EDITOR's Choice
reviews
Jan Smuts: Unafraid
of Greatness
Richard Steyn
Jonathan Ball • 978 1 8684 2694 2
Jan Christiaan Smuts is one of the
great sons of South Africa – indeed, of
all Africa and even the world – whose
brilliance has been eclipsed with the
passage of time and much of what
he achieved has been over-written by
historical revisionism. Having said that,
he was by no means a perfect man. He
spent large portions of his life far from
his farm and long-suffering wife in Irene,
in what was then the Transvaal, and
was accused, sometimes with reason,
for placing a higher value on foreign
matters like helping establish both
the League of Nations and the United
Nations than on domestic politics in
South Africa. In some ways he was a
man of his time. His interactions with
both Gandhi and others representing
the interests of those considered 'not
white' or, in the parlance of the time,
'Natives', are, from the perspective of
a century on, not quite 'good enough'
relative to his other achievements. It
is easy to look back and accuse him
of being yet another Boer, interested
on the domestic front mainly with the
entre