how he would have brought his leadership talents to bear in South Africa of the 1990s and 21st century. He would have been redundant as a Field Marshal; unlikely as a world leader. As a politician, the possibilities are endless, the most likely being that he would have rendered the role of Mandela superfluous through steady reform over four decades. He could have chosen a brilliant academic career in several fields - as a botanist; as a philosopher. . . But this merely shows how talented the man was, and how pointless is speculation.
Piet Beukes in producing his slim 200-page work on "Slim Jan", set out to show that, in embracing the theories of Charles Darwin, Smuts was not rejecting religion. The author goes to great lengths to establish this point even though, in today's world, the point requires no emphasis. The heated and ignorant debates concerning the relationships of apes, men and God are largely irrelevant now.
What is relevant, and what Beukes popularised admirably, was Smuts’s personal as well as holistic philosophy. It is a reminder for all of us of the universality of the warrior, philosopher, statesman, naturalist and politician who was Smuts. He left a vast heritage of ideas - ideas precisely opposite to those imposed on our country by Malan, Verwoerd, Strijdom and other smaller minds.
It reminds me too, that Smuts, though hated by many of his nationalistic people, was adored by a majority of white English and Afrikaans South Africans, and many brown and black people non-voters who cheered him and waved their flags during his ‘morale-building’ war-time parades in cities and dorps throughout South Africa.
To write-off Smuts today as a narrow bigoted racist would be to deny a world view which placed him, literally, on a pedestal at Westminster and accepted his ideas for civilised world government.
Smuts was an impatient man; impatient of fools and brusque with admirers. Quick to anger and quick to act. He had few social graces – unlike Louis Botha who fashioned the Union of South Africa. Everybody, including the British Cabinet and Court, loved Louis.
There’s no denying, however, that Smuts was one of the world’s great brains in the first half of the 20th century. He was a magnetic (rather than charismatic) leader - yet he was a simple fellow, who yearned for a simple life. He found it in his tin farmhouse at Irene near Pretoria. And close observance showed that he was a kindly character at heart, full of wonder for Nature. When he was able to relax he invariably demonstrated patience and a genuine interest in young people whom he wished to enthuse with his world view.
Smuts
on origins and multi-universes
The popular debate on Darwin’s
Theory of Evolution that raged a century ago appears to have reduced in noise
from a Big Bang to a whimper. But in 2005, it was raging again – at a
scientific level. One group of self-styled ‘conservative’ scientists in America
were claiming that there were prospects of scientific proof that the origins of
mankind – like the origins of the universe – were no random event, but the
result of a higher intelligence. Other
scientists were hotly denying any sign of ‘scientific evidence’ of this pious
hope once expressed by Einstein (and Smuts, and others).
However, there is stronger
scientific support for another theory, expressed by Smuts in 1889 – the theory
of the existence of more than one Universe.
Cosmologist Michie Kaku, and contemporaries such as Roger Penrose, Brian Greene and Simon Singh, were
all rushing into print in the early 21st Century with scientific calculations
pointing to multi-universes.
Kaku
has tried to explain the complex
formulae in popular terms in a book entitled Parallel Worlds – The Science
of Alternative Universes and our Future in the Cosmos.(2005, Doubleday)
He proposes a number of, at first
glance incredible, methods by which intelligent beings in the next billion
years might migrate to other universes, his criterion for plausibility being
the integrity of the mathematics, according to the London Financial Times..
Kaku points out that eventually the Sun
and other stars in our known universe will exhaust their fuel, leaving a cold and cheerless semi-void in which no
life of any kind can exist.
He claims that mathematics can come
to the aid of doomed humanity. Quantum theory is the theory of the very small,
which takes the idea of probability beyond most people's ken. The
latest Quantum theory calculations “make almost compulsory” the idea that
multiple universes must exist and that new universes may "bud off".
Of course, if mankind is to save
itself, it first has to find a method of surviving through the next few
centuries on this fragile, warlike little planet.
