Botha and Smuts

Louis Botha and Jan Christiaan Smuts fought with the Transvaal Afrikaaners against the British in the Second Boer War. In the settlement, or accommodation, of 1910, Botha became the first prime minister of the Union of South Africa, a semi- (from 1931 virtually) independent dominion under the Crown, and held the position until his death in 1919. Botha and Smuts fought with the allies in the First World War against German South-West Africa and German East Africa. Smuts helped in Versailles to found the League of Nations.

The visual image of General Smuts that is impressed the most clearly on my mind is the sight of him in Paris, in 1919, taking a stroll with General Botha during one of the intervals between the sessions of the peace conference. One often saw the two comrades in each other’s company; and Botha, who was then already a very sick man, would be leaning on Smuts’s arm, while Smuts would be helping his old friend along tenderly. Their affection for each other was moving. This long friendship drew out, in Smuts, a quality of loving-kindness that adorned his manifold gifts and went far to redeem his relatively few short-comings.

When Botha died, Smuts succeeded him and was prime minister until 1924, and again from 1939 to ’48, though he spent much of the Second World War advising Churchill in London. He supported Zionism. In 1948 his party lost to the strongly pro-Apartheid Nationalists. He died in 1950. In 1961 the last constitutional links with Britain were dissolved and South Africa became a republic.

Acquaintances, OUP, 1967