For months, stubborn old Jan Christian Smuts fought off death. Exhausted by pneumonia and heart strain, the 80-year-old statesman made a slight concession to the enemy last June—he "temporarily" yielded his leadership of South Africa's United Party to his deputy, Jacobus Gideon Nel Strauss. But through his son, he announced that he planned soon "once more to enter the fray with renewed vigor." Last week, against his doctors' advice, Smuts left his tin-walled farmhouse to do just that.
The Idea of the Whole. Jan Smuts had always been in the fray—as statesman and soldier, as author, orator, mountain-climber, scientist, philosopher. He had been such an indefatigable participant in his time's great events that the world came to think of him as one of its great men. More honored abroad than at home, for more than 40 years he made the voice of his far-off country heard in the world.
With Elizabethan vim and versatility, Smuts had lived his own "idea of the whole" which he expounded in his book, Holism and Evolution in 1926. He believed that everywhere in the universe—among electrons and protons, plants and animals, minds and personalities, empires and world orders—the forces of cooperation and fusion, i.e., "holism,"*are at work. But at Smuts's life's end, not even his own beloved country was whole.
Reconstructed Boer. Born a British subject in the old Cape Colony, Smuts was too busy with his father's fields and herds to learn to read until he was twelve. At 21, he won a scholarship to Cambridge University. When he returned to South Africa, he found growing strife between Briton and Boer. Good Boer Smuts renounced his British citizenship.
When Britain went to war with the Boers in 1899, the bookish lawyer became a commando general whom the British soon learned to respect. When the war was over, Smuts used both toughness and brilliance to persuade the British to give South Africa dominion status, and Britain's former enemy turned into Britain's enduring friend. Many a Boer called him "Slim [sly] Jannie" thereafter.
In 1914, Smuts swung South Africa to the Allies, helped capture German SouthWest Africa. Later he led the campaign that won German East Africa. He was summoned to London as the only dominion member of the British War Cabinet. It was Smuts who proposed the new name—soon adopted—for the British Empire: "The British Commonwealth of Nations."
At Versailles, Smuts worked vigorously with Wilson on the League Covenant, with equal vigor opposed the harshness of the terms imposed on Germany, arguing that a generous peace was more likely to last. Between the wars, he was out of office for nine years. When war came again, the pro-Hitler Nationalist leader, General James Barry Munnik Hertzog, moved in Parliament that South Africa stay neutral. Smuts defeated him at the polls, led South Africa into the war at Britain's side. Later, as a delegate at San Francisco, he helped write the preamble of the United Nations Charter.