105. A Boer’s Global Influence, Part 1
I’m fascinated by the often-contradictory lives of famous men and women. I’m also quite intrigued by the way a man, whom I only once saw in the distance on the top of Table Mountain in 1947, has entered in my writings more often than I realized until now.
Jan Christian Smuts was born on May 24,1870, the second oldest son of Jacobus and Catharina Smuts. Traditionally, the eldest son was sent to school and the younger son remained on the farm to eventually take over from his father. When he was twelve, his older brother died, and his parents sent him to school instead. Despite his late start, he quickly caught up and then surpassed his classmates. At age sixteen, he was enrolled at Stellenbosch University’s Victoria College (South Africa’s leading university for Afrikaans-speaking students). In 1891, he graduated with double first-class honors (honors in two separate subjects) in literature and science. He also studied High Dutch, German and Ancient Greek and won the Ebden scholarship to study overseas. He chose Christ College Cambridge where he read Law. His scholarship barely covered his living costs but J.I. Marais, a professor at Victoria College, recognizing the youth’s remarkable abilities, lent him enough money to continue his studies.
He graduated in 1894 with a Double First. Professor Maitland declared that Smuts was the most brilliant scholar he had ever met. Lord Todd, Master of Christ College, later named the three outstanding scholars from 500 years of the College’s existence – John Milton, Charles Darwin and Jan Smuts!
Smuts then passed the exams for the Inns of Court, entering the Middle Temple to begin a career in Law. He was also offered a Fellowship in Law at Cambridge but in 1895 he decided to return to South Africa where he set up a law practice in Cape Town. He had never really fitted in socially with his fellow students in Britain and was seen as being very arrogant. Even back in Cape Town, he was regarded as being abrasive and made few friends, although his brilliance was freely acknowledged. He then turned towards journalism and politics, writing for the Cape Times, the leading newspaper of the period.
Smuts’ father introduced him to Jan Hofmeyr who was the leader of the newly formed Afrikaner Bond. Hofmeyr in turn introduced the young man to Cecil Rhodes, who offered Jan a job with de Beer’s Diamonds. Smuts’ friendship and support of Rhodes was cut short when Rhodes was the force behind the Jameson Raid which took place in December 1895. This was a failed attempt to create an uprising amongst the Uitlanders (foreigners) in the Transvaal Republic against its President, Paul Kruger. Rhodes was disgraced and forced to resign as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony.
Smuts left de Beers and travelled up to Pretoria, capital of the Transvaal Republic, where in his later twenties he was appointed State Attorney. The tension between Britain and the Boer Republics was growing. Smuts was appointed head of a delegation to attend a peace conference in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State Republic (incidentally, my mother’s birthplace, as well as the British writer Tolkien’s). The young firebrand Smuts clashed with Sir Alfred Milner and the talks broke down, leading in many ways to the start of the Anglo-Boer War.
When war broke out, Smuts was appointed by Paul Kruger to handle propaganda, logistics and communications with the Boer generals as well as with foreign diplomats still remaining in the Transvaal. In 1899, a British war correspondent was captured by the Boers and interrogated by Smuts. The correspondent, Winston Churchill, was amazed to discover that one of the Boers (whom he perceived were mostly uneducated farmers but superb horsemen and sharpshooters who had invented the art of guerrilla warfare) was in fact a brilliant academic with a Cambridge degree. Smuts and Churchill established an immediate rapport, which was to turn into a lifelong friendship and association. Churchill’s later daring escape from captivity and return to Britain was undoubtedly regarded by Smuts as a blessing for his new friend.
Smuts then revealed a completely new side to his character. He felt that he should take a more active role in the war. He left Pretoria and joined a Boer Commando under the leadership of General Koos de la Rey (whose grandson Ray de la Rey studied an applied religious philosophy alongside my wife Hero and I in the 1970s). De la Rey was a brilliant soldier and tactician. Smuts, as usual, was an adept pupil. I used one of their most successful battles with the British, which took place at Buffelspoort (Buffalo Gateway), in the first novel of my Willjohn Trilogy, Pursuit of Treachery. Although my stories take place in the years from 2001 to 2019, I have used some of the rich history of the area where the stories are located to give a backdrop to the novels which are essentially action/adventure romance in an unusual setting. Buffelspoort is close to the country hotel that I have renamed Buffalo Hills (actually, Sparkling Waters where the central character of my novels, American mining consultant Ed Willjohn, stayed when he first arrived in South Africa).
