If one wishes to make dubious comparisons, one would
have to concede that Jan Christiaan Smuts, the young Sunday school teacher, was
more complex, more intelligent and a much greater character than Cecil Rhodes –
and was quickly recognised as such by the world.
He always was, and possibly will continue to be, regarded
by his global admirers as a visionary – and by his enemies (a majority of black
and white South Africans) as a villain.
He was crafty and deceptive politician. He was an ambitious, and ruthless
stateman. He was also a courageous and honorable soldier; a botanist; a biologist and a philosopher.
On the eve of leaving for Pretoria in 1898, the young
Jannie Smuts was so prominent a lawyer in Johannesburg that he was scheduled to
defend the German Count Von Veldheim, (an accused blackmailer) in the city’s
most sensational murder case. Von Veldheim walked into an office and shot and
killed Woolf Joel, brother of Solly Joel, chairman of the giant Johannesburg
Consolidated Investment Company. The jury found Von Veldheim not guilty – a
popular verdict with which the judges did not agree. He was re-arrested and unceremoniously
bundled out of the Transvaal Republic on President Kruger’s orders. Ironically the orders originated from the accused’s potential legal defender, Jan Smuts.
Soon, in
times of crisis and war, there was to emerge the cold courage – or cruelty, as some would say - of slim Jannie Smuts (slim meaning shrewd, or
cunning, depending on the speaker’s prejudice). Examples of his ruthlessness in quelling violence and
protest were carefully noted, as was the characteristic he displayed of icy
reserve with compatriots and colleagues.
His ruthless
policy of continuing to ignore ‘the Native Question’ until such time as
inter-white racism could be brought under control, was condemned by his
contemporary critics, and will surely be increasingly condemned with the
passage of time.
Less known about ‘cold, clever’ (slim) Jannie
Smuts is the warmth he had with family, intimate friends and some women
correspondents whom he counted among his special relationships. In Smuts the
Humanist, the classical scholar Prof T J Haarhoff writes: “The ease with
which Smuts could associate with different kinds of people, whether scientists
or children, especially in his later years, was based on real understanding and
insight. He achieved a personal harmony . . . that penetrated to the great
leaders of the world, as well as to humbler friends.”
Insufficient attention is given by biographers to Smuts’s strange,
romantic poetry, or to his reaction to the tragedies of the deaths of his first, second, and third-born
children. The twins died while the young parents were penniless and on the
move; the third died when husband and wife were forced apart by war for two
years, and were unable even to exchange letters when they most needed to. The effect of these must have added to
Isie’s introversion and JC’s severe public face.
Even though the author of Blood on the Path observed some of the couple’s domestic
behaviour in their old age, he failed as a young, ‘hard-news’ reporter to
understand very much of their relationship
during his lone visits to their home in Irene in the late 1940s. Only
looking back, did he appreciate that the qualities which he saw in their
relationship as eccentric and cool were in fact the warm embers of love and
respect.
An introduction which Smuts wrote for a book on “the life and
writings of Olive Schreiner”, Not Without Honour, says as much about the
famous General as it does about the famous woman whom he was praising. Smuts compared Olive Schreiner with Emily
Bronte.
“Both reveal the mystery
of the human personality in their art. Both had a great capacity for love, and
love at a pitch of intensity which was almost demonic in its quality. . . Frustrated love is a terrible thing,.”
Smuts wrote. (author’s emphasis).
More significant is Smuts’s description of his relationship with
Olive Schreiner:
“In the
First World War she did not see eye to eye with me in some of the things which
the hard compulsion of war laid on me, and some of my most poignant memories of
her in that tremendous time are connected with her supplications to me,
literally on bended knees. How we both
suffered, both meaning to do what was right, in a world hard almost beyond human endurance! I loved her more, in spite of our different insights."
