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Jan Smuts and Nelson Mandela — careful diplomacy, steely resolve

Nelson Mandela (back row in the middle) meets with Margaret Thatcher (front row, second from left) and members of the royal family. Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/EPA

By Roger Southall

12 Dec 2024

This excerpt from Smuts & Mandela: The Men Who Made South Africa gives a glimpse of two skilled statesmen: one helped to draft the UN’s charter and the other stewarded South Africa through difficult times.

Following the Second World War, delegates of some 50 states met in San Francisco between April and June 1945 to establish a forum for the discussion of world affairs and the resolution of international disputes. Its founding was a moment of great hope and was widely viewed as a major step towards a better and more equal world.

Jan Smuts was the only delegate present who had also been present at Versailles in 1919. He again played a highly influential role, providing drafts of key documents, notably the Charter of the United Nations, which committed that body to the pursuit of “equal rights and self-determination of peoples” and anticipated the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, a foundational statement of principle that eventually helped to validate the claims of nationalist movements internationally.

By now Smuts had become a venerated elder statesman. At the same time, as the only delegate to wear military uniform, he struck an almost determinedly old-fashioned figure. He was also one who was uncomfortably aware that the liberal principles he formally espoused on the world stage were contradicted by South Africa’s racial policies at home.

He had gone to San Francisco expecting a rough ride, and that was what he had to endure. Before the conference met, the Commonwealth’s prime ministers had convened in London to discuss the charter. Smuts argued that the initial draft was too dry and legalistic.

Nelson Mandela. (Photo: Frank Micelotta / Getty Images)

Smuts Mandela Jan Smuts. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Determined that the UN should succeed where the League of Nations had failed, after he was elected president of the General Assembly, he proposed wording that would have universal appeal, including a ringing declaration that “We the United Nations … declare our faith in basic human rights”.

His plea received strong backing and, subsequently, his proposed wording was endorsed by the UN’s conference, except that “basic” human rights now became “fundamental human rights”. Let this charter, he declared in his inaugural speech to the conference, “proclaim to the world and to posterity … the resolve to vindicate the fundamental rights of man and on that basis found a better, freer world for the future”.

Over the next 18 months, Indian diplomats were to repeatedly attack him by highlighting the contradiction between the aspirations of the charter, which he himself had authored, and South Africa’s treatment of its Indian citizens.

Trouble at home

The Cape Town Agreement between South Africa and India in 1927 had committed the South African government to “uplifting” Indians. However, if that meant a growing Indian population moving into historically white areas, white voters were not eager for Indians to be “uplifted”.

In the Transvaal, anti-Indian sentiment increased rapidly during the 1930s, culminating in the JBM Hertzog government’s introduction of the Asiatics (Transvaal Land and Trading) Bill of 1939. Its purpose was to pin Indians to their existing residences for two years while the government came up with a longer-term solution.

Smuts, not wanting to offend white voters at a critical time (he was about to confront Hertzog about South Africa’s entry into the Second World War), acquiesced. This worked, and within a short space of time he was back in power as prime minister. Smuts needed the support of the reactionary Dominion Party to support his wartime coalition.

Most of its supporters lived in Natal and were thoroughly hostile to Indian penetration of their residential areas. This inevitably aroused the ire of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC), and so Smuts delegated the problem to successive committees headed by the judge Francis Broome.

When these concluded that Indian penetration was taking place at a rate whites would not tolerate, Smuts aped Hertzog by securing the passage of the Trading and Occupation of Land (Transvaal and Natal) Restriction Act in April 1943.

Its purpose was to “peg” the position for three years pending further investigations, for which Smuts again turned to Broome to head a Natal Judicial Commission, composed of three whites and two Indians, both from the NIC. This reached a compromise whereby purchases of land and dwellings by members of one racial group from members of another would be offset by a reverse exchange elsewhere.

Generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts at Versailles in July 1919. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Smuts departed for San Francisco confident that he had managed to avoid a quarrel with India. He could not have been more wrong. After his departure, Smuts’s white supporters in Natal rose in revolt. The Indian community struck back.

The moderates who had sat on the Broome Commission were replaced by a more strident leadership demanding immediate equality for Indians in Natal. Smuts countered with a new bill, the Asiatic Land Tenure Bill, which would have granted Indians limited parliamentary representation as compensation for their loss of rights to land purchase and residence.

The Indian community rejected his offer, labelled his legislation the “Ghetto Act”, and embarked on a campaign of passive resistance. They also looked to India for support.

With India now on the verge of independence, Jawaharlal Nehru’s provisional government put the treatment of Indians in South Africa on the agenda of the first session of the UN General Assembly, where Smuts was about to seek approval for South Africa to incorporate South-West Africa.

High noon in New York

The San Francisco conference had served notice that South Africa would be invited to bring its mandate over South-West Africa into the UN’s proposed trusteeship system.

In contrast, Smuts put South Africa’s case for the incorporation of that territory on grounds of geographical contiguity, ethnological kinship and mutual economic advantage, insisting too that the population wanted it.

However, the Indian government was having none of it. The South African Indian Congress requested India to send heavyweights, either Mahatma Gandhi or Nehru himself, to argue their case.

Gandhi, trying to stop communal carnage as independence neared, declined; Nehru was too overwhelmed with other issues, but he chose his sister, Mrs Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who had led the Indian National Congress delegation to San Francisco. Gandhi pleaded with her to remember that Smuts was a “man of God” and stressed he did not want to lose his friendship.

When the UN General Assembly convened in New York in late October 1946, the Indian delegates demanded that South-West Africa be converted into a Trust Territory. They linked this to an attack on the Ghetto Act as a repudiation of the Cape Town Agreement and as violating the UN’s Charter of Human Rights.

