Smuts’ failure in South West Africa:
The Bondelzwarts rebellion and the investigation by the League of Nations
Amsterdam, May 2017 Ian Daugherty 10026282 Master Thesis History of International Relations Under the supervision of dr. Kuitenbrouwer
Table of Contents
PREFACE 3 CHAPTER I 8 CHAPTER II 18 CHAPTER III 32 CHAPTER IV 46 CONCLUSION 59 LITERATURE 62Preface
From 1915 to 1990 South Africa ruled over the territory that was then known as South West Africa, presently Namibia. The South African army conquered the German Colony during the First World War and governed it under martial law until 1921. From then on South West Africa functioned as a de facto sixth province of South Africa until 1990. From 1921 to 1946 as a League of Nations mandate and from 1946 to 1990 as a controversial United Nations trust territory. After the First World War Smuts was in the ideal position to realize South Africa’s aspiration for a League mandate. During that time he was the South African minister of defense but also South Africa’s representative at the Imperial War Cabinet and the Paris Peace Conference. At the same time Smuts was responsible for much of the intellectual design for the League of Nations and the mandate system that South West Africa would eventually fall under. However, during South Africa’s reign of the territory it would almost unremittingly receive critique from both these institutions. The critique first surfaced during Smuts’ time as Prime Minister of South Africa between 1919 and 1924. The question that arises is: to what extent was Smuts responsible for South Africa’s solicitation of the mandate of South West Africa and how did the critique on the mandate influence his reputation as an internationally respected statesman?
Northward expansion, including the territory of South West Africa, had always been on the political agenda of the South African Boer Republics and the Cape Colony. The old Boer Republican slogan: ‘then shall it be, from Simonsberg to the Zambesi, Africa for the Afrikaners’ illustrates this determination.1 At the eve of the
First World War, a mere five years after the establishment of the independent South African Union, that dream of territorial expansion was still very much alive amongst African Nationalists and other South African politicians alike. One of the most adamant supporters of these expansionist dreams was Smuts.2 However, the Germans
who in the early 1880’s had claimed large swaths of land south of the Zambezi River were thwarting these ambitions. At that time Cape politicians had unsuccessfully begged the British Foreign Office to block Bismarck’s determination to annex the territory that was to become German South West Africa.
1 William Keith Hancock, Smuts I; The Sanguine Years 1870-1919 (Cambridge 1962), 380. 2 Ibidem, 381.
When the First World War broke out in Europe in 1914, South Africa - as part of the British Empire - had the constitutional obligation to aid and assist Great Britain in the War against the Axis powers in Europe and abroad. On the 7th of August 1914
the British officially accepted South Africa’s help and simultaneously raised a fateful question: ‘If your Ministers at the same time desire and feel themselves able to seize such part of German South-West Africa (…) we should feel that this was a great and urgent imperial service.’3 Prime Minister Louis Botha and second in command Smuts
saw an opportunity for territorial expansion and agreed. Neither Botha nor Smuts would ever publicly use expansionist arguments when convincing the Union to participate in the War, but the potential future annexation of German South West Africa certainly played a role in their eagerness to accept. This becomes clear in a letter from Botha to Smuts in April 1915: ‘True we are doing a great deal by agreeing to take German South-West Africa, but we should not lose sight of the fact that we are taking the country for ourselves and not for anyone else.’4 Smuts agreed and was
convinced that German South West Africa formed ‘a part of our Afrikaner heritage’.5
At the conclusion of the First World War at the Paris Peace Conference South Africa was granted permanent control of their conquered territory as a League of Nations C Mandate. As a C Mandate, South West Africa became part of the Union in all but name. South Africa had a free hand in domestic issues, financial budgeting and foreign policy. However, South West Africa was under the trusteeship of South Africa through the League of Nations and not an integral part of the Union. In accordance with the official League scripture it was also never to be. When its architects – including Smuts – had designed the League they had done so to ‘uphold imperial authority and strengthen the prestige and legitimacy of alien, non-consensual rule.’6
But after world leaders had established the League the officials and civil servants that took over ran it in a way not many had anticipated. These officials administered the League in a humanitarian and internationalist fashion that would clash with South Africa’s interpretation of their authority in the mandate. I will later argue that this disagreement was far in the future at the Paris Peace Conference and that South
3 Ibidem, 279.
4 William Keith Hancock, Jean van der Poel, Selection from the Smuts Papers; Volume III June 1910 – November 1918 (Cambridge 1966) Vol. 12 no. 60.
5 William Keith Hancock, Jean van der Poel, Selection from the Smuts Papers; Volume IV November 1918-August 1919 (Cambridge 1966) 12/143A.
African representatives were under the impression that the C status granted them annexation in all but name.
Therefore, when Smuts became the second Prime Minister of South Africa in 1919, he felt that his dream for a greater South Africa - stretching from the Cape to at least the Zambezi but preferably beyond - was solidly moving according to his ambition. The solicitation for the South African mandate can almost exclusively be credited to Smuts. This was due to his favored position amongst the upper echelons of the British ruling elite and because of his position as one of the prime architects of the Charter for the League of Nations and its accompanying mandate system. Now, as Prime Minister and with the Germans removed from Africa, Smuts would put much effort in furthering his ambitions.7
Ironically Smuts’ ideological brainchildren, the League of Nations and particularly the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) – charged with mandate oversight – would frustrate these ambitions, perhaps even more than any other factor in his life. The origin of this quarrel was the brutal repression by South Africa of a rebellion by the Bondelzwarts tribe in South West Africa in May 1922. This rebellion was in a sense nothing more than a successful suppression much like other tribal suppressions so common in colonial Africa. However, the Bondelzwarts rebellion proved to be of a different magnitude, as it provoked rebuking responses both internationally and domestically. A few days after the South African Air Force bombed the Bondelzwarts the international press ran the story for the first time.8 On
the 5th of September that same year the League of Nations was forced to investigate
the situation when the subject was raised at the League of Nations’ Assembly in Geneva. During the lifetime of the League of Nations, South Africa’s status as a mandatory power was never up for serious discussion. However the PMC summoned the South African representatives to Geneva to report time after time on the causes of the rebellion and eventually for their general treatment of the indigenous inhabitants of South West Africa.9 Powerless to punish South Africa, by for instance, revoking
their mandate status, the PMC did all it could to at least deprive it of international legitimacy. On no other mandate, save (British) Palestine and (French) Syria, did the
7 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton 2008) 29-65.
8 ‘Hottentot Rising. Rebels Bombed’, The Times, 31 May 1922, 9. 9 Pedersen, Guardians, 112-141.
