Smuts, the United Nations and the Rhetoric of Race and Rights

Abstract

For almost half a century apartheid South Africa attracted more attention from the United Nations than perhaps any other problem. It served as a key reference point for international developments in human rights and helped to legitimize the United Nations' aspirations to represent the higher ideals and conscience of the world. Throughout the Cold War, and beyond, the iniquity of apartheid was one of the moral and political issues that countries, large and small, aligned and non-aligned, could mostly agree on. Vindication of the UN's stance on apartheid was provided by Nelson Mandela, who addressed the General Assembly in October 1994 as president of South Africa. His presence, timed to coincide with the organization's upcoming fiftieth anniversary, lent unimpeachable dignity to the United Nations' contribution to the struggle for justice and freedom. Mandela opened with the words: 'It surely must be one of the great ironies of our age that this august Assembly is addressed, for the first time in its 49 years, by a South African head of state drawn from among the African majority of what is an African country'. By way of tribute to the UN's support of the liberation movement, Mandela noted that the organization would be able to mark its halfcentenary 'with the apartheid system having been vanquished and consigned to the past'.' Few people present would have been inclined to recall a further irony, namely, that a previous South African head of state had once taken a prominent role in the United Nations' plenary proceedings: a statesman who was also in his time a symbol of world freedom. This was Jan Smuts, who helped to inspire and shape the ringing Preamble to the UN Charter in 1945, including its mention of 'human rights'. A quarter of a century earlier, this apostle of world government and international co-operation had helped to structure the League of Nations and draft its Covenant. But readers of the considerable literature on the international history of human rights which has emerged in the past two decades will have to look hard to find reference to Smuts's hand in the process, if this is acknowledged at all. Smuts's lustre did not long survive the post-second world war era. In 1946 he was rebuffed at the General Assembly, condemned in his own words as a