Mandela and Smuts: Two anniversaries, two great leaders of South Africa. Could Smuts have prevented the Second World War?

(Both leaders have statues in Parliament Square)

Nelson Mandela was released from Victor-Verster Prison in Paarl 20 years ago today.

90 years ago today, the Council of the League of Nations met in London for the first time. The man responsible for much of the Covenant of the League – and 25 years and a World War later for the Charter of the United Nations – was General Jan Christian Smuts.

As a founding father of the Union of South Africa, Smuts originally favoured apartheid. Yet Mandela wrote magnanimously of Smuts: ‘I cared more that he had helped the foundation of the League of Nations, promoting freedom throughout the world, than the fact that he had repressed freedom at home.’

As a student, Nelson Mandela went to hear Smuts speak. He recalls in his memoirs that his first impression was that he spoke better English than Smuts, but it is clear that he admired him.

In a book published today, General Smuts: South Africa author Antony Lentin recounts how, had Smuts’s advice on the Treaty of Versailles been heeded in 1919, a Second World War might have been prevented. The Treaty, he warned, ‘should not be capable of moral repudiation by the German people hereafter’.

Time and again at the Paris Peace Conference, greatly influenced by the magnanimity Britain had shown him and his Afrikaners after the Boer War, Smuts pleaded with the leaders of the Great Powers to negotiate with the Germans face to face. But he was outmanoeuvred – not least by our own Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

Smuts said that direct negotiation with the German delegation, representing after all the hopes of a liberal democratic Germany, would make the treaty’s ‘moral authority’ ‘all the more binding, free of unnecessary dictation’. And if you don’t, you will get a Diktat ‘signed at the point of the bayonet’, that will prove a mere ‘scrap of paper’.

Author, Antony Lentin, formerly a Professor of History at the Open University, is a Senior Member of Wolfson College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a barrister. Antony Lentin says, “Both were magnanimous men who embodied reconciliation.”

In all, three books are published today by Haus Publishing in the Makers of the Modern World series (£12.99 hb), marking the 90th anniversary of the meeting of the Council of The League of Nations in London:

The League of Nations by Ruth Henig (ISBN 978-1-905791-75-0);

General Smuts: South Africa by Antony Lentin (ISBN 978-1-905791-82-8); and

Paul Hymans: Belgium by Sally Marks (ISBN 978-1-905791-81-1)

The first title examines the League and its legacy today, one is on the extraordinary General Smuts, and his instrumental role in the formation of the League (and a great deal more besides), and one is on Belgium and Paul Hymans, the first President of the League.

Peace-meal