PMC spend more hours investigating, interrogating and condemning the repressive methods than on South Africa.10
The Bondelzwarts rebellion, South Africa’s northward territorially expansion, and the League of Nations’ inquiries all have Smuts as a key player. This essay will discuss the history and the process leading up to the annexation followed by the causes, progression and outcome of the rebellion. For this the League of Nations archives in Geneva are a valuable source. The archives contain the minutes of all official meetings of both the League Assembly as well as the PMC. Both are a valuable source for the general understanding of how the League functioned but the archives also contain some very detailed opinions and reports from League officials as well as some of its founders. In these reports and discussions Smuts is mentioned quite often in connection with the South African mandate in general but also more specifically during hearings concerning the aftermath of the Bondelzwarts rebellion. After the disbandment of the League of Nations in 1946 the offices in Geneva were swept for any remaining non categorized documents to be archived. Where most of the documents concerning the minutes of the official discussions were orderly archived some discussions on a more personal note were not. These discussions concerning the rebellion and the legal status of a League of Nations C Mandate were put together in the box ‘S259’ marked as ‘Correspondence’ and in the Boxes ‘R10’ to ‘R14’ concerning ‘South West Africa’. Some of these documents contain valuable inside opinions on the Bondelzwarts rebellion but were often incomplete as parts of the correspondence were stored in personal archives, misplaced or lost. The archives have been researched by previous historians but not with the intent of investigating Smuts’ role.
Luckily Smuts’ own correspondence has been very well preserved and even categorized by his official biographer William Keith Hancock in a seven series long correspondence bundle. This, together with Smuts’ personal works The League of Nations a Practical Suggestion, Holism and Evolution and War-time Speeches give ample and valuable insight into Smuts’ personal philosophy and (political) ideas.11
On The League of Nations, the Permanent Mandates Commission and on Jan Smuts plenty has been written so far. Therefor I will briefly explore the relevant
10 Pedersen, Guardians, 129.
11 Jan Smuts, The League of Nations; A Practical Suggestion (London 1918); Jan Smuts, Holism and Evolution (London 1926); Jan Smuts, War-time Speeches (London 1917).
historiography on these subject as well as contemplate why further investigation into these subject is necessary.
Chapter I
‘Back to the League of Nations’ but why? And why an international perspective is needed.
While walking through Ariane Park in Geneva and looking up to the marvelous classicist palace, one is surrounded by an important part of history. This park on Lake Geneva with views of the French Alps was once the center of
internationalists’ dreams and hopes when it functioned as the headquarters for the League of Nations. The League, established after World War I, was to be the first official international organization for a cooperation of nations. It can be argued that this internationalist concept rose from the ashes of the devastation of World War I, but that would be a too negative an explanation. A more positive approach would be to say that it was the brainchild of idealistic men such as Lord Bryce, Howard Taft, Lord Cecil and probably most of all Jan Smuts and Woodrow Wilson. In Wilson’s words these men envisioned ‘A General Association of Nations … under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small States alike’.12 There had been previous
attempts for international arbitrage between nations, especially within Europe. The Concert of Europe, which had reigned over Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, and the Peace Conferences in The Hague at the start of the 20th century, could be seen as
predecessors of the League or at least as experiments leading up to the establishment of the League, without directly envisioning it.13
When, in April 1946, Lord Cecil famously said ‘The League is dead. Long live the United Nations’ indeed everything that was once the League was no more.14
When Arthur Sweetser, one of the architects of this outcome, was asked to compare the League with the UN he answered that it was like talking about his first
honeymoon while being on a honeymoon with his second wife.15 But to follow this
analogy the second and the first wife had a lot in common. Publically this vision would have been repressed, as it was important to distance the United Nations from
12 N.a., The League of Nations, A Pictorial Survey (Geneva 1929) 5.
13 Mark Mazower, Governing the World; The History of an Idea (London 2012). 14 Ibidem, 211.
the failures of the League, but ‘in many respects [it] simply continued the ongoing League experiment’, as historian Mark Mazower recently claimed.16
The League’s demise ensured it lost its prominent place as a favorite topic for political commentators, historians and other intellectuals. This resulted in
internationalist historians walking away from the League and for years most books on the League were ‘rise and fall’ narratives or analytical postmortems on the League. The few authors that did venture onto the subject of the League in the years of the reduced interest mainly used national archives and thus national perspectives and not the League’s. This left the archives in Geneva largely unused for close to forty years.17
All of this changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union when Gorbachev called for a ‘new world order’ and more international cooperation through a
revitalization of the United Nations.18 In the article ‘Back to the League of Nations’
historian Susan Pedersen claims that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the new claims of sovereignty that followed began to sound very familiar.19 The breakup of
Yugoslavia and the ethnic driven conflicts that followed also had many similarities with the situation post World War I. Historians and political commentators alike wondered if the minorities protection system – established by the League to protect ethnic minorities after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire – could be a model for modern problems in for instance the Balkans. Pedersen claims that the events in the 1990s thus revitalized historians’ interest in the League of Nations. ‘By the mid-1990s, new historical research was under way or in print on all these aspects of the League.’20 It resulted in a much broader understanding of the League than the mere
‘rise and fall’ narratives. Pedersen outlines three different narratives on the League. The first focuses on the League’s contribution to peacekeeping. The second looks at the League’s international authority in this period, and the third – closely intertwined with the second – on the shifting boundaries of state power versus international rule of law.21
16 Mazower, Governing the World, 212.
17 Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 112, No. 4 (Oct., 2007) 1091-1117, 1091.
18 Mazower, Governing the World, i.
19 Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, 1091. 20 Ibidem, 1092.
The re-energized interest in the third narrative included renewed research on the League of Nations’ mandates but also on the Permanent Mandate Commission (PMC). 22 The mandates, first suggested by Smuts in his influential study The League
of Nations; a practical suggestion, were supposed to be a system of national responsibility subjected to international supervision.23 Smuts believedthat the
mandate system should only be applied to former territories of European empires in Europe and in the Middle East. Or, in his own words: ‘… territories and peoples split off from Russia, Austria and Turkey.’24 But much to Smuts’ dismay, as well as other
British Dominion leaders’, the mandate system was also applied to former German colonies on the Southern hemisphere.25
Pedersen has very directly called for more study to be performed on the League of Nations but there have been other less direct promoters. The president of the American Historical Association, Akira Iriye, encouraged fellow historians to pursue history ‘that exceeded national boundaries’ during the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1988.26 Iriye’swas ahead of his time as he called
for an intensified interest in international organizations such as the League but also in a wider field of internationalism. It is exactly what Pedersen called forwhen she described the renewed interest in the League in the early 1990’s.
Zara Steiner is one of the historians who showed renewed interest in the League. In her article ‘On writing international history: chaps, maps and much more’ she asks for more attention to be given to the personalities of the men and woman who are being researched.27 She also – much like Iriye – called attention to the fact
that politicians are often hovering between the realities of national and international politics.
‘So we place our actors in both a domestic and an international framework. No international historian would be content to answer the question on ‘how’ and ‘why’ by looking only at the domestic basis of
22 F.S. Northedge, The League of Nations: Its life and Times, 1920-1946 (Holmes and Meier 1986) 192.
23 Smuts, A Practical Suggestion, 21. 24 Ibidem, 14.
25 Peter Sales, ‘‘A little German Colony here or there!’ The U.S. Australian Clash at the Paris Peace conference of 1919’, Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 8 (1989) 22-34.