Jan Smuts (second from left) at the 1944 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference. (Photo: Wikipedia)

South Africa submitted that the dispute be referred to the International Court of Justice, where it hoped political issues would be subordinated to legal ones. Complicated manoeuvrings followed and culminated in the dispute being referred to the General Assembly’s political and legal committees sitting together.

Between 21 November and 8 December 1946, Smuts listened “patiently and courteously” to six passionate speeches by Mrs Pandit. In another committee, where South-West Africa was being discussed, the Indian representative, Maharaj Singh, stated that India would argue against incorporation in the name of all non-self-governing peoples throughout the world.

He received strong backstage support from the president of the ANC, AB Xuma, who famously used his presence in New York to claim that he had had to fly 10,000 miles to meet his own prime minister, who “talks about us but won’t talk to us”. It was a peculiarly damaging jibe.

***

Mandela, South Africa and the world

In an article published in the influential American journal Foreign Affairs under his name in 1993, Nelson Mandela spelt out the principles upon which South Africa’s future foreign policy would rest.

Human rights were central to international relations; lasting solutions to the problems of humankind could only come through the promotion of democracy; respect for international law should guide the relations between nations; peace was the goal for which all nations should strive; South African policies would reflect the concerns of the African continent; and economic development depended on international cooperation in an interdependent world.

Scholars of international relations have stressed how the goals of idealists have had to adjust to the realities of global power. Mandela’s case was no different. His statement of intent underplayed the complexities of the major reorientation of foreign relations that the new South Africa was required to undertake.

Until recently an international pariah, South Africa needed to use its new identity as a non-racial democracy to refashion its relations with Europe and North America while building new relationships with the global East and South.

In addition, South Africa needed to completely rework its relationship with the African continent. Mandela played a major role in laying down the broad direction of foreign policy. In so doing, he placed major store in establishing sound personal relationships with the great and the good, often in blithe disregard of protocol.

Former US president Bill Clinton leans down to whisper to former South African president Nelson Mandela during a visit to the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg on 19 July 2007. (Photo: Win McNamee / Getty Images for the Clinton Foundation)

The personal as political

Initially, Mandela’s domination of foreign policymaking was so complete as to virtually overshadow the role of the Department of Foreign Affairs, the cabinet, parliament and the ANC.

Between March 1990 and mid-1992, Mandela made some 16 foreign trips, visiting 49 countries across Africa, Europe and North America. He was an international celebrity. Crowds turned out to worship him wherever he went.

Politicians packed Congress, the British parliament and other historic venues to hear him speak. Presidents and prime ministers queued up to proclaim themselves his friend. Mandela did not shy from buttering them up.

But nor did he shy from playing hard to get, as Margaret Thatcher found out when he postponed meeting her during his initial visit to Britain. She had to wait her turn.

Mandela used these early travels to meet old friends, greet those who had supported the struggle, and raise money for the ANC.

The global Mandela

During the Cold War, successive Republican administrations under Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush and the Conservative government under Thatcher had opposed sanctions and branded Mandela and the ANC as terrorists.

Though less vocal, member states of the EU (especially France and Germany) had significant trade and investment links with South Africa and feared a flood of whites claiming citizenship if political stability broke down. Mandela appreciated the importance of establishing himself as someone with whom they could do business.

Mandela met President George W Bush on his initial visit to the US in 1990. He was disappointed by an initial US offer of a $600-million aid and investment package (“peanuts”, he called it), but when he made his first state visit to Washington as president in 1995, he struck up an enduring friendship with Bill Clinton.

This led to the establishment of a US-South African Bi-national Commission to supplement the traditional channels of diplomacy by bringing together the most senior decision-makers and officials from both governments.

Co-chaired by vice-president Al Gore and Thabo Mbeki, its early meetings concluded with the signing of agreements increasing cooperation in areas of science, technology, the environment and taxation.

The US and South Africa also found common ground in supporting the extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (the NP government had divested itself of nuclear weapons to prevent their falling into the hands of the ANC, while the ANC was not ungrateful that it was spared the dilemma of what to do with them).

Nelson Mandela (back row in the middle) meets Margaret Thatcher (front, second from left) and members of the royal family. (Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth / EPA)

The EU had adopted (limited) sanctions against South Africa in the mid-1980s, but a lack of unanimity about how to respond to FW de Klerk’s democratisation initiatives led to disarray, with individual states unilaterally dropping sanctions.

Mandela used meetings with President François Mitterrand of France and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany to stress their continuing importance. He also set the ball rolling for the negotiation of a comprehensive trade agreement.

The talks were not easy. Both the French and the Germans sought exclusions from an EU agreement that would have eased high barriers to the importation of South African agricultural goods, prompting concerns about European protectionism. But two years later, Mary Robinson, the Irish leader, was to declare that her country’s forthcoming presidency of the EU would be dedicated to securing South Africa better access to the European market.

Mandela never forged as close a personal relationship with any British prime minister as he did with Clinton, but he recognised the critical importance of winning British backing. Initially, those high up in the ANC had bristled when Mandela mooted the idea of meeting Thatcher.

Nonetheless, he had recognised the necessity of establishing a personal rapport, to secure her neutrality if not her actual support. Thatcher had her own reasons for meeting him halfway.

Britain’s stake in South Africa’s stability went beyond its economic ties. Were the worst to happen, there were some 350,000 white South Africans with British citizenship who could flee the country immediately, and up to a million able to claim British passports. When they met, they disagreed about sanctions but agreed that “apartheid must go”. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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