The latest Jan Smuts biography explores but does not fully explain the terrible blots in his otherwise brilliant career, writes Nigel Willis.
JAN SMUTS: UNAFRAID OF GREATNESS by Richard Steyn (Jonathan Ball)
Another biography of Jan Smuts? Dazzling in his giftedness and achievements, Smuts has been incomprehensible in his ultimate political and moral failure. These failures have haunted us for the past 70 years and will continue to do so.
Richard Steyn, in Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness, attempts to unravel the mystery.
My being in the world may be attributed to Smuts. Life in England during the years immediately following World War II was grim. There was food rationing. London was strewn with the bombed wrecks of buildings, reminding everyone of the awfulness of the years before.
When Smuts invited the British royal family to visit South Africa in 1947, both he and this country received such favourable news coverage in Britain that my maternal grandparents decided to immigrate with my mother, as part of the wave of hundreds of thousands who came here from Britain shortly before the National Party came to power in 1948. My mother met my father here.
Against this background, I began to read biographies of Smuts as a schoolboy. I have read those by Piet Beukes, Bernard Friedman, Keith Hancock, Piet Meiring, Sarah Gertrude Millin and his son, Jannie.
Among the reasons for this plethora of biographies is that Smuts continues to be an enduring enigma. No one has succeeded in explaining his massive flaws, despite his undoubted brilliance. Interestingly, as with his biographies, no painting, statue, bust or even photograph quite captures his personality. He always looks different, even though he is immediately recognisable.
Uncovering Smuts’s complexity
As is to be expected from a lawyer who saw the light of journalism, eventually becoming one of South Africa’s distinguished newspaper editors, Richard Steyn writes beautifully. (Hancock’s two-volume work is magisterial and scholarly but is a ponderous and turgid tome.) In a style that is easy to read, he takes one through the life of Smuts at a gripping pace. Through the device of writing the book in two parts, the first a chronological account and the second a series of vignettes on aspects of his personality, Steyn succeeds, more than the other biographers, in uncovering Smuts’s complexity.
For full review by Nigel Willis see Mail & GuardianÂ