26 Akira Iriye, ‘The internationalization of History’, The American Historical Review. Vol. 94 (1989) 1-10 .
27 Zara Steiner, ‘On Writing International History: Chaps, Maps and much more’. International Affairs Vol. 73 (1997) 531-546, 531-532.
foreign policy. It is here that the discussions of international systems, economic regimes and cultural interchange becomehighly relevant.’28
This strongly applies to Smuts. Smuts was always the South African politician as well as the internationalist who was so important within the more global British Empire and at the world stage.
The 1990s proved to be a pivotal decade for the renewed interest in the League. Iriye called for history ‘that exceeded national boundaries’ in the late 1980. The end of the Cold War sounded the beginning for a renewed and intensified look at the League from historians and intellectuals alike. In recent years books by Mazower, Pedersen and many others show the interest is not waning just yet. Reynolds and Steiner illustrate that personal opinions and motives can be a strong influence in historic events. In the case of Smuts I will show that his personal believes and philosophy on race, international politics and South Africa’s destiny strongly influenced the history of South Africa and Namibia and therefore his own political career.
What has been written on the Permanent Mandates Commission? In recent years attempts were made at comparative studies of the mandate system as a whole. In 2004 Michael Callahan published his second book on Britain and France’s African B mandates, illustrating how these superpowers played their role in the League very differently.29 The English– more than the French – tried to placate
the League by adhering to the rules, most of the time, and by sending important people as representatives to Geneva. However, the English were also in an easy position as the territories that really mattered to them – India and perhaps Kenya, and Egypt for the Suez Canal – were under their control outside of the Mandates system. The only important mandate was oil rich Iraq, and the British made sure they got that country out of the League’s jurisdiction as fast as they could.30
Callahan showed in his other book, Mandates and Empire, that even though the PMC never had any real power over the mandated territories it did influence
28 Steiner, ‘On Writing International History, 540.
29 Michael Callahan, A Sacred Trust: The League of Nations and Africa, 1929-1946 (Brighton 2004). 30 Susan Pedersen, ‘The Meaning of the Mandates System: An Argument’ Geschichte und
public opinion and proved to be able to publicly embarrass mandatory powers that stepped out of line.31 This was not what its architects and officials had intended.
According to Pedersen: ‘To the contrary, they sought at every turn to uphold imperial authority and strengthen the prestige and legitimacy of alien, non-consensual rule.’32
Pedersen continues by saying that the League of Nations gave an international
platform to all ‘worthy humanitarians, belligerent German revisionists and nationalists determined to expose the brutalities of imperial rule.’33
In Pedersen’s article ‘The Meaning of the Mandates System: An Argument’ Pedersen also explained why the PMC was more trouble for the mandatory powers than the League’s Assembly and Secretariat had originally hoped for. The naming and shaming tactic of the PMC was contrary to the Secretariat’s policy of solving
problems behind closed doors.34 Even though all the commissioners were white
Europeans (except for the one almost totally silent Japanese member) they proved to be men, and one woman, with more principles than had originally been anticipated.35
And indeed, in historical perspective, it is ironic that a Dutch commissioner, D.W.F. van Rees, and the Belgian commissioner Pierre Orts, commented negatively on colonial practices by other countries considering their own countries’ colonial history.
Even more than those two, Sir Frederick Lugard, the British appointee, proved to be far more a man of principle than many would have liked. Lugard headed the Commission and gave it status and legitimacy but he also was a stubborn front man who wanted to set his own course. Lugard was however no enemy of the concept ‘empire’; he had been the imperial Governor in Nigeria up until the end of the First World War. In Lugard’s eyes mandates had to use his way of governance as an example: the British way. But ironic or not, the members of the PMC were not shy about giving and publishing their opinion on the mandated territories, much to the chagrin of not only the criticized mandatory powers but also of the Secretariat which, as I have mentioned, preferred to handle everything behind closed doors. The fact that all members of the PMC were appointed without a set term meant that most retired only at old age or when their country retreated from the League. Pedersen argues that
31 Michael Callahan, Mandates and Empire (Brighton 1999). 32 Pedersen, Guardians, 13.
33 Ibidem.
34 Pedersen, ‘The Meaning of the Mandates System,’ 24. 35 Ibidem, 12.
this long term of membership, together with the surprising principles of its members made the PMC highly knowledgeable and self-determent in their policy.36
However, to accurately study the PMC, its decision-making and its effects one cannot just focus on the PMC. To really understand this complicated institution in relation to for instance their stance on the Bondelzwarts rebellion, a multiple
perspective approach is necessary. Ann Laura Stoler in her article ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’ argues that indeed for comparative studies of empire or colonial history historians should take an approach beyond just the nation.37 Historian Robert Gregg
makes the same appeal: ‘go beyond the boundaries of the nation-state to understand the larger dimensions of the imperial system’.38
In her extensive book The Guardians: the League of Nations and the crisis of Empire, Susan Pedersen does exactly that and adheres to Stoller’s arguments in Tense and Tender Ties to go ‘beyond the nation’.39 The book is not written from the Smuts
perspective – although he is mentioned – but from the perspectives of the
internationalists in the League in Geneva and then more specifically those of the PMC and Assembly. In a careful study of the minutes of the Assembly sessions and the PMC meetings, Pedersen identifies the Bondelzwarts rebellion as one of the main dossiers studied by the PMC and recognizes it for the precedent it set for later cases to come before the PMC.40 The Bondelzwarts rebellion in correlation with Smuts is
mentioned, but not deeply exploited. Pedersen does partlyblame the rebellion on Smuts’ policy but does not fully exploit the reasons for Smuts to enforce colonial continuity. The reason is probably that Pedersen’s research has in recent years primarily focused on the League of Nations and not on Smuts. The previously mentioned Back to the League of Nations from 2007 in which she argued for more research on the League and showed what had been done so far is a clear start to an extensive specialization in the subject which eventually resulted in The Guardians from 2015.41 Other works on this subject include her article ‘The Meaning of the
Mandates System: An Argument’ from 2006, in which she argues that ‘the mandates
36 Susan Pedersen, ‘The Meaning of the Mandates System,’ 13.
37 Ann Laura, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies. The Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. 3 (2001) 829-865, 847. 38 Robert Gregg, ‘Inside Out, Outside’. Essays in Comparative History (New York 2000) 6. 39 Pedersen, The Guardians, 107.
40 Ibiden, 134-141.
system should best be seen as a discursive arena and not asan administrative
system.’42 The PMC was more an institution useful in influencing the public opinion
than an institution made for hard power play. Although the reprimands from the PMC – and other bodies of the League for that matter – did result in other mandatory powers being more tactful in their repressive ways or at least in getting better at cloaking problems from the outside world. Not so with South Africa, as Pedersen argues: they were already moving towards the ‘rogue state’ status.43
But if it is important to look beyond the PMC when studying its decisions and motivations it is also essential to study the intent of its original architects. Mandatory oversight was meant to make imperialism more legitimate, not to ban it. This essay will show that the Mandate system had this unintended effect, by its architects. One of the architects facing serious critique from the PMC was Smuts who had laid the groundwork not only for the PMC but also for the League of Nations as a whole.
Why Smuts?
