Jan Smuts is the figure most identified with the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, Nelson Mandela the figure most identified with South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994. Australian historian Keith Hancock refers to Smuts as the “actor, manager and producer” of the new state. Author and scholar on Jan Smuts Kenneth Ingham dubs him the “unofficial general secretary” of the National Convention, which preceded Union and drew up the draft South Africa Act.
Smuts himself never forgot he was a founding father of SA and considered his efforts to make the Union “his greatest single work”. In a similar fashion, Tom Lodge regards Mandela as “indispensable” to South Africa’s “pacted transition”, Peter Hain hails him as having “refounded a nation”, while Joe Slovo maintains that, without Mandela, “South African history would have taken a completely different turn”.
Both the formation of the Union and the transition to democracy represented the culmination of freedom struggles, that of the Boers against British imperialism, and that of black South Africans against white minority rule. Smuts and the delegates to the National Convention, which convened in late 1908, faced the issue of constructing a unified country after a devastating war. Mandela and the ANC were confronted in the early 1990s by the challenge of bringing South Africans together after an equally brutal conflict.
These similarities apart, historians are correct to emphasise the differences between the settlements, for by excluding the large majority of people from access to political power on racial grounds, Union laid the foundation for their struggle for political equality.
There were other differences too. A mere eight years intervened between the signing of the Peace of Vereeniging and the creation of the Union, during which Smuts transitioned from freedom fighter to colonial nationalist, leading the Transvaal to self-government in 1906 and subsequently steering the negotiations that led to a united South Africa. In contrast, Mandela was not to know when he entered the political arena in the late 1940s that he was embarking on a very long walk to freedom, 27 years of which would see him fighting for liberation from inside prison walls.
Furthermore, when Smuts came to negotiating the deal that brought the four colonies of the Transvaal, the Cape, Orange River (Free State) and Natal together into one political unit, he was bargaining from a position of relative strength. Mandela was far less advantaged. When he was released from jail in 1990, his challenge was to achieve democracy from a position of relative weakness. Smuts was able to use the state power of the Transvaal, the most economically powerful of the four colonies, to drive the process of Union, while simultaneously enjoying the backing of the Imperial power, which had long wanted a united South Africa.
Furthermore, the Union was premised upon the virtually unquestioned assumption that it would entrench white supremacy. In contrast, Mandela confronted a far more complex situation. The mass democratic movement may have forced the National Party government to concede the necessity of negotiating with the ANC, but after its unbanning in 1990, Mandela had to confirm his leadership of the ANC, unite a sprawling movement behind him, and confront a still powerful state machinery which retained an overwhelming military advantage. Beyond that, he had to steer the ANC through complex negotiations between key players with very different interests, a process that was constantly interrupted by violence, mass actions and the spoiling tactics of political groupings which threatened a return to war.
In retrospect, we can credit Smuts with forging a new country that survives still today. Yet we now view his achievement as fatally undermined by its racial exclusivity. With the wisdom of history, we now say it was always destined to fail. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how it shaped the present and how, in all its essentials, it was to last for over 80 years. Today, our present conceit is to assume that Mandela’s democracy, because it was founded upon a basis of racial equality and political inclusivity, will endure. But Smuts might smile at such sophistry and riposte that in 1910 the founders of his South Africa were similarly optimistic.
Nation builders
Central to the idea of nation building is the forging of a common sense of citizenship among all members of a putative nation that overrides ethnic, racial and other particularisms. The literature on nation building that developed in the wake of African decolonisation in the 1960s and 1970s revolved around the idea of achieving unity out of diversity. This alluded to the problem that leaders of “new states” had of containing sub-nationalisms whose existence was construed as threatening the survival of “new nations”.
Much of this literature implicitly assumed that the departing colonial powers had handed over power relatively peacefully, very often to a “charismatic” leader at the head of a nationalist political party that was capable of absorbing all and sundry. However, as Charles Tilly and others have argued, the use of violence by holders of state power has been central to the nation-building project historically. Nations have been built as much by force as — if not more than — by peaceful construction of a sense of commonality spanning shared languages, cultures and religions. South Africa is no different: the founding of the Union in 1910 was the culmination of countless wars, of colonisers against the colonised, of Boer against Brit.
It was against this background that Louis Botha and Jan Smuts embarked on building a South African nation. Because their conception of the nation was racially exclusive and founded upon past violence, it led inexorably to a decades-long challenge by those who were racially excluded. During the early decades of the new state, this threat was relatively easily contained. Nonetheless, Smuts was for much of the time uneasily aware of the contradictions between the 1910 settlement’s modelling on a Westminster-style democracy and its racially exclusive basis. As a result, he was always to struggle to reconcile his intellectual commitment to political liberalism with the racially supremacist policies that he himself advocated.
Although his accession as prime minister for a second term in 1939, leading South Africa into World War 2, provided him with an opportunity to move the country in a different political direction, he lacked the political conviction to try. His subsequent political defeat in 1948 by an NP bent on reasserting the politics of racial exclusion inaugurated the long struggle between those demanding an inclusive democracy and those denying it. It was left to Nelson Mandela to lead the project of making a nonracial South Africa, only for him and his successors having to confront the multiple challenges left behind by the country’s bitter racial past.
• This is an edited extract of ‘Smuts and Mandela: The Men Who Made South Africa’; by Roger Southall; published by Jacana Media
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