Smuts, Vol. 2: Fields of Force, 1919–1950 by W.K. Hancock

Smuts, Vol. 2: Fields of Force, 1919–1950 Reviews

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  Eleanore

  “I have tried not to write about Smuts and his times but I have had to write about him in his times.” With these words, W.K. Hancock sets forth upon the second volume of his biography of Jan Christiaan Smuts. Starting with the aftermath of the Paris Peace Conference and continuing into those first stumbling footsteps into the heart of the Cold War, Hancock maps the fate of a man and political leader struggling between two contradictory worlds. By 1919, Smuts already spent a good portion of his career unifying South Africa against “racialism” on the home-front, a struggle he defined narrowly as between the white races, British and Boer, and yet also accomplished a number of important progressive and anti-imperialist goals on the international stage. In the second half of Smuts’ life Hancock notes that, “the nineteenth century maxim ‘liberal abroad, conservative at home,’ would cease to be serviceable.”
  
  Smuts acted as an early and powerful advocate for the Commonwealth, single-handedly defending the independence of Dominion status against the creeping “federalism” of the Colonial Office in 1917. Contributing heavily behind the scenes to the architecture of the League of Nations at the Treaty of Versailles, Smuts subsequently played a critical role in bringing Southern Irish leaders to the negotiating table with the English in 1921, ultimately producing the Anglo-Irish Treaty. An early and vocal critic of the Versailles reparations settlement, Smuts partnered with John Maynard Keynes in trying to counteract the French during negotiations, and in 1924 played a signal role in building the political will necessary amongst the allies for the establishment of the Dawes Committee to revise them. A close confidant to Winston Churchill throughout World War II, particularly on the North African campaign, Smuts also engaged in correspondence with Niels Bohr on the subject of international control for nuclear science and technology in the wake of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Finally, and most ironically, Jan Christiann Smuts, “the Butcher of Bulhoek,” wrote a large portion of the language that went into the Preamble of the UN Charter, including the clause on “basic human rights.”
  
  Hancock also takes great care in laying out the policies and deeds of Jan Christaan Smuts on his domestic turf. As Prime Minister of South Africa, Minister of Native Affairs, Minister of Defense, Smuts held political office almost continuously for over three decades. No man played more central a role in the establishment of the South African state and no man bears more responsibility for the failure of South Africa to set the conditions for the realization of human rights within its own borders. Hancock avoids drawing explicit judgments, preferring to give ample rope for Smuts to hang himself through evidence. And the documentary record speaks clearly of Smuts’ willful blindness to the moral contradictions inherent in the solution of segregation, to the absurdity of speaking about racialism in a way that took no account of Africans or Indians, and to the volatile fragility of an economic system founded on the colour bar. Smuts, himself, became increasingly aware of these contradictions before he died. Unfortunately, Hancock also attempts to present a balance of evidence for the defense, detailing the incremental efforts of the government, noting the lack of resources and time. Here he marches dangerously between apology and relativism. Here, he goes too far.