Why is it important to examine an individual’s personal beliefs and
philosophy when studying international relations in the first place? David Reynolds answered this question in his very influential essay ‘International History, The Cultural Turn and the Diplomatic Twitch’.44 Reynolds: ‘To many cultural and social
historians, international history may seem old hat’.45 Reynolds showed how in recent
decades historians moved away from the pure archival Rankean form of diplomatic history and embraced the ‘cultural turn’, using for instance gender or personality as a way of explaining history. American Frank Costigliola followed his call in a much-acclaimed work; Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War. Costigliola argues personalities influenced the outset of the Cold War .46
Personality or at least personal preferences as described by Costigliola played a big part in Smuts’ politics. In public Smuts might have advocated for ‘public opinion’ as
42 Susan Pedersen, ‘The Meaning of the Mandates System,’ 28. 43 Ibidem, 24.
44 David Reynolds, ‘International History, The Cultural Turn and the Diplomatic Twitch’. Cultural and Social History (2006) 75-91.
45 Ibidem, 75.
46 Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (Princeton 2012)
a judge for diplomatic undertakings, but in reality Smuts was a zealous believer in his own ideologies and nothing or nobody could move him to pursue a different course.47
To understand Smuts’ beliefs in South African exceptionalism and its destiny for Northward expansion, Smuts’ personal philosophy goes a long way towards explaining Smuts’ beliefs. Saul Dubow wrote that in Smuts’ concept of holism he always believed that smaller ‘units fitting into greater wholes explained how small nations could find their place in larger organizations; in this way nations might expand, rather than lose, their meaning and purpose, for the particular retained its own special identity within the whole.’48 Smuts thought that white western civilization
would be safer and better off if the small white settler nations in Africa would unite into a bigger whole.
Smuts was so much more than a mere South African politician with a vision for a greater white settler nation in the South of Africa. He was a man who strongly influenced the first half of the 20th century. He helped transform the British Empire,
he was an influential War Cabinet Minister during the First World War, he swayed the British and American attitude towards the League of Nations, he was a prominent philosopher, the only man to sign the peace treaties for both world wars and one of the greatest internationalists of his time. He is the only man who can rightfully claim to have played a part in drafting the League’s Covenant as well as the United Nations Charter. Much has been written on Smuts, but William Keith Hancock has still produced the most extensive, albeit dated, biography. Not only did Hancock publish two works on Smuts, featuring his whole life, he - with Jean van der Poel - also published The Smuts Papers, consisting of seven books. Hancock: ‘There have been other biographers before me and there will be others after me’. This is of course true but the extensive use of first hand material from Smuts’ private collection as well as the Smuts Archives in Cape Town make it an invaluable source on Smuts.
In recent years historians have picked up the trail, although such a
monumental work as Hancock produced might never be attempted again. In light of the rejuvenated interest in the League it comes as no surprise that Smuts has been awarded renewed attention. Previously mentioned historian Mazower devoted a chapter on Smuts in his book No Enchanted Palace; The End of Empire and the
47 Heidi Tworek, ‘Peace through truth; Press and Moral Disarmament through the League of Nations’ (Cambridge MA, 2010) 23.
48 Saul Dubow, ‘Smuts, the United Nations and the Rhetoric of race and rights’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 43. (2008) 43-72.
Ideological Origins of the United Nations.49 Smuts featured in Mazowers book as an
ambitious internationalist who in all his enthusiasm and brilliance failed to feel ‘the way the wind was blowing’, balancing between South African nationalism, British Imperialism and League internationalism.50 Smuts, much like Churchill, saw
international cooperation in the form of the League and later the United Nations as an affirmation of the Victorian England sentiments that Europeans – as a race – were meant for sovereignty whereas others races were not. Both however misinterpreted the powerful anti-colonial movement in the United States after the Second World War and the growing anti racial sentiment in England that had started after the First World War and continued to grow after the Second World War.51 Smuts’ ambitions in Africa
came to a halt before he had realized his dream of the ‘United States of Africa’, an ambition shared by some, but hated by many. But, as Mazower pointed out, during his final period in power during the Second World War he still believed in his dream. Addressing South African troops in Kenya in 1940 he hailed prophetically: ‘The efforts you are making will, perhaps not in our time, bring about a United States of Africa.’52 But sentiment on a greater South Africa had turned against Smuts and
would continue to rise against him. At Whitehall they were by that time even less impressed with the suggestion than they had been more than twenty years before. Churchill might have gone for it but he had also been voted out of office after the War. On the other hand it must be noted that Smuts was no fool. When traveling to San Francisco for the establishment of the Untied Nations in 1945 Smuts was uneasy about the ‘strong humanitarian tendency’ and the possible embarrassment in relation to his own country, South Africa.53 But he needed not have worried as –at so many
times in his life - the attendees and press honored Smuts for his achievements and as the ‘lone leading survivor of the Paris peace conference.’54
No Enchanted Palace places Smuts’ role in the League, his League ambitions and his ambitions for a Greater South Africa in international perspective. But the failure of his dream for a Greater South Africa and the discredit of his policies and beliefs that had brought South Africa so much international critique had been in Smuts’ own words: an internal matter. Smuts saw his South West Africa policy as
49 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace. 50 Ibidem, 55.
51 Ibidem. 52 Ibidem, 54. 53 Ibidem, 28-29.
domestic business whereas the League and especially the PMC considered this an international conflict – hence the conflict between the two in the first place. This means any further research into the topic needs an international as well as a national perspective.
In The Guardians by Pedersen, Smuts is marked as an important person but more in his role as a South African politician than as an international politician with strong ties to the League. This is not strange as Pedersen explores the League’s wide tendencies far beyond Smuts’ influences or relevance but does leave some questions unanswered in relation to Smuts and his role in South West Africa. More specifically, she does not further investigate the question of how League officials in the PMC and the Assembly alike responded to Smuts – the important architect and highly respected man within the League – being implicated in the Bondelzwarts rebellion.
Heidi Tworek mentions Smuts in her work on the League of Nations ‘Peace through truth’.55 But here Smuts is portrayed as a moral and principal man who was a
proponent of public opinion being the leading factor for the directive of the League of Nations. And let there be no mistake, Smuts was a man of morals and principles. He fought for many ideals, both literally in the Second Boer War and the First World War, but also many idealistic battles in politics. Smuts was an avid internationalist and till his death he remained proud of the League even after it had criticized his beloved South Africa’s policies.56 This is at least how Mazower and most other
historians look at Smuts: a man in full support of both institutions that he had done so much for. But the League must have disappointed him. Not only did itfail in its ultimate goal of keeping peace in Europe, it also did not bring Smuts all that he had intended.
Chapter II
Smuts and Imperial Colonialism
Smuts, and Botha before him, had been enthusiastic about their campaign against the Germans in South West Africa but many South Africans were not. Especially many Boers who had fought against the British in the Second Boer War were inclined to support Germany rather than Britain in the First World War. The
55 Tworek, ‘Peace through truth’. 56 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 54.
Germans had supported the Boers morally during their war and the Boers had not forgotten.57 When South African forces lost one of the first skirmishes of the
campaign at Sandfontein on 26th September 1914, rebellion broke out in South Africa.
