Jan Smuts and the Metaphysics of the League of Nations

Smuts’s political and philosophical career spanned the first half of the twentieth century. Born in South Africa to prosperous Boer farmers, Smuts was inspired at a young age by Cecil Rhodes (Hancock Reference Hancock1962, 31). He first began to develop his philosophy of holism at Stellenbosch in South Africa where he studied biology, physics, and philosophy. As an exceptional student, he was selected for university at Cambridge where he took up law. Here he began to sketch out his philosophical ideas for a study of “personology” through Walt Whitman (Hancock Reference Hancock1962, 38–9). Smuts’s elaboration of organicism and teleology was honed under the influence of T. H. Green’s British Hegelianism (Mazower Reference Mazower2009, 73). It was also at Cambridge, where the British ruling class reproduced itself, that Smuts met J. A. Hobson’s brother, Professor of mathematics, E. W. Hobson (Hancock Reference Hancock1962, 43–4). Smuts’s experience in the metropole led to correspondences with other leading internationalists: H. G. Wells, Gilbert Murray, Lionel Curtis, and Woodrow Wilson. Smuts collaborated with Wilson on the mandate system as well as the racialized language of self-determination that would frame the League of Nations (Curry Reference Curry1961). In South Africa, Smuts was also in dialogue with leading feminist Olive Schreiner who shared his negrophobia. For both it was paramount to protect white women from the sexual threat of the Black native (McClintock Reference McClintock1995, 288).

While Holism and Evolution was not published until 1926, Smuts’s thought developed over his young adult life. Smuts’s philosophy reflected a broader trend that attempted to rethink the principles of life itself in the wake of Darwin’s “discovery” of evolution, the beginnings of the quantum revolution, and the mechanistic slaughter of World War I. Holism and Evolution emerges in dialogue with Einstein’s relativity, August Weismann’s evolutionary biology, Henri Bergson’s vitalism, and Alfred North Whitehead’s critique of mechanistic science. While Smuts’s philosophy qua philosophy would not go on to have the same academic influence as his interlocutors, Holism and Evolution was widely reviewed at the time in philosophy, religion, psychology, and biology journals across the Atlantic. A review by the embryologist J. Graham Kerr in Nature (Reference Kerr1927, 309) heralded Smuts’s work as a “remarkable and important book,” a preview of the consolidation of science and philosophy. The immediate influence of the book was felt in the burgeoning field of imperial ecology, where Holism and Evolution founded an approach to governing the African continent as an ecological whole, shaped by the reciprocal influence between humans and their environment (Anker Reference Anker2009).

By reading Smuts’s racial and internationalist politics alongside his metaphysics, I follow Jeanne Morefield (Reference Morefield2014) who argues that Smuts deploys his metaphysics alongside a pacific vision of the British empire as the model for the League of Nations.Footnote ² For Morefield, Smuts’s evolutionary philosophy places the British Empire at the peak of humanity, whereas the Black population of Africa is stuck indefinitely in the waiting room of history. The justification of a two-tiered racialized mandate system follows, and hierarchy is made a permanent aspect of world politics. Smuts achieves what his predecessors in the Round Table could not: “Smuts solved liberal imperialism’s temporal problem, at least temporarily” (Morefield Reference Morefield2014, 173). While I agree with the substance of Morefield’s argument, I depart from it in three respects. First, while Morefield emphasizes the importance of parts and wholes in Smuts’s metaphysics of racial hierarchy, I emphasize the ways in which Smuts’s understanding of peace becomes synonymous with the creative global fusion of the white races into a higher spiritual unity. Second, emphasizing Smuts’s metaphysical conception of peace leads to different emphasis on politics. Morefield argues (correctly in my view) for the importance of the British Empire, as a synthesis of dominions and dependencies, as a model for the League of Nations. While Morefield acknowledges Smuts’s reflections on South Africa as a form of fusing great wholes, I position these reflections within the fin de siècle ideology of racial peace resituates South Africa in the wake of the Anglo-Boer as a model for the League itself. Finally, by foregrounding race war and miscegenation as the antithesis to racial peace, I place greater emphasis on how Smuts’s metaphysics inflect the internal racial governance of the mandates.

Smuts argues that his philosophy is derived by staying true to the fluidity of nature (Smuts Reference Smuts1926, 20–1). Smuts’s metaphysics takes the organism and its broader ecological field to be the basic unit of holism. The interrelation between the organism and its broader environment is essential to understanding the processes of life and evolution (Reference Smuts1926, 56). Smuts’s ecological philosophy reimagines the relationship between life, matter, and mind by making the processual development of “holism” immanent. Organisms in the universe exist within and exude energetic fields. These different “fields” influence and penetrate each other as part of the mutual interaction between organisms and their environment. Against mechanistic materialism and its insistence that matter is “dead,” Smuts asserts that each entity as part of a broader universe is creative (Smuts Reference Smuts1926, 54–5). Creativeness is the fundamental concept of holism. It is the principle of life itself (Smuts Reference Smuts1926, 119).

For Smuts the creativity of life has a direction. Entities continually strive toward integration into ever greater “wholes” that emerge from and produce their own fields of influence. Wholes are progressively more complex entities that achieve an equilibrium. They embody the coordination of individual parts in a greater unity. Smuts argues explicitly against Bergson’s conception of a vitalistic life force that enters all things from the outside. Organic entities exert a life force, a holism, that is immanent to the parts but is irreducible to the mere sum of them. For Smuts, Holism as telos is both the goal and the driving force behind evolution and life (Smuts Reference Smuts1926, 100). At moments, Smuts comes close to contemporary vibrant materialism by arguing that the influx and efflux of different energies influence each other as the immanent “stuff” of the universe (see Bennett Reference Bennett2010).

