This is an edited excerpt from the book Smuts & Mandela: The Men Who Made South Africa, written by Roger Southall and published by Jacana Media.
Unlike the constitutional negotiations between the departing colonial powers and nationalists which foreshadowed decolonisation in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, the making of the South African state in 1908–1909 was a product of negotiations between the colonial political elites of the four self-governing colonies, with the British government acting as little more than a bystander.
Understandably, historians have focused primarily upon the racially restricted franchise upon which the Union was founded, portraying it as an act of betrayal, by both Cape liberals and the British government, of the black majority.
There is no dispute here that the almost total exclusion of black South Africans from the body politic of this “new South Africa” was the defining aspect of its character. However, there are other aspects of the inheritance of Union which, despite their dubious origins, are less easily dismissed.
It is almost too obvious to state, but Union brought the four colonies into a single country with the boundaries that we know today. Given that all previous efforts had fallen foul of the subcontinent’s complex politics, this was no ordinary triumph, and, as the decision made by the Rhodesian delegates to stay out of the fold confirms, the final shape of the “new state” was not preordained, even if we accept that a doubtful Natal was left with little choice but to join.
Union provided the foundation for an admittedly “white” South Africa to take its place alongside the other Dominions, and to register its concerns at the heart of Empire in a way that, as far less significant states, the former colonies would have been unable to do had they remained separate.
Given South Africa’s racial policies, this was never free of controversy, as Smuts was to find out on numerous occasions.
Yet today the political unity of South Africa is taken as non-negotiable; apartheid-era attempts to balkanise South Africa by granting “independence” to African “homelands” was never taken seriously by any but a handful of renegade ethnic nationalists.
The last-minute threats of secession by KwaZulu made by Chief Buthelezi prior to the 1994 election were regarded not merely as dangerously disruptive but heretical and would never have been accepted as legitimate internationally.
Smuts played a signal role in ensuring that the “new South Africa” was created as a unitary state; his reasoning that a Canadian-style federation could prove divisive was readily accepted by most delegates except a few doubters from Natal.
Like the constitutions that were adopted by former British colonies in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, Union replicated the outward forms of the British Constitution (regular elections, the accountability of ministers to parliament, the separation of powers, the rule of law, etc.) without simultaneously importing the conventions that underpinned them.
These forms embodied the ideals of British democracy for which Mandela was to express admiration during the Treason Trial, yet simultaneously they provided the framework for the strong centralised government which Botha and Smuts felt would be necessary to hold South Africa together.
Apart from granting the four provinces only very limited powers, the South Africa Act made no provision for the rights and liberties of citizens, which, although notionally protected by the courts and common law, could therefore be whittled away by parliament.
Yet what most defined the limitations of democracy was not merely the racially defined restrictions of the franchise, but the Act’s provision (clause 147) that vested administration of “native affairs” and of “matters specially or differentially affecting Asiatics throughout the Union”. Previously exercised by colonial governors as “supreme chiefs”, in the governor general in council.
By this single stroke, buried in the depths of the Act, “natives” and “Asiatics” were denied access to South Africa’s representative institutions and were placed under the direct authority of the government.
Meanwhile, unitary government required the fashioning of a new apparatus of administration, with the merging of the former colonies’ public services, most notably those pertaining to customs, railways, and the raising and allocation of revenues at the front of the queue.
Steyn presents the challenge confronting Louis Botha as being not only to reconcile the two “races” recently divided by a bitter war, but also to maintain control over a black population three times as numerous as whites while simultaneously keeping “a balance between Boer agriculturalists and the great industries of the Rand, with their competing demands for cheap labour”.
In addition, he had to manage the newly created South African Party, whose fragile unity was soon shattered by Hertzog’s creation of the NP and the subsequent Afrikaner Rebellion against South Africa’s entry into the First World War.
No wonder that he leaned so heavily on Smuts, to whom he delegated critical tasks. The most critical and politically sensitive of these was the formation of the Union Defence Force (UDF).
Discussions at the National Convention had mentioned nothing about how the military would fit into the new state. Come 1910, the Botha government inherited a defence strategy from the War Office in Britain that revolved around the worsening of Anglo-German relations.
It stressed the need for an attack on South West Africa in the event of war, combining this with warnings that the nearby German presence could lead to the incitement of “native” uprisings in the neighbouring British protectorates.
These fears about “native” uprisings were probably exaggerated by the War Office to hasten military unification in the hope of securing the early release of British troops still stationed in South Africa for the European theatre.
Yet, ironically, following the brutal suppression of the Bambatha rebellion in 1906, it had been made plain to those who made the Union that, given that Africans were disenfranchised, cooped up in reserves and disarmed, “the solution to the new state’s security was simple: firepower”.
So long as the state had adequate access to weapons of suitably destructive capacity, “native” uprisings could be resolved by military means and would not require a political solution.
Hence followed the dualistic nature of the new state. “Politics” was for whites, who retained access to arms, while the governance of blacks fell under the rubric of “native administration”.
This had a further consequence. Contrary to the warnings of the British War Office, it was not the “natives” who presented the principal danger to the new state, but whites who did not share the same vision of South African freedom as Botha and Smuts.
Biographers have made much of Smuts’ ruthlessness in putting down threats to the security of the new state. Neither he nor Botha shied from the use of force. With the UDF not yet in action, Smuts did not hesitate to call out Imperial troops to quell the mineworkers’ strike of 1913, although when the strikers proved a match for their adversaries, he and Botha had little choice but to sue for peace by making concessions.
