Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (50 page)

In South Africa was Jan Christian Smuts, the only colonial statesman to become a world figure, or for that matter to be accepted on his own merits in the highest councils of the Empire itself. There was no questioning
his
style. His presence was elegant, his manners were delightful and he was generally assumed to have the qualities of a sage or prophet. With his neat grey beard and slim figure, the straightness of his posture, his calm grey-blue eyes and gentle high-pitched voice, he did not so much dominate company as attract it magnetically to his person. Yet there was a hint of the equivocal to him, and though to the end of his life the British honoured him, and accepted him as one of the great men of the age, his own people viewed him with distrust. For he was a Boer always and unmistakably, and for all the breadth of his vision and experience, all his life he was trapped within his origins.

As it happened he grew up within the British Empire, in Cape Province, and went on a law scholarship to Cambridge, where he got a brilliant first and declined a fellowship. He renounced his British nationality after the Jameson Raid, but when the Boer War
ended worked wholeheartedly for reconciliation with the British Empire. The British greatly admired him, and during the Great War he was co-opted to the British War Cabinet in London. This was an unprecedented honour. Smuts stayed in England for more than two years, and became a great public figure—a Privy Councillor, a Companion of Honour, an oracle everyone consulted. He advised generals on their strategy, politicians on their arguments. He was offered a safe seat in the House of Commons. He was invited to command the Palestine campaign. He reorganized the air force—the true beginning of the RAF. He proposed himself as field commander of the American divisions then arriving in France. He devised the structure of the League of Nations, he largely invented the Statute of Westminster, and he did much to convince the British Government that independence was the only solution to the problem of Catholic Ireland.

All this time he remained a member of the South African Government too, and when he went home in 1919 he became Prime Minister upon the death of Botha. In that troubled backwater of the world his stature was cruelly diminished. He found that to counter the more extreme of the Boer Nationalists, who wanted only to revive their own Republics, his moderate South African Party was obliged to coalesce with the Unionists, the party of Rhodes, Jameson and the jingos. He put down the 1922 Rand riots with unyielding ferocity, antagonizing the labour unions, and next year he was defeated by an alliance between the Labour Party and the Afrikaner Nationalists. In the world outside he was an elder statesman, very nearly a prophet: in his own country he was, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a political failure, at worst out of office altogether, at best a deputy to his own principal opponent in the coalition Governments of the slump years.

Smuts had a philosophy of his own, which he called ‘holism’, and which postulated, insofar as anyone could understand it, the essential unity of everything within an amicable universe. He sprang from a people, though, who believed in the single punch, the undiluted draught, black-and-white. His private life was complex beyond the imagination of most Afrikaners. His home near Pretoria, Doornkloof, was no more than a large tin-roofed bungalow, built by 
the British as an officers’ leave centre during the Boer War, not at all pretentious and not very comfortable: but he lived there with his devoted family like a scholar and a prince, developing his theories of history, holism and diplomacy, surrounded by a wild clutter of books and papers, clambered over by many grandchildren, visited by every distinguished visitor to South African shores and exchanging letters with correspondents all over the world.

Yet he remained, like it or not, a Boer himself—Cambridge-educated, British-fostered, world-renowned, liberally minded, estranged from the Dutch Reformed Church, detested by the Afrikaner Republicans, but still a Boer of the Volk. And perhaps it was his Boerness which flawed this truly great man, and kept him from the very highest ranks of human achievement. Fundamental to Boerness was the question of race, and behind every episode of Boer history, behind the Great Trek, behind the wars against the British, behind the re-emergence now of Afrikaner nationalism, lay the inescapable truth that the white man was outnumbered in South Africa overwhelmingly by the black. The profoundest Boer intention was to maintain the supremacy of the white race, and it was this unchanging resolve, touching upon the rawest nerve of Empire, which made South Africa so awkward a limb, of the imperial body. The British Empire might not always live up to its own best principles, but still it was
au fond
a liberal organism. To deny a man advancement because of his colour denied its own highest convictions: trusteeship implied, if not immediate equality of status, at least the recognition that, with luck and good behaviour, all men might be equal one day.

