THE LEGACY OF GENERAL SMUTS (1950)

Publisher's card wraps with portrait of Smuts on front panel.

24pp. Very good condition. 

'The four essays in this pamphlet were written for the Johannesburg weekly, "Forward," and are here reprinted in response to the requests from readers to have them in permanent form.

I began writing them when it was still difficult to think of Jan Christiaan Smuts as dead. He had occupied the centre of the South African stage for so long that he seemed almost a permanent institution. The very controversy that had surrounded him in life was still pursuing him in death. Friend and foe were penning adulation or criticism, or narrowly concentrating on only one aspect of the man. The Left-wing "Guardian" was highlighting the force with which he had crushed the strikes of 1913, 1914 and 1922; the Right-wing "Mynwerker" was reminding its readers that Smuts had ordered the execution of Jopie Fourie.

I felt that the death of General Smuts demanded a more objective assessment of his life's work. I set myself the task of re-reading his speeches and writings, of mentally re-traversing the historic movements, in South Africa and abroad, in which he had played so prominent a part. Slowly from the accumulation of detail a body of conclusions emerged. In the clear air beyond adulation and blame, I found the life-work of Jan Christiaan Smuts more significant for South Africa and for our crisis-ridden humanity than I had previously supposed.' - from the introduction

The author Edgar Bernstein (1912-74) was born in Germiston and educated at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was a journalist on The South African Jewish Times and later served as editor. He contributed to Forward, The South African Opinion, Trek and The Star, where his obituary on Herman Charles Bosman, his close friend, appeared. - A Bosman Companion