The Maritz rebellion as it became known was a short rebellion instigated by Manie Maritz, Christiaan de Wet, Jan Kamp and Christian Beyers, well-known Boer generals from the Second Boer War. The leaders of the rebellion stated they had not forgotten the British atrocities during the Second Boer War and saw no reason to now fight for the British against the Germans. The rebellion failed but Smuts and the government ran into more problems when senator Koos de la Rey, another war hero and a senator, was shot and killed by police while underway to address his followers urging them to protest against South African aggression. The government claimed the shooting had been an accident as De la Rey had been mistaken for an escaping convict but many South Africans did not believe this.58
Although saddened by the loss of Afrikaner blood, Smuts and Botha pushed forward to conquer South West Africa and by July 1915 Botha and Smuts ‘had added to the Union a territory larger than Germany, and they had done it with fewer
casualties than the cost of an average trench raid in France.’59 At the same time
however they alienated some white Afrikaners who had no sympathy for the war and who saw Botha and Smuts as traitors. Before the rebellion, Smuts expected the animosity between Afrikaners to vanish after the annexation of South West Africa. On September 22, 1914 he wrote consolingly to friend and military commander Deneys Reitz, ‘You will see, when all is over and German South West Africa again forms part of our Afrikaner heritage, feeling will quickly swing round and our actions be generally approved.’60 But some rebels and others opponents would never forgive
Smuts. From the moment Smuts supported the campaign in South West Africa and denounced the rebellion, he received letters condemning him as a traitor and a ‘turncoat’. ‘The Germans will clear the country of English and vuilgoed Afrikaners who run after the English. Go and trek!’ one wrote to Smuts.61
The division amongst Afrikaners surely bothered Smuts but the opportunity for northwardexpansion was too much of a prize for Smuts to let pass. South African
57 Annette Seegers, The military in de making of modern South Africa (New York 1996) 8. 58 Hew Strachan, The First World War, Volume I: To Arms (New York 2001) 547-563. 59 Denys Reitz, Trekking On (Edinburgh 2012) 52.
60 Hancock, The Smuts Papers III, Vol. 12 no. 143A. 61 Hancock, The Sanguine Years, 393.
northward expansion was a dream Smuts shared with many other South Africans. The incorporation of the German colony would in one stroke take care of Smuts’
expansionist ambition on the south west coast of Africa. Smuts thought that if the Union troops could conquer German East Africa, it ‘could probably effect an exchange with Mozambique and so consolidate our territories South of the Zambesi and Kunene’.62 That would leave only the interior of the south of Africa a non-Union
territory and Smuts was convinced of eventual unification in those regions, and that this would eventually lead to ‘a great African federation of States’ as part of the British commonwealth.63
Smuts contemplating on African heritage was not new, but Smuts arguing in favor of imperial commonwealth expansion is ironic in light of historic events. Because of World War I Smuts became an Empire favorite due to his war
achievements in Africa but that had not always been the case. During the Second Boer War Smuts had vigorously fought against British imperialism in a war he lost but also a war that jump-started his political and military career. During that war Smuts proved to be a witty writer full of resentment towards British imperialism when he wrote; ‘then [if the Empire would not acknowledge their mistake in the war] the ghost of the murdered Boer people will haunt the British Empire to its grave…’64 The British
Foreign Office and Colonial Office were not too keen on Smuts at that time. In their reports during and after the Second Boer War Smuts was portrayed as a ‘dangerous, crafty, implacable enemy of everything British.’65 This is also how the British
continued to regard Smuts for some years after the war. In reports for British
dignitaries visiting South Africa in the early years of the 20th century Smuts would be
described as ‘the Cambridge man gone wrong’ referring to his years at the British elitists’ institution.66
In the long run Smuts actually proved to be a great proponent and active advocate for the British Empire - under his own terms. During the Second Boer War Smuts started advocating a wind of change for the Empire. Smuts was convinced that the Empire should be more of a commonwealth where the English metropolis would
62 Hancock, Smuts Papers IV, Vol. 13 no. 154. 63 Sarah G. Millin, General Smuts (London 1936) 384.
64 William Keith Hancock, Jean van der Poel, Selection from the Smuts Papers; Volume I June 1888-May 1902 (Cambridge 1966) 495.
65 Hancock, The Sanguine Years, 149. 66 Hancock, The Sanguine Years, 147.
still be the leading example within the institute, however not the patriarchal one.67 The
Empire’s function should be ensuring security, handling foreign affairs and most importantly it should be a white brotherhood of nations that would use their
fraternization to protect themselves against an outside hostile world. For Smuts this hostile world existed only in the form of one threat that would and had formed many of Smuts’ policies and propositions: “the black masses of the dark African
continent”.68
At the time Smuts was one of many who advocated a world ruled by white supremacy. Smuts saw it the white man’s duty to rule over the ‘uncivilized’ black masses and to educate them.69 Smuts - in tune with Rudyard Kipling’s ‘White Man’s
Burden’ - consideredthe white race not only to be ‘the Guardians of their own safety and development; at the same time they are the trustees for the coloured race.’70 Even
more, Smuts felt it should be the responsibility of the white race to ‘teach the natives the dignity of labour’.71 Within the British Empire outlines for a white African
federation had been on the drawing table as early as the 1880’s. After the Second Boer War talk of an African White Union continued amongst some very influential Englishmen, led by High Commissioner Sir Alfred Milner. Milner’s famous entourage or the so-called “kindergarten” were all ‘ardent Hegelians from Oxford with the confidence in the power of the state to create this new political entity; they prioritized white union … while urging a tougher tone towards non-Europeans’.72
Smuts agreed and saw ‘… a vast continent, peopled by over 100,000,000 barbarians’ and ‘Unless the white race closes its ranks … its position will soon be untenable in the face of that overwhelming majority’.73
The fear of the black majority was one of the motivations for Smuts to
advocate for a greater South Africa. Smuts saw advantages in the form of security for South Africa if it would align itself with the interests of larger groups. This idea fit within his philosophy of Holism that explained how smaller bits should fit in to larger ‘wholes’ to prosper. For Smuts in political practical terms this meant that small nations could prosper within larger organizations without losing meaning and purpose
67 Ibidem, 146-149.
68 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 48-49. 69 Hancock, The Sanguine Years, 57. 70 Ibidem, 56.
