Jan Smuts in the South African Republic

Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts, OM, CH, ED, KC, FRS (24 May 1870 – 11 September 1950) was a prominent South African and Commonwealth statesman, military leader, and philosopher.

Rhodes was also chairman of the British South Africa Company, granted a Royal Charter in 1889, giving it the right to develop the country beyond the Limpopo - present day Zimbabwe and Zambia.

Southern Africa was divided into four separate entities; there were two British colonies, the Cape and Natal, and two Afrikaner republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.

Towns such as Johannesburg had already transformed from quiet villages into vast mining camps, filled with prostitution and drunkenness - vices utterly repugnant to the Calvinist Afrikaners.

[2] Despite this, the fact remained that at the same time as gold revenues served as the Transvaal's main source of income, the uitlander mineworkers were denied any effective say in government.

Distrustful of Rhodes's motives, the Transvaal refused to consider a proposed Southern Africa customs union and strongly resisted further development of rail links to the Cape.

Kruger then drastically increased customs rates on south-bound cargoes, in an attempt to force the mining companies off the Cape and Natal lines, on to the new route.

Smuts saw this alliance between Rhodes and Hofmeyr, this union of the two white races, as a permanent and insoluble part of Cape life, an optimistic sign of the future to the rest of South Africa.

Smuts, determined to do what he could to aid this process, used his newspaper articles in support of Rhodes; defending what he saw as the man of vision against his parochial and small-minded rivals.

As Smuts was to write in 1902: When Mr Cecil Rhodes appeared on the scene in 1889 as Premier of the Cape Colony under Bond auspices, with a platform of racial conciliation, political consolidation of South Africa and northern expansion, my natural bias as well as the glamour of magnificence which distinguished this policy from the 'parish pump politics' of his predecessors, made me a sort of natural convert to his views.

Smuts set great store by the ties of blood and kinship between the Afrikaners; the Transvaal, in common with most of South Africa, had been originally peopled by men from the Cape.

Smuts identified two main factors hindering union; the reluctance of the British population to put down roots, to regard South Africa as home rather than looking back to Britain, and the Afrikaner desire to keep itself apart, relying on its superior numbers to impose its will upon the rest.

[5] Smuts could accept that the reluctance towards union and development came down to a simple, God-fearing people, concerned at the effect of the influx of migrants and industry on their old pastoral ways.

Unlike Hofmeyr, content to allow matters to develop at their own pace, trusting that the seventy-year-old Kruger and his obstructive policies would not last much longer, Rhodes feared that the growing wealth of the Transvaal would give them the decisive voice in any future union negotiations.

Disgusted at the duplicity of Rhodes and the reaction of the British population, he began to identify himself more and more with his own community, the Afrikaners, both those in the colony and those in broader South Africa.

He made one final attempt to secure a future in the Cape, in March 1896 he applied for a lectureship in Law as the South Africa College – he was turned down in favour of an older man.

Originally written to forge a political compromise between warring factions, in many areas the Constitution was too vague or obscure and was never treated with the seriousness and respect such a document usually enjoyed.

[10] Smuts was convinced that Kotze's actions were strongly motivated by a desire to appeal to British elements: the Uitlanders, the High Commissioner and the Colonial office; each of which had been vociferous in their criticism of the chaotic nature of Transvaal administration.

On 8 June 1898 Smuts, at 28 years of age, was granted second-class citizenship of the Transvaal; enabling Kruger to appoint him to the post of State Attorney the same day.

Smuts campaigned to improve the standards of local magistrates and civil servants, and, mindful of the Kotzé affair, he strove to get the haphazard and scattered laws of the Transvaal into order.

These deals included getting Rhodes's agreement to keep silent - in return for which Chamberlain guaranteed that the Royal Charter of the British South Africa Company would not be revoked.

On 19 December 1898 there was a vulgar brawl in Johannesburg between two drunken uitlanders; a relatively commonplace event in the rough streets of the Rand, but one which was to have significant ramifications.

The Transvaal government were accused of displaying undue leniency towards Constable Jones; the League protested at the reduction of the charge to culpable homicide and his release on £200 bail, a sum which was less than that typically imposed upon uitlanders for relatively trivial offences.

Smuts attempted to defuse the situation; he called for the papers relating to the Edgar case and after examining them gave orders for the re-arrest of Jones on a charge of murder.

On the 22nd Smuts invited Edmund Fraser to call on him to discuss recent allegations of police mistreatment of Cape Coloured Transvaal residents, and various other matters of current controversy.

Despite Smuts's actions in ordering Jones to be tried on a charge of murder, and the assurance of British officials that they would do what they could to defuse the situation, the South African League held their illegal protest meeting.

Sir William had no sympathy with Milner's aims; he refused the petition and in a dispatch to London he condemned the whole controversy as nothing than a storm whipped up by the League.

This time, in order to keep within the law (which banned unlicensed outdoor meetings), the League proposed to hold it in an enclosed space (a large circus building known as the Amphitheatre).

Meaning to quell what he saw as a civil war, President Martinus Steyn of the Orange Free State begged Kruger to agree to a peace conference in Bloemfontein.

As the only man of the Transvaal delegation fluent in English, he jumped in at every opportunity, speaking for the entire country in his refusal to grant political rights to the Uitlanders.