Remembering Smuts
I WAS at a suburban dinner party. The hosts’ kids came in with some university friends to chat to the fogies before they went out jolling. I found myself chatting to a pleasant young fellow.
He was from Johannesburg, he said. He matriculated at General Smuts High School. General Smuts? He must then know a bit about Smuts? No, he said. Was Smuts not some apartheid figure? The teachers never spoke about him.
I was flabbergasted. Apartheid figure? In the short time available, I put this youngster right on a few things about Smuts.
He was prime minister of the Union of South Africa.
He was named by Lord Todd of Christ College, Cambridge, as one of the three most brilliant scholars at the university. The others: Isaac Newton (the law of gravity) and the poet John Milton ( Paradise Lost).
He served in the British war cabinets during World Wars I and II.
He founded the Royal Air
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Force and, six months later, the South African Air Force (the two oldest in the world).
He was the only world statesman to have signed the peace treaties ending both world wars.
He wrote the preamble to the founding document of the UN.
He was a confidante of Albert Einstein, who described him as one of 13 people in the world who understood his Theory of Relativity.
He wrote Holism and Evolution, which launched the philosophical school of Holism, which has adherents mainly in the US today.
And, and, and… Apartheid figure? The youngster was astounded. But why was none of this generally known, he asked?
Good question. The National Party did a good job of expunging all memory of Smuts and what he stood for. Imagine if we had embarked in the 1950s on what began only in the 1990s.
But Neville and Sandy Herrington, of Tekweni TV, have done something to fill the lacuna. They’ve put together a documentary titled The Flawed Genius of General Smuts, which includes contemporary newsreels.
I’ve seen a trailer and it’s not to be missed. It will be flighted on DStv Channel 190 this Sunday at 5.55am, 2.55pm and 9.55pm.
The flaws
FLAWED genius? Yes, Smuts was headstrong and detached. He refused to believe he was politically threatened. Ernie Malherbe, who was his director of military intelligence during World War II (later principal of Natal University) was among those who pleaded with him to order a constituency redelimitation before the 1948 election, to correct the grotesque skewing in favour of the platteland, where the Nats were strong.
He refused to publicise the subversive activities of the Broederbond during World War II.
And he declined an electoral pact with N C Havenga’s moderate Afrikaner Party. Havenga made a pact with the Nats instead and it was the handful of Afrikaner Party MPs elected that tipped the balance.
Ja tog…