This was the root difference between the British and the South African view of Empire, and Smuts was torn by it. He believed genuinely in the community of the world, but he could not quite bring himself, so deep were his folk-instincts perhaps, to believe in the community of black and white. He was ‘Slim Jannie’ to his fellow-Boers because he seemed too flexible: he was faintly suspect to his fellow-cosmopolitans because on this particular issue he seemed too rigid. It was Smuts who, by persuading Milner in 1902 to postpone the problem of the native franchise, ensured that it would be handled in the Boer, not the British, way. ‘
Allas
sal
regkom
’,
he 
used to say—‘everything will sort itself out’—and in the racial context this meant that nothing would change. ‘I sympathize profoundly with the native races whose land it was long before we came here,’ Smuts once said, ‘but I don’t believe in politics for them…. When I consider their political future I must say that I look into shadows and darkness; and then I feel inclined to shift the intolerable burden of solving the sphinx problem to the ampler shoulders … of the future.’

This was foresight. He could not have solved the problem even if he tried; sphinx-like it remained; shadows were truly to cloud its resolution. But Smuts’ evasion of it tempered his greatness nonetheless, and perhaps affected his style too. Even at his most majestic, there was something withdrawn about him. He saw the world in the grandest terms; he believed evolution itself to be only a symptom of cosmic brotherhood; his influence upon international events was never less than dignified, and sometimes noble; yet all around this famous figure, as he sat with his beloved and comfortable wife on his stoep at Doornkloof, there developed year by year the pseudo-philosophy of apartheid, which was one day to shatter his own dream of Commonwealth, and even threaten the unity of mankind. He was a man of his times, after all: a man of his race, too.

There were others, of course. There were wandering eccentrics like Bill Bailey of the Coconut Grove, whose refusal to leave his celebrated bar in Singapore immortalized him in a popular song. There were formidable individualists like Thomas Russell Pasha, the police chief of Egypt, who used to jump his favourite camel over the steeplechase course at Gezira, or his colleague Harry Boyle the Oriental Secretary, who was asked once by a total stranger on the terrace of Shepheard’s if he was the hotel pimp—‘I am Sir,’ he replied at once, ‘but since I am enjoying my tea interval perhaps you would direct your inquiry to my deputy over there’—and off the stranger went to Sir Thomas Lipton the tea magnate, who was taking tea nearby. There were great merchants like Antonin Besse of Aden, an
entrepreneur
out of the Arabian Nights, who lived in delicate splendour
in his palace in the Arab quarter, refusing to join the British Club but sending his hides, spices and coffees in his own ships across the world.

There was Charles Vyner Brooke, last of the great imperial freelances, who had succeeded his father and his great-uncle as hereditary Rajah of Sarawak, and against all the trends of Empire, remained the despotic ruler of the land, appointing his fifty British officials personally, recruiting his own army, and accepting Whitehall’s authority only in matter of foreign relations. There was the aberrant soldier Orde Wingate, Royal Artillery, the furious son of Plymouth Brethren parents, who had adopted the Zionist cause while serving in Palestine, had organized his own night squads of young Jewish guerillas to combat Arab sabotage, and was to be encountered loping around Palestine with his devoted desperadoes, a rifle in his hand, grenades tied to his belt and dirty gym shoes on his feet.
1
There was Captain A. T. A. Ritchie, the Old Harrovian Game Warden of Kenya, who fought in the Great War with the French Foreign Legion, drove about in a Rolls-Royce with rhinoceros horns affixed to its radiator, and so adored all living things that his house was full of stray wild animals, and he even made friends with individual fish. There were saint-like missionaries, unconventional engineers, flotsam and jetsam characters everywhere, keeping hotels in Suez, sailing steamboats up the Gambia, fossicking still on the deserted Klondyke, or pretending to imaginary pedigrees among the Melbourne matrons.

But they were the exceptions, the rebels even. ‘We spend our time’, wrote Freya Stark, contemplating the imperial British in 1933, ‘creating a magnificent
average
type of Englishman, the finest instrument in the world: none of our education sets out to produce great men.’ So it was. The Empire was withdrawing into the first postures of apology, and it needed the estimable average, Santayana’s just and boyish masters, not the great men or the heretics.