Jan Smuts

He's talking about Johannesburg International Airport, the Oliver Tambo Airport, that's what he's calling now.

Before it was called Jan Smuts Airport.

When we went there with Jesu on the way to get Mandela's freedom, it was a Jan Smuts Airport.

That was one of the Afrikaners.

And there was all police, the SAPs as they called them, they were out there watching us when we came in.

And getting off the plane and going there and watching all these white Afrikaners watching us when we got off the plane, you know, because we had no one to greet us.

When we stopped in Zambia, we had a motorcade.

So we came directly from Zambia to South Africa and stopped at Jan Smuts.

On May 15th, Allied leaders, still preparing for the hundreds of different ways in which everything could go wrong, once again returned to St. Paul's School, London.

Some 150 guests sit on crowded wooden benches behind a single row of chairs at the front reserved for King George VI, Winston Churchill, Field Marshal and Prime Minister of South Africa Jan Smuts, and Sir Alan Brooke, who serves as Winston's chief military advisor.

They face the stage where a map of the Normandy beaches and surrounding area is tilted at an angle for all to see.

As Ike will later note, during the whole war, I attended no other conference so packed with rank as this one.

And they could have come slightly earlier, 'cause there were proposals on the table, weren't there, from the South African, uh-

Well, no, Jan Smuts, you know, he, he was involved in, uh, in-

There were previous talks with the IRA where they said the IRA had to give up their weapons.

Yeah, but that, but that wasn't, that wasn't Jan Smuts.

That was in, uh, um, when, uh, in autumn and, uh, early winter of 1920.

'20, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, and the parties of Jan Smuts was, was, was the governing party.

So he is very-- though he's seen by many as a liberal or was in his, for his time, a liberal person, the, the foundations actually started there.

And what later became grand apartheid built on those, uh, 1930 and 1936 acts.

Yeah.

The, the first question is not correct.

Um, the person who did that was Jan Smuts.

Mm-hmm.

From the outset the Boers dominated the Union government.

Botha himself served as Union premier from nineteen ten until his death in nineteen nineteen, and was followed by General Jan Smuts, who had been a comrade-in-arms in the campaigns against the British during the Boer War and right-hand man of Botha in politics since the war.

Botha and Smuts alike believed, as practical statesmen, that in friendly cooperation with the British in South Africa and under the protecting aegis of the Empire, the Boer people could best prosper, and why not? They were now masters of all British South Africa.

Botha and Smuts came increasingly under the spell of British imperialism.

Botha conquered German South West Africa during the war, and as a delegate at the Peace Conference insisted that it be given to South Africa as a mandate.

Smuts served as British commander in the campaign to conquer German East Africa, not for the Boers, but for the Empire.

He was an influential member of Lloyd George's War Cabinet and a trusted advisor of the London government in imperial affairs.

Crown Coins Casino.

[laughs]

Jan Smuts.

J-A-N is his first name, Smuts was his last name, S-M-U-T-S, in his book Holism and Evolution.

Amazing.

Uh, uh, it, it started out as the League of Nations, right? I mean, it started out as the League of Nations that had a lot of contributions by a, a former South African, uh, politician who played a, a, a pivotal role in, I suppose, the conceptualization of it.

I'm talking about Jan Smuts.

Uh, when it was still the League of Nations, later became as we now know it, the, the, the, the United Nations.

What was its mandate? And I, I love the fact that you point to the fact that the power structures in the UN reflect the power structures of the victors of the Second World War in many way, many ways, and of course, the, the value systems that they hold, uh, worldviews that they hold in terms of the power structures that exist.