71 Ibidem.
72 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 33. 73 Hancock, The Sanguine Years, 55-56
and maybe most of all, retaining security from the larger ‘whole’.74 Smuts philosophy
explains why he was a proponent of a greater South Africa, a Commonwealth and a League of Nations. The Commonwealth would provide safety for a small nation like South Africa but at the same time it could guaranteethat it would not be trivialized as it could act as part of a wide and encompassing structure of nations. And although Smuts saw that this would also benefit other countries he always considered South Africa’s interests first, despite what many of his political opponents in South Africa would claim. Smuts: ‘…the interests of South Africa will always be first with me.’75
Smuts thoughtthat South African interests would best be served in a
brotherhood of white nations in Africa. Fraternization of white men in Africa would secure its future in Africa as again smaller units within a bigger ‘whole’ would be better suited to repel “the black masses of the dark African continent”.76 This kind of
thought was indeed where Smuts philosophically had found common ground with British imperialists such as Kipling but more importantly with the very influential Milner and his kindergarten, especially Lionel Curtis. All pupils of Hegel’s ‘Lordship and Bondage’ philosophy, they considered it the responsibility of the white race to provide this lordship over the black race. The only difference was that Smuts saw this as a duty for the whole white race - including Afrikaners and for instance Germans - whereas Milner and Curtis regarded this solely the responsibility of the ‘British race’.77 Milner spoke of ‘race patriotism’ and thought of ‘blood’ as the binding force
of the Empire.78
At the same time there were differences between Smuts and Milner. Even though Smuts felt England should always have a leading role within the Empire, he spoke from his South African point of view. Smuts had found common ground with English Federalists on an (South) African super state and the black race related questions - the finer details could be worked out later. In the words of historian Mark Mazower: ‘Smuts … had been calling for expansion to the Zambesi (sic) or even the equator since 1885and he certainly was not about to give up now that Germany had been removed from the arena [during World War I]’.79 The only problem left for
Smuts was how to keep South West Africa in South African hands.
74 Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 85-117.
75 Jan Smuts (jr), Jan Christian Smuts (London 1952) 160. 76 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 48-49.
77 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 33. 78 Ibidem, 34.
Smuts and the solicitation for South West Africa
There had been a time when British opinion had been friendly and even welcoming towards German Imperialism. While reporting on the Herero rebellion in 1904 the Londen Times wrote: ‘The solidarity of the white races in the midst of the huge black population that surrounds them must be a consideration ever present in our minds’.80 Smuts commented on the matter at a speech given in Newcastle in
September 1918. He portrayed British sentiment towards German imperial aspirations astutely: ‘Well, there was a time when we never grudged Germany colonies … but she chose to declare war against the rest of the world’.81 In other words the Germans
had been welcome to colonize up until World War I.
The reason for this turn around was strategic. During the war the fear arose on the British side that the German war in Europe would only be the initiation of an attempt to world hegemony. Germany as a worldwide super power would leave the British Empire vulnerable and in danger of defeat. For those who believed this, Empire security was one of the main reasons for the war in the first place. Followers of this doctrine were men like British Colonial Secretary Lewis Hartcourt and
members of the Imperial War Cabinet like Lord Curzon, Lord Milner and Jan Smuts. They saw the danger in the hypothetical possibility of a German Mittelafrika
encompassing a spectrum of countries from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. In the words of the influential War Cabinet Secretary L. S. Amery in 1917: ‘…if Germany can recover her colonies, or even add to them (The Congo and the Portuguese colonies) … she will be able to renew it (war) with far greater hopes of success.’82
The fear was that British hegemony in Africa and the Indian Ocean could be
threatened by submarines and airplanes launched from the African mainland backed by a huge ‘black army’.83
Smuts, indeed concerned with Empire security, had a double agenda. Not only did he want security for the Empire by depriving Germany of its colonies, Smuts also wanted these colonies for South Africa. Smuts being endeared by Empire press during his time in London took the stand to plead for annexation of the colonies. In May
80 The Times, “The Rising in German South West Africa’ 5 May 1904, 5. 81 The Times, ‘An All-Empire Peace’ 13 September 1918, 8.
82 Roger Louis, Great Britain and Germany’s Lost Colonies (Oxford 1967) 3-4. 83 Ibidem, 3.
1917 Smuts stated before both Houses of Parliament: ‘In the past thirty years see what has happened. Everywhere on your communications Germany has settled down; everywhere … you will find a German colony here and there and the day would have come when your Empire would have been in great jeopardy…’84 The Daily Mail
asked and answered: ‘Why is General Smuts anxious about the future of Equatorial Africa? Because the War has brought the surprising revelation that the African negroes can be transformed into some of the finest fighting material in the world … by means of naval bases on both sides of Africa they will command the sea routes to the East and to Australia.’85 The Times of India: ‘The barbarian from the Veldt, as
General Smuts styles himself, summed up the position in a sentence when he said that East Africa ensured us land communication from one end of the continent to another and also ensured sea routes round the Cape and through the Red Sea … With the Germans in East Africa and their line Dar-es-Salaam to Tanganyika completed, the great central line of communication was perpetually menaced.’86 Smuts found an ally
in the press that thought the idea of returning the conquered colonies to Germany dangerous for the British Empire.87
The leaders of the Empire agreed. British Prime Minister Lloyd George had chosen for his War Cabinet to encompass representatives from the Dominions. In doing so he had created an executive office for the Empire at large but at the same time gave the Dominions more influence on the post war world. All agreed that the conquered German colonies should preferably not be given back to Germany but there was no consensus on the finer details. In a subcommittee presided by Curzon, called the ‘Territorial Desiderata’, which seated amongst others Robert Cecil, Austen Chamberlain, William Massey (from New Zealand), Milner disciple Leo Amery and Jan Smuts talks ensued on the future of these colonies.88 Curzon ventured well beyond
the scope of German colonies and freely talked about a whole range of strategic annexations for the British Empire ranging from the more plausible recommendations for trade-offs in Africa between Britain and France to suggesting that the Empire should keep an eye on Greenland and to propose a trade-off with the USA for the Alaskan panhandle against some British Islands in the Caribbean.89 With some sense
84 Smuts, War-time Speeches, 25.
85 The Daily Mail, ‘Black Armies: The German Dream’ 4 June 1917. 86 Times of India, ‘n.a.’ 29 May 1917.
87 Roger, Lost Colonies, 85. 88 Roger, Lost Colonies, 81. 89 Ibidem, 84.
of understatement Curzon at one point stated that they might be creating the impression ‘that we were meditating the carving up of the world to suit our own interests.’90 Curzon eagerly discussed the wide range of territories the British Empire
needed for its security. Smuts stayed more on subject and during the meetings of the commission and gained some valuable proponents for his plans for South West Africa such as Chamberlain and Cecil.91 Smuts had started the lobby for South Africa’s
expansion within the heart of the British Empire and had found allies for his ideas. Lloyd George however had made it clear that although he agreed with the general tendencies of the committee (annexation in name of Empire security) he preferred discussing annexation of the former German colonies with its allies at a future peace conference.92
But Smuts would not bet on one horse and ventured to make sure that South Africa would be the logical choice for annexing South West Africa. Smuts thought it important to show to the outside world that the Germans were not suitable colonizers and that the inhabitants of South West Africa would be better off under South African rule. This tactic of focusing on native interests also found support in England where it was used as anti-German propaganda. In May 1916 a speech by Colonel Stanley Markham Pritchard was one of the first instances where native rights was used as an argument against German colonialism. Pritchard spoke of the Herero rebellion and the following atrocities as an example of the extreme cruelty the Germans exerted to suppress their colonial inhabitants and estimated that ‘the population had been reduced by between 30,000 and 40,000 as a result.’93
During Lloyd George premiership the narrative of Germany as a bad colonizer intensified. The ‘native desire’ would be one of the arguments used by Lloyd George in convincing the world – most specifically the Americans – that the former colonies must not be returned to Germany but that they should be handed over to a more responsible colonizer. Even though Lloyd George most likely used this argument purely as semantics since the discussions in the ‘Territorial Desiderata’ committee proved that security was the main reason, the argument was elaborately made through war propaganda. The Report on the Natives of South West Africa and Their Treatment