A year later, when confronting the mineworkers again, he was ready for them and brought the strike to an early end by using forces he now had at his disposal, before illegally deporting those he considered the ringleaders.
When subsequently the Nationalist rebels rose against South Africa entering the First World War, Botha and Smuts assembled a force of 40 000 Afrikaner loyalists and stamped out the rebellion within months. After the Great War, faced by the Rand revolt of 1921, Smuts took personal command of government forces, declared martial law, and used planes to bomb the rebels’ positions.
Historians of the Bulhoek and Bondelswarts rebellions are correct to point out that these were dealt with no less violently. Given the racialised basis of the new state, this observation is, sadly, unremarkable.
What is more pertinent is that the violence used to quell them was so thoroughly disproportionate. From the state’s viewpoint, they constituted nothing more than a threat to the racial order in far-flung rural areas. Cursory efforts were made on both occasions to parley, but white patience was short (Smuts had been “too busy” to meet with the Israelites at Bulhoek), and swift resort was made to violence to bring both rebellions to a bloody end.
In contrast, Smuts was personally involved in efforts to negotiate a compromise between the mineworkers and the mine-owners in both 1913 and 1921 before resorting to force, even though the state could claim with much greater credibility that the mineworkers’ strikes posed a major threat to the established order.
White mineworkers were citizens and voters; African rebels were not. Likewise, as former comrades in arms, the rebels of 1914 were treated with remarkable lenience once the rebellion had been put down.
If there is one interpretation that stands out about the armed clashes of the Union’s first decade, it is that apart from any personal predilections Smuts and Botha may have had for resolving political issues by military means, their ruthlessness followed from their recognition of the fragility of the new state in which they had invested so much of themselves.
Meanwhile, their actions had the consequence that political and military authority in South Africa became permanently fused.
Botha assumed personal command of the campaign to suppress the 1914 rebellion; the Union was led by former Boer generals as prime ministers until 1948; Smuts, having been commissioned into the British army to campaign in Tanganyika in 1917, regularly appeared on the international stage, as he did at the foundation of the UN, in military uniform, ending his career with the rank of Field Marshal.
More substantively, Smuts’ Defence Act of 1912 expected the military to play a significant political role by requiring it to work closely with the police, with the latter under the former’s control.
In what was an internally colonised society, in which black subjects had no or few rights, this entrenched a tradition of militarised policing, which eventually reached its zenith when troops were poured into the townships to confront popular insurrection during the 1980s.
As the inheritor of this ambiguous tradition, Mandela was fortunate in never having to confront the sort of challenges to the very existence of the state which had been experienced by his predecessors. Unlike Smuts and Botha, he had the trade union movement behind him.
More importantly, the military threat from the right had been defused by the humiliating defeat of the AWB, the latest in a long line of white militia, when they rushed to defend Chief Mangope’s ill-fated Bophuthatswana regime.
Also significant in this respect was Mandela’s success in persuading Constand Viljoen’s AVF to participate in the 1994 election as the Freedom Front.
Similarly, the threat of armed mayhem by the IFP was defused by Buthelezi’s last-minute agreement to join the election and participate in the GNU. Furthermore, although Mandela’s government was confronted by the considerable challenge of merging the SADF, homeland militaries and the armed wings of the liberation movements, this was achieved remarkably smoothly, aided by MK’s own tradition of subordination to political leadership.
Unlike in many African states where, following decolonisation, armies staged coups and displaced civilian regimes, civilian rule in Mandela’s democracy was never threatened by an ambitious military.
Mandela’s state enjoyed the legitimacy that Smuts’ state had never acquired. From the moment of its foundation, the constitutional status of the Union had always been challenged by those who wanted total freedom from the British Empire and declaration of a republic. Smuts was never able or inclined to totally vanquish them. Instead, they vanquished him in 1948, after which the NP effectively changed the rules of the game to firm its grip on power.
Using the powers but abusing the spirit of the Westminster- style Constitution bestowed by the South Africa Act, the NP finessed electoral arrangements to ensure its hegemony, drastically narrowed the space for opposition and extinguished any progressive potential which Smuts’ reforms of the 1940s might have had by reinvigorating racial separation.
Yet ultimately, their project was destined to fail. Despite the Nationalists finally achieving their republic in 1961, what initially looked like a totalitarian juggernaut proved to be based on fragile foundations, unable to resist either the changing tides of the international balance of power or the mounting challenge of the descendants of those to whom Union had denied the franchise.
Nonetheless, the magnitude of what Mandela achieved should not be underestimated. When De Klerk released him, the former had not intended to give up power, but to finesse a way in which the NP could hang on to it; yet just four years later, the ANC swept to victory in the 1994 election.
Above all, Mandela’s state was founded on two fundamental principles denied by the South Africa Act of 1909. The first was the granting of the franchise regardless of gender and race, accompanied by the entrenchment of human rights. The second was the supremacy of the Constitution rather than parliament, ensuring that so long as the senior judiciary retained its independence and integrity, the principles of the Constitution would not be overturned.
This did not guarantee that Mandela’s democracy would survive. Even at its foundation, there were those who doubted whether it possessed adequate social, economic and even political foundations to live up to its ideals over the long term. However, few doubted the commitment of Mandela himself to making it work.