On December 3, 1900, nearly 150 supply wagons left Rietfontein camp in Pretoria, which had recently been captured by the British forces. The wagons (bound for another British garrison in Rustenberg) carried food supplies, clothing, ammunition as well as turkeys and other Christmas fare. The Boer forces in the Western Transvaal were exhausted, short on food, their clothing mostly in tatters and their ammunition almost depleted. General de la Rey, aided by newly appointed thirty-year-old General Smuts, decided on a bold plan to capture some of the supply wagons. Smuts was told to capture and hold one of the kopjes (small conical hills) overlooking the trail where the wagons would have to pass through. Although the British troops accompanying the convoy occupied the kopje before Smuts arrived, he and his men managed to dislodge the Brits and take their place on top of the kopje. Smuts attacked the convoy from above while de la Rey encircled the wagons from behind. This resulted in the capture of 126 wagons and effectively prolonged the war for at least another year with the Boers rejuvenated by fresh clothing, food supplies and – above all – ammunition.
The sheer numbers and resources of the British slowly wore down the resistance of the Boers but another exploit by Smuts contributed to the British offer of a ceasefire in 1902. Smuts had led an attack on the British-held mining village of Okiep in the Northern Cape. He had devised the idea to push a train loaded with explosives on the slight downhill slope into the town and blow up the small village containing the British garrison. The night before the attack, Smuts was seen reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In the event, the attack failed but it did underline the Boers’ determination to remain in the fight which had resulted in the deaths of so many British troops against the loss of far fewer Boers, who had demonstrated finally that the massed lines of British troopers in their bright red tunics had no place in modern warfare.
The greatest loss of life on the side of the Afrikaners was undoubtedly the deaths by disease and starvation of over 20,000 women and children, who had been placed in the world’s first concentration camps. This was certainly not Britain’s finest hour!
After the treaty of Vereeniging (a small town on the banks of the Vaal River) was signed by both parties, there was an uneasy alliance. A number of Boer generals and their families left South Africa forever, refusing to be part of the peace treaty. In my first novel Pursuit of Treachery, it is revealed that Ed Willjohn’s unusual name was derived from an ancestor, Boer general Ben Viljoen, who emigrated to the United States and settled on the banks of the Rio Grande in New Mexico. He went on to become a successful farmer and developed a new irrigation system that was adopted by most of the farmers in the region. He also fought with Mexican revolutionaries to unseat the Mexican dictator but returned to the US where he was briefly appointed US consul in Germany before remarrying an American and settling down on his farm in Mesilla, before dying at the age of forty-seven.
Back in South Africa, Smuts joined a group of former Boer generals to form a group called “Het Volk” (The People) headed by Louis Botha with Smuts as his deputy. In 1906, Botha and Smuts went to London to plea for self-government of the Transvaal. This was granted. Smuts was appointed Colonial and Education Secretary. This brought him into conflict with a young Indian lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi, later Mahatma, who had come to South Africa to fight for rights for the Indians who had initially been imported as “coolie” laborers to work in the sugar estates of Natal (as the local Zulus were unwilling to perform the backbreaking work of cutting the cane). Smuts was opposed to granting equal rights for the Indians. Meanwhile, Smuts felt it was time to unify all South Africa into one nation. He drew up a constitution which he and Botha presented to Whitehall in London. They were given Royal Assent by King Edward VII to form the Union of South Africa in December 1909.
In my next blog, I will trace Smuts’ evolution from South African politician to World Statesman, whose reputation has faded away over the years, particularly in the shadow of that other more recent South African World Statesman, Nelson Mandela.
Smuts was undoubtedly a genius but, as with many others of superior intellect, he was not an easy person to deal with.
Meanwhile, our current work of genius, the fast-evolving working model of the ExoBrain III computing system, provides us with exciting news every week and we are fast approaching that elusive paradigm shift to a new echelon of truly understandable computing.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.