90 Ibidem.
91 TNA, Imperial War Cabinet Minutes, 13, I May 1917, CAB. 23/40, 4-6. 92 Ibidem, 6.
by Germany was to be a prime piece of propaganda used by the British for the purpose of denying the Germans their colonies.94
Although the report was part of a much bigger British propaganda war, and the British published it as the Blue Book (referring to official government printing) it was largely of South African making. The South African Government had commissioned the report in September 1917. It had been put together by South African Major T.L. O’Reilly and fellow countryman Administrator E.H.L. Gorges in less than four months. It is unclear if Smuts gave the direct order for the report or if he just meddled with its finer details, but it is clear that it was designed to help Smuts’ campaign for Union control of South West Africa.95 The contents of the report can almost be
completely summarized by what Gorges wrote as itspreface: ‘Enough is, I [Gorges, ed.] think, contained herein to leave no doubts as to the terrible courses pursued both by the German Colonial Administration … and by the individual Germans settled or stationed in the country, or as to the deplorable plight the natives fell into under the brutalities and robberies to which they were systematically subjected.’96 The more
than 200-page report was nothing less than a political crusade against German colonial rule and an implicit promoter of British colonialism.
The report consists of two parts. The first 25 chapters are a historic account of the region that is now Namibia. It explains how German influence first took hold in the region and how it slowly but surely changed to an extremely oppressed colonial state.97 The war was so brutal that most modern historians call it the ‘the first
genocide of the 20th century’.98 The word genocide is not used in the report as it did
not yet exist, but the cruelty of the war was exploited by Gorges to show that the Germans were unfit colonial rulers. This was further exhibited by a set of gruesome pictures of indigenous people being punished by hanging, flogging or in any other horrible fashion.99
Gorges made sure that the German atrocities were clear for its readers to see. Extensive first-hand accounts of the punishments and other German acts of colonial
94 Christina Twomey, ‘Atricity Narratives and Imperial Rivalry: Britain, Germany and the Treament of ‘Native Races’, 1904-1939’ in T. Crook and B. Taithe (eds), Evil Barbarism and Empire: Britain and Abraid c. 1830-2000 (London 2011) 201-225. 13.
95 Jeremy Silvester, Jan-Bart Gewald, ‘Sjambok or Cane? Reading the Blue book’ in Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 30 (2004) 704.
96 Major T. L. O’Reilly, E. H. L. Gorges, The Blue Book; Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany (His Majesty’s Stationery Office, London 1918) 4.
97 O’Reilly, Blue Book, 55-58, 61-67. 98 Silvester ‘Sjambok or Cane?’, 704. 99 O’Reilly, Blue Book, 2, 205-210.
aggression were included in the book. One of the most interesting paragraphs of the book ‘Observations on Corporal Punishment as Practiced in the Union of South Africa’ compared South Africa’s sentences with the German methods in South West Africa.100 Contrary to the German methods, Gorges deemed the South African
corporal punishment system very justifiable. Gorges argued that ‘experience has shown that the rattan cane is the most suitable instrument for this purpose [corporal punishment]’101. He then goes to great lengths explaining the reason why: mostly
because it ‘causes temporary pain but not prolonged suffering’.102 Also ‘the cane is
soaked and disinfected as far as possible’ and ‘before the administration of the strokes the prisoner is examined by the medical officer, who advises as to his fitness, or otherwise to undergo the punishment’.103 Finally the ‘the number of strokes rarely
exceeds 12, and only in the case of very serious offence are more inflicted’.104 To
Gorges the German method of corporal punishment was however not humane. He clearly explains why the ‘Sjambok’ was not an appropriate punishing tool as it was ‘for driving cattle, and will, if sufficient force is applied, cut clean through the skin of these animals.’105 According to Gorges almost all of the ‘natives’ he had met in the
Native Hospital in Windhoek ‘bore unmistakable evidence of having been brutally flogged’.106 Gorges continues by pointing out that the ‘executions were carried out in
a very crude and cruel manner … there was no privacy about the proceedings, nor … was
The book succeeded in depicting the Germans as bad colonizers and, that was exactly its original purpose.107 At the same time the book reasoned that South Africa
would be well suited to govern the indigenous people of South West Africa since they had local’s interests at heart. The report resulted in the publication of an official release through the English parliamentary press and was thus redubbed the Blue Book and it immediately became the subject of heated controversy and discussion. The German government was outraged by the portrayal of their colonial rule and countered by printing a White Book attacking colonial rule by other European
100 Ibidem, 202-209. 101 Ibidem. 102 Ibidem. 103 Ibidem. 104 Ibidem. 105 Ibidem, 203
106 O’Reilly, Blue Book, 203.
powers.108 Eventually the Blue Book got withdrawn from public libraries throughout
the British Empire as it was seen as a source of racial hatred between the remaining German-speaking inhabitants and the white South African immigrants. In South West Africa the remaining copies were destroyed but only years after it had delivered its effect of portraying the Germans as horrible imperial colonists.109.
Smuts at the Paris Peace Conference
The campaign for securing South West Africa as a South African mandate was a long campaign for South Africa and one that Smuts greatly invested in. His dream for securing the mandate was shared by more politicians in the Union but Smuts was one of the main driving forces and architects of the idea. 110 To call the successful
solicitation for a South African mandate a one man feat is hardly an exaggeration. No other South African politician, not even Botha, had the personal connections and credibility in London and Washington that were needed to warm the right people to the idea. Smuts’ friends in London, his personal connection with Wilson and his time served in the Imperial War Cabinet made him the ideal man to successfully deliver South Africa’s objective.111
The campaign for South African control of the former German colony had started with convincing the world that the Union of South Africa would be a better administrator than Germany. The Blue Book had just been one of the tools the South Africans – and the British - had used to prove their point. The larger propaganda war of the British Empire against the Germans had included many reports on ‘native desire’ and bad German colonialism. The British newspaper The Times had even done their share of Germany bashing. ‘In none of the late German colonies is the loathing of German rule so bitterly expressed as by the natives of South-West Africa’, the newspaper reported in late 1918 quoting from a government report on ‘The attitude of the natives of the German colonies’.112 For anyone in doubt the header of the article
stated: ‘Wishes of the Natives’ and ‘Preference for British Rule’.113 Smuts and Botha
