41 Facts About Jan Smuts

Jan Smuts was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1894 but returned home the following year.

Jan Smuts led the republic's delegation to the Bloemfontein Conference and served as an officer in a commando unit following the outbreak of war in 1899.

Jan Smuts played a leading role in the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, helping shape its constitution.

Jan Smuts personally led troops in the East African campaign in 1916 and the following year joined the Imperial War Cabinet in London.

Jan Smuts played a leading role at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, advocating for the creation of the League of Nations and securing South African control over the former German South-West Africa.

Jan Smuts spent several years in academia, during which he coined the term "holism", before eventually re-entering politics as deputy prime minister in a coalition with Hertzog; in 1934 their parties subsequently merged to form the United Party.

Jan Smuts returned as prime minister in 1939, leading South Africa into the Second World War at the head of a pro-interventionist faction.

Jan Smuts was appointed field marshal in 1941 and in 1945 signed the UN Charter, the only signer of the Treaty of Versailles to do so.

Jan Smuts was born on 24 May 1870, at the family farm, Bovenplaats, near Malmesbury, in the Cape Colony.

In 1882, when Jan Smuts was twelve, his elder brother died, and Jan Smuts was sent to school in his place.

Jan Smuts was admitted to Victoria College, Stellenbosch, in 1886, at the age of sixteen.

Jan Smuts made outstanding academic progress, graduating in 1891 with double first-class honours in Literature and Science.

In December 1894, Jan Smuts passed the examinations for the Inns of Court, entering the Middle Temple.

In 1895, Jan Smuts became an advocate and supporter of Rhodes.

Jan Smuts went on to produce his next manuscript, which he completed in 1910, entitled An Inquiry into the Whole.

Jan Smuts's manuscript was then revised in 1924 and published in 1926 with the title Holism and Evolution.

Jan Smuts was acknowledged for his contribution by getting the honour to write the first entry about the concept for the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1929 edition.

In one of Adler's letters dated 14 June 1931, he invited Jan Smuts to be one of three judges of the best book on the history of wholeness with a reference to Individual Psychology.

In 1916 General Jan Smuts was put in charge of the conquest of German East Africa.

Crowe commanded the artillery in East Africa under General Jan Smuts and published an account of the campaign, General Jan Smuts' Campaign in East Africa in 1918.

Early in 1917, Jan Smuts left Africa and went to London, as he had been invited to join the Imperial War Cabinet and the War Policy Committee by David Lloyd George.

In 1917, following the German Gotha Raids, and lobbying by Viscount French, Jan Smuts wrote a review of the British Air Services, which came to be called the Jan Smuts Report.

Early in 1918, Jan Smuts was sent to Egypt to confer with Allenby and Marshall, and prepare for major efforts in that theatre.

When Botha died in 1919, Jan Smuts was elected prime minister, serving until a shocking defeat in 1924 at the hands of the National Party.

Jan Smuts went on several botanical expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s with John Hutchinson, former botanist-in-charge of the African section of the Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens and taxonomist of note.

In December 1934, Jan Smuts told an audience at the Royal Institute of International Affairs that:.

On 24 May 1941 Jan Smuts was appointed a field marshal of the British Army.

Jan Smuts was a leading guest at the 1947 wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

Jan Smuts accepted the appointment as Colonel-in-Chief of Regiment Westelike Provinsie as from 17 September 1948.

In 1949, Jan Smuts was bitterly opposed to the London Declaration which transformed British Commonwealth into the Commonwealth of Nations and made it possible for Republics to remain its members.

On 29 May 1950, a week after the public celebration of his eightieth birthday in Johannesburg and Pretoria, Jan Smuts suffered a coronary thrombosis.

Jan Smuts died of a subsequent heart attack on his family farm of Doornkloof, Irene, near Pretoria, on 11 September 1950.

In 1899, Jan Smuts interrogated the young Winston Churchill, who had been captured by Afrikaners during the Boer War, which was the first time they met.

The next time was in 1906, while Jan Smuts was leading a mission about South Africa's future to London before Churchill, then Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies.

Jan Smuts was, for most of his political life, a vocal supporter of segregation of the races, and in 1929 he justified the erection of separate institutions for blacks and whites in tones prescient of the later practice of apartheid:.

In 1943 Chaim Weizmann wrote to Jan Smuts, detailing a plan to develop Britain's African colonies to compete with the United States.

Jan Smuts's government granted de facto recognition to Israel on 24 May 1948.

However, Jan Smuts was deputy prime minister when the Hertzog government in 1937 passed the Aliens Act that was aimed at preventing Jewish immigration to South Africa.

Jan Smuts lobbied against the White Paper of 1939, and several streets and a kibbutz, Ramat Yohanan, in Israel are named after him.

Jan Smuts was a vocal proponent of the creation of a Jewish state, and spoke out against the rising antisemitism of the 1930s.

In 2004, Jan Smuts was named by voters in a poll held by the South African Broadcasting Corporation as one of the top ten Greatest South Africans of all time.