Jan Smuts

Biography

Jan Christiaan Smuts was born on May 24, 1870, on a farm in Cape Colony, and became arguably the most remarkable figure produced by the Boer Wars — a man who fought the British with a pistol on the Cape veldt and later helped draft the Covenant of the League of Nations, commanded Allied forces in East Africa in World War I, participated in the Paris Peace Conference, and served twice as Prime Minister of South Africa. He was thirty years old when the war began and had never commanded troops in the field; he had been a Cambridge-trained lawyer and the Transvaal's State Attorney. Smuts's military career developed rapidly under the pressure of the guerrilla war. He proved a natural commander — physically fearless, intellectually flexible, capable of inspiring personal loyalty from men who had known combat all their lives. He led one of the most daring operations of the war: a mounted invasion of Cape Colony in September 1901 with 340 men, riding 3,000 miles through British-held territory to foment a Cape Boer uprising and threaten the British position in the south. The invasion failed to spark the general rising Smuts hoped for, but his force evaded British pursuit for eight months, eventually numbering over 3,000 men before the war ended. At Vereeniging, Smuts was among the advocates for peace — he had grasped, with characteristic analytical clarity, that the guerrilla war could continue indefinitely but could not be won, and that a negotiated peace preserving Boer cultural identity was more valuable than continued resistance that could only produce more suffering. The insight proved correct: within eight years the former Boer republics had responsible government; within ten, Smuts was Deputy Prime Minister of a unified South Africa. Smuts's subsequent career ranged across the entire global stage of the first half of the twentieth century — War Cabinet member under Lloyd George, commander in East Africa, participant in both Paris Peace Conferences, prime minister twice, field marshal in the British Army, friend of Einstein, and a founding figure of the United Nations Charter. He also, in the darkness of his legacy, helped construct the racial segregation policies that would eventually become apartheid — a contradiction at the heart of a man who wrote about 'holism' and human dignity while building a system of racial domination.

Key Battles