Författare: Roger Southall Professor of Sociology University of the Witw

Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870-1950) and Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (1918-2013) belonged to and were shaped by two different epochs in South Africa, yet left an indelible mark on its history. Sociologist Roger Southall has brought them together, so to speak, in a book, Smuts & Mandela, The Men Who Made South Africa. Among the many parallels he draws between the two men – one a racist white supremacist and the other a non-racialist and African nationalist – is that they were both nation-builders. Smuts made the state which Mandela fought to transform. We asked the author to explain.

What do you want readers to take away from this book?

The dustcover says it all:

This book makes the case that we cannot fully understand Mandela without first understanding Smuts and how South Africa continues to struggle with the legacy he left behind.

This begs the question: why I have chosen to compare the lives and legacies of Jan Smuts, a white supremacist leader of South Africa, and Nelson Mandela, the black nationalist leader of the liberation movement which led the country to democracy?

There will certainly be those who will query the moral and historical legitimacy of this comparison. But I believe it is simultaneously challenging and informative. It forces us to grapple with the disjuncture with the past that took place in 1994, when South Africa became a democracy, as well as with the continuities.

The present had to build upon the past, because the past cannot be wished away. We must seek to understand it, in part in its own terms (how did the makers of that past themselves see their present and justify their actions?), and partly from our own vantage point (what have been the consequences of that past and the actions of those who made it?).

My subtitle to the book, The Men Who Made South Africa, is obviously hyperbole. No individual ever makes history on their own. It is always a collective product. Nonetheless, there are always those individuals whose actions are more consequential than others’. And in broad terms, I want to drive home the message that the character of the freedom struggle waged by Mandela and the anti-apartheid African National Congress was unavoidably shaped by the nature of the state which Smuts helped construct with the negotiation of the Union of South Africa in 1910.

Who was Jan Smuts?

Smuts is widely credited as the major figure who shaped the making of the Union of South Africa in 1909-10. It brought together two former Boer republics, the Transvaal and Orange Free State, with the longstanding colonies of the Cape and Natal into a single country in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 (South African War). The war had resulted in the British bringing an end to Boer independence. However, the state created by the union was primarily based on white male suffrage. Its primary characteristic was its denial of the vote to the “new South Africa’s” black majority.

Following the union, Smuts played a major role in the erection of segregation (whereby passage of key laws like the Natives Land Act of 1913 entrenched white supremacy) before becoming prime minister for the first time in 1919-24. He became prime minister again between 1939 and 1948, leading South Africa into and out of the second world war.

Throughout this period, Smuts became an international statesman, playing highly significant roles in the formation of the League of Nations after the first world war and the United Nations after the second world war.

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Smuts has been largely forgotten in popular memory. There are two reasons for this. In South Africa, after ejecting him from power in 1948, his opponents in the National Party sought to erase him from the history books. For reasons I explore in the book, they regarded him as a traitor to the Afrikaner people, the descendants of largely Dutch and French migrants to South Africa who had resented coming under British rule and influence since the mid-19th century.

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Beyond South Africa, because Smuts had been one of the architects of segregation, it became convenient to forget the praise which had been heaped upon him by the western world.

It does not follow that we should continue to forget the role that Smuts played in South African and world history if we want to understand South Africa today.

Who was Nelson Mandela?

Mandela’s life has become a triumphant morality tale.

As the telling goes, it begins during the 1950s when he played a leading role in the mass campaigns against apartheid, rising in the anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC) and then deftly promoting the cause of freedom in the 1956-1961 Treason Trial and 1963-64 Rivonia Trial. This was followed by 27 years in jail on account of his beliefs.

During the 1980s Mandela prodded a recalcitrant apartheid regime towards the negotiating table, and led the ANC during the negotiations which brought South Africa to democracy. He then achieved global recognition when, as president, his efforts to promote national reconciliation transformed South Africa and consolidated democracy.

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Whereas Smuts was to be largely forgotten after his defeat in the 1948 election, Mandela became an international icon.

But history is always changing, and as I argue in the book, interest in Smuts is now reviving. I argue that this is because of the need for a more careful, more critical assessment of Mandela. Smuts was the man who, above all others, made the racist South Africa of 1910. This required Mandela, the man who above all others made the non-racial South Africa of 1994, to build on the foundations Smuts had laid.

How does comparing them help us understand the country’s history?

My book traces the history of 20th century South Africa through the two lives of Smuts and Mandela. I trace parallels in their lives: they were freedom fighters, state makers, nation builders and global statesmen.

I explore how it was that these particular leaders of a relatively unimportant country managed to become major figures in the global imagination.

A focus on individuals is only ever just one way to study history. Nonetheless, it is a valid one, and the popularity of biographies suggests that it is a highly attractive way for many non-historians to read their history. I wanted to write something that spoke to a readership beyond the academy.

I also wanted to stress that although 1994 brought a massive change to the South African state and economy, there are numerous continuities with the past. Smuts made the state which Mandela fought to transform. Läs mer…

A number of reports have called South Africa a politically polarised society. This may seem uncontroversial, given the country’s history of dispossession and discrimination during colonialism and apartheid, and their continuing legacy after 30 years of democracy.

But my analysis of South African history and politics disputes this view.

The Atlantic Council reported ahead of the country’s May elections that, although the country ranked “very high” on elections and political rights, a slight

negative trend may be attributed to political polarisation.