thought the indigenous well-being of South West Africans would be important when
108 Ibidem. 109 Ibidem, 704.
110 Hancock, The Sanguine Years, 505-548. 111 Ibidem.
112 The Times, ‘The Future of the German Colonies’, 12 December 1918. 7. 113 Ibidem.
making their claim for the colony but in the end it proved not to be. Idealistic notions by the two were trivial compared to the great strategic compromise the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 turned out to be, at which the fate of South West Africa was decided. When creating the League of Nations and the mandate system in Paris, human rights and ‘Wishes of the Natives’ in the former German colonies were not high on the agenda. During the war the dominions had fought loyally and hard on British side. And now the southern dominions - Australia, New Zealand and South Africa - wanted to be compensated for their efforts. Australia and New Zealand had their eyes set on former German possessions in the Pacific; South Africa wanted South West Africa.114 English Prime Minister Lloyd George was easily convinced, but
knew all too well that America would object to Australia and New Zealand’s wishes due to geopolitical and perhaps moral reasons. Lloyd George observed that these questions would have to be ‘fought out at theParis Peace Conference where the Dominions would be able to present their own case.’115
The Dominions indeed made a strong case. Almost everybody, except the Germans, agreed that the Germans were not to get their colonies back. Lloyd George pledged: ‘One thing is quite certain, that none of Germany’s colonies would be returned to her’.116 On January 27th Wilson made it clear where he stood: ‘if the
Colonies were not to be returned to Germany, as we all agreed, some other basis must be found to develop them and to take care of the inhabitants of these backwards countries’.117 The Allies agreed that the German colonies would not be returned to
Germany after the War and all representatives at the peace conference agreed that these former colonies were not ready for independence. But it was still undecided what to do with them.
The Australians under Prime Minister Hughes, The New Zealanders under Prime Minister Massey and The South Africans under Botha and Smuts fought hard for annexation rather than the mandatory status. Smuts tried to make a case for annexing South West Africa, by stating that the territories were ‘geographically one country’ and a ‘desert country without any product of great value and only suitable for
114 George Curry, ‘Woodrow Wilson, Jan Smuts, and the Versailles Settlement’ The American Historical Review, Vol. 66, No. 4 (1961) 968-986, 975-76.
115 Lord Hankey, The Supreme control at the Paris Peace Conference 1919 (London 1963) 17.
116 John Crawford, Ian McGibbon New Zealand's Great War: New Zealand, the Allies and the First World War (Auckland 2007) 127.
pastoralists’.118 But Wilson who was against annexation by the Southern Dominions
resisted Smuts, Hughes and Massey. Wilson was concerned that annexation by Australia and New Zealand in the Pacific would lead to similar claims by World War I ally Japan, something Wilson opposed due to strategic reasons.119 Massey and
Hughes famously fought Wilson long and hard on the matter claiming all kinds of impracticalities. They went even further than Smuts in this matter when they started comparing American war losses to their own and when Hughes prophetically stated ‘history showed us that friends in one war were not friends in the next’.120 Hughes
proved to be exceptionally stubborn. After many long debates Wilson asked Hughes: ‘Mr. Hughes, am I to understand that that if the whole civilized world asks Australia to agree to a mandate in respect of those islands, Australia is prepared to defy the appeal of the whole civilized world?’ Hughes answered: ‘That’s about the size of it, President Wilson.’121
In the end the Dominions and Wilson compromised. For their war efforts the Dominions would be rewarded their territories under the jurisdiction of the League of Nations with a C mandate. In the original plans for the mandates there was only room for an A and B mandate –which would give the mandatory power far less prerogative than in the case of a C mandate. Wilson had pledged his support from the beginning of the peace talks for a solution involving League of Nations’ mandates but had to go along with some of the demands made by the Southern dominions.122 The C mandate
had been controversial from the start with some suspecting that it was not very different from annexation. Lord Maurice Hankey of the British delegation assured Hughes that the C mandate was ‘the equivalent of a 999 years lease’.123 And there
were other high-ranking officials who very much doubted that there was a practical difference between a C mandate and annexation. In a personal letter dated 11
February 1919 from Lord Milner to Lord Cecil that sentiment was repeated ‘… for no doubt the “C” mandate is camouflage anyway’.124 The C mandate was a compromise,
Wilson got his way by resisting dominion pressure for annexation and the Dominions got their way with the far reaching powers the C mandate allotted to them. In the
118 Ibidem 56.
119 Sales, ‘A little German Colony here or there!’, 31. 120 Hankey, The Supreme Control, 56.
121 Ibidem, 61.
122 Sales, ‘A little German Colony here or there!’ 123 Ibidem, 29.
words of William Rappard, the mandatory systems first secretary: ‘The mandates system formed a kind of compromise between the proposition advanced by the advocates of annexation and the proposition put forward by those who wished to entrust the colonial territories to an international administration’.125
Smuts had greatly influenced the outcome of the mandates debate. Wilson, under the influence of US adviser George Louis Beer ‘had picked up the ideas from General Smuts on colonials mandates.’126 But Smuts had not been happy with the
general terms of the Versailles Treaty where this topic was on the agenda. Smuts had waged a long and at times bitter campaign against the harshness towards Germany in the treaty and thus not fully supported the negotiations outcome. On 3rd June 1919
Smuts received a letter from Lloyd George regarding the objections that Smuts had made to the treaty. Lloyd George, albeit in a friendly fashion, asked Smuts if he was also prepared to give up the concessions that the Germans would want from South Africa. ‘The Germans repeatedly request the return of their colonies. Are you
prepared to allow German South West Africa, or German East Africa to be returned to Germany as a concession? … Are you similarly prepared to make concessions in regard to German businesses in South Africa, which the Germans also complain of?’127
Lloyd George had made it clear to Smuts that a South African mandate would not become a reality without the League of Nations and that the League of Nations was an integral part of the peace treaty. Smuts had to choose and he immediately wrote back: ‘Please do not have the impression that I would be generous at the
expense of others, so long as the Union gets South West Africa! In this great business South West Africa is as dust in the balance compared to the burdens now hanging over the civilized world.’128 Smuts implied here that he did not have South African
interests at the forefront of his mind but it proved to be semantics; torn between his misgivings on the Versailles Treaty and South African interests Smuts eventually chose the latter and co-signed the treaty, albeit with resentment.129 The treaty, and thus
the establishment of the League of Nations and the mandates system, sealed the fate
125 Northedge, The League of Nations, 193. 126 Sales, ‘A little German Colony here or there!’ 127 Hancock, Smuts Papers IV, Vol. 22, no. 251. 128 Ibidem, 220.
of South West Africa. The former German colony would be a C mandate under the trusteeship of South Africa.
Chapter III
The Mandate under Gorges
When the Germans surrendered South West Africa to General Botha, martial law was immediately imposed. From the 9th of July 1915 to 1st of January 1921 South West
Africa stayed under this military form of law.130 Two days after imposing martial law
Smuts appointed a Military Governor to command Union forces in the region in the absence of Botha and Smuts. This Military Governor reported directly to the Minister of Defense, Smuts, and was therefore, the most senior Union servant in the newly acclaimed realm - a spot normally preserved for the Chief Civil Secretary, at that time Edmund Gorges. But during the first months of the occupation Gorges needed to consult the Military Governor on ‘all important matters’, who - in case of a possible
130 S. Akweenda, International Law and the Protection of Namibia’s Territorial Integrity, boundaries and Territorial Claims (The Hague 1997) 28-29.