The Democracy and Development Progam said party loyalty and political popularisation could make it difficult for people to accept electoral outcomes that were not in their favour.

For its part, the Edelman Trust Barometer recently ranked South Africa among the most politically polarised countries in the world, along with Argentina, Colombia, the US, Spain and Sweden.

Political polarisation, it argued, was an outcome of decreasing economic optimism, consequent rising distrust in government, and a widening gap in incomes at the extremes. Distrust in the established media was growing, with people increasingly receiving their information from social media “echo chambers”.

This assertion that polarisation in South Africa is extreme is widely cultivated by notions that the country’s politics is split along lines of “race” and class. Of black versus white, and rich versus poor. Given the country’s brutal history, this isn’t surprising.

However, based on my analysis of South Africa’s political landscape since the 1970s, I believe we should be careful about accepting the notion that the country is politically polarised. This matters because some argue that polarisation is dangerous, leading to political gridlock, instability and collapse of democracy. In short, if South Africa is politically polarised, then democracy would appear to be on the way out. But is this so?

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If the country was as politically polarised as suggested, this would presumably have been reflected by the outcome of the 2024 general election. But the results indicated very clearly that the country is not divided into two antagonistic camps. The longtime governing African National Congress won 40% of the vote. The opposition Democratic Alliance won nearly 22%. Although ideologically divided, they found enough ground in common to form the core of a government of national unity. It presently consists of ten parties.

This has been widely interpreted as the political centre having held. This is endorsed by opinion poll findings indicating that the unity government is giving rise to greater optimism about the future.

Political polarisation

American political scientists trying to understand the rise of Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2016 developed the notion of political polarisation.They had always recognised that the American electorate was divided along class, ideology and political interest lines. Now they identified it as divided into mutually antagonistic camps.

Mineral resources minister Gwede Mantashe (ANC), correctional services minister Pieter Groenewald (FF+), and home affairs minister Lionel Schreiber (DA).
Rodger Bosch/AFP via Getty Images.

Democrats and Republicans had come to view each other as an existential threat to their nation or way of life.

The political scientists went on to identify similar processes taking place in many countries across the world. They argued that this was undermining the capacity of democracy to survive.

All this taps into the recognition that socio-economic inequality has dramatically increased globally since the 1980s. This has undermined trust in established political institutions and parties. The outcome has been the rise of increasingly extremist modes of politics. Populist politicians encourage this. They mobilise support by dividing society into bitterly opposed groups. They then pose as saviours of honest citizens under attack by established elites, a “deep state”, or unwelcome and exploitative outsiders. The extreme inequalities in South Africa have enabled similar scenarios.

Contrary evidence

In South Africa, during the Jacob Zuma presidency, 2009-2018, members of the governing ANC’s “radical economic transformation” faction made numerous attacks on “white monopoly capital”. The suggestion was that shadowy apartheid-era economic forces were subverting the country’s democracy.

Whether this reflected reality was less important to the faction than using it to mobilise political opinion. The notion was that, despite the formal arrival of democracy in 1994, South Africa was still run by a rich white minority at the expense of the mass of black South Africans.

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Some politicians seek political support by using polarising language and terminology. But does that mean South Africa is politically polarised?

Careful reflection suggests otherwise.

The South Africa of the 1970s and 1980s, when the anti-apartheid struggle was at its height, was manifestly polarised between the apartheid government and the forces of democracy. Yet today, after the sixth democratic election, the unity government is holding together, despite policy differences between the ANC and DA (who between them took nearly two-thirds of the votes cast). For the moment at least, they are exploring ways to agree how to disagree. The country remains divided in many ways. Yet it is not polarised into irreconcilably antagonistic camps with wildly opposing world views.

Tensions

There are nevertheless tensions.

An alternative interpretation of the 2024 election result is that South African politics is dividing those who adhere to the legitimacy of the democratic constitution and those who don’t.

The surprise appearance of Zuma’s uMkhontho we Sizwe Party (MK) was the major factor leading to the ANC losing is majority, down from 57% in 2019 to 40% in 2024. MK won 14%. It has thrown its lot in with Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), whose share of the vote fell to 9%, to form the “Progressive Caucus” in the national assembly. Together they now make up the core of the opposition.

The MK Party wants to replace the present constitution. It argues that the constitution enables the courts to declare acts passed by parliament unconstitutional, and it denies majority rule. Meanwhile, the EFF has long displayed its contempt for many aspects of the constitution.

It is therefore unsurprising that the Progressive Caucus has been cited as an alliance of anti-constitutional forces, heralding the division of South Africa into two warring camps.

Considerable opposition within the ANC to the government of national unity confirms that the party is in danger of further fragmentation. Those hostile to the coalition with the DA might jump ship.

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This does not necessarily add up to a united, anti-constitutionalist opposition.

Nonetheless, what the Edelman Trust Report and other surveys do confirm is that trust in the government and other national institutions, such as the judiciary, police and the electoral authorities, is declining. A similar thing is happening in many other democracies.

In the recent elections, only 58% of the registered electorate voted. The low level of participation is worrying. It’s a sign that democracy is not working as well as it should for a large minority of the population.

But only further probing will show whether that minority is resolutely antagonistic to the constitution. Läs mer…