However, Smuts’s metaphysics prioritizes mind over matter and (white) anthropos over ecology. In ways that will become important later in his conception of racial hierarchy, anti-Blackness, and the threat of miscegenation, Smuts delineates idealism as an evolutionary achievement that elevates humans above nature to transcend both ecology and biology. While this transcendence relies on the proper functioning of parts and wholes, it is the transcendence itself that makes the spiritual force of white humans synonymous with the pinnacle of creative life in the cosmos. No longer wholly influenced by the environment or determined by the biological inheritance of genetics, creative life now exerts its influence on nature.

The creative advance moves in progressive sequence from inorganic to organic, from organic matter like trees and animals to the human Mind. From Mind, Smuts asserts that the pinnacle of human evolution is the individual personality, which has the greatest capacity to exert influence over its environment and incorporate negative elements of the environment into the self without being corrupted or destroyed. It is the personalities who truly direct the course of history. In Holism and Evolution, Smuts calls for a new study of personology: biography (Whitman and Goethe were exemplars) as a new form of study that will give the greatest insight into the inner workings of the cosmic process. Humans, and especially those who have achieved a high degree of “personality,” are those best suited to participate in and direct a cosmic process that is already progressing toward a peaceful equilibrium in metaphysical holism. Smuts writes that “And Holism, standing on that high level of attainment in the human, points the way to the future, and shows in wholeness, in the creation of ever more perfect wholes, lies the inner meaning and trend of the universe. It is as if the Great Creative Spirit hath said: ‘Behold, I make all things whole’” (Smuts Reference Smuts1926, 106).

For Smuts this cosmic Telos manifests itself as a movement toward greater peace and joy. Holism and the evolutionary process provide assurance that even pain and suffering move toward greater spiritual integration that will “feed the flame of the pure and free soul” (Smuts Reference Smuts1926, 315). The small works smoothly in function with the broader cosmic destiny of the whole. Smuts sees human freedom and its conscious direction over politics as creating the essential space for the full realization of the creative advance (Smuts Reference Smuts1926, 138–9).

For Smuts the League of Nations is the supreme manifestation of holism, the telos, and pinnacle of the creative advance in his writings. As Smuts calls for a “new life” and “a new spirit” to prevent Europe from falling backward in time, he earnestly turns to the League of Nations as a vital force (Smuts Reference Smuts1996a, 271). Repeatedly in his writings on the League, we see him turn to the idea of the League of Nations as a “creative” rebirth, a “creative” peace that will engender progress from within the “debris of the old dead world” (Smuts Reference Smuts1919, 30–1). The League is consistently interpreted as in line with the broader movement of a now fluid history in step with a greater “march” of humanity as the “embodiment and living expression of the moral and spiritual unity of the human race” (Smuts Reference Smuts1919, 71). In a speech to American newspapers in 1918 on the League, Smuts goes so far as to argue that as a “creative effort of the human race” toward the task of world peace, “the process of civilisation has always been towards the League of Nations” (Smuts Reference Smuts1966b, 14).

The language of creative “birth” also coincides with the repeated use of organic metaphors that Smuts deploys in describing the League of Nations. More than the mechanistic addition to the matter of the world, the League of Nations will become part of the living and breathing apparatus of international politics: “an ever visible, living, working organ of the polity of civilization” (Smuts Reference Smuts1919, 8). Toward this end, Smuts concludes Holism and Evolution by turning to the League:

The League of Nations is the culmination of holism, an expression of life itself striving for greater perfection and peace. As a spiritual force that has both incorporated and transcended the violence of war, it has also transcended death. As an eternal force that will begin to direct the matters of men toward peace, the League is construed by Smuts as the pinnacle of creative life in the cosmos.

The League of Nations and Racial Peace

Echoing contemporaries like Henri Bergson, Smuts proffered his metaphysical conception of the League of Nations as a solution to the problems of mechanistic slaughter and scientific materialism of the German Empire. In contrast to the deadening spirit of German scientific materialism and imperialism, the League “will develop vitality, it will take root and grow” (Smuts Reference Smuts1966b, 14). But while the German war effort figured as a challenge to civilization by embodying the principles of mechanistic science, it was not, in Smuts’s mind, an impediment to the important task of reconciliation that needed to take place in the wake of the war.

In his letters to Woodrow Wilson, he stressed the need to temper the desire to punish Germany for the war and stressed the importance of European reintegration (Smuts Reference Smuts1966b, 157–61). This conception of reconciliation was explicitly racialized as a need to reunify the white races and contrasted sharply with Smuts plans for segregation. Smuts was not alone in ascribing a racialized interpretation to the League of Nations and the project of peace. Smuts’s contemporaries were often explicit about the racial politics of the League. Woodrow Wilson saw the Anglo-Saxon races as especially endowed with the mission of bringing about global peace (Anievas Reference Anievas2014). For Wilson’s advisor, George Louis Beer, the war had a potentially purifying effect that could bring about the unification of the English-speaking peoples and the Anglo-Saxon race across the borders of nation-states (Beer Reference Beer1917, 164; see also Bell Reference Bell2014). From the varied liberal advocates for a League of Nations, H. G. Wells, Gilbert Murray, Alfred Zimmern, James Bryce (see Wells et al. Reference Wells, Viscount, Lionel, William, H. Wickham, Alfred, J.A., Viscount and Gilbert1919), and Wilson, the League held a special appeal to reconcile liberalism’s nominal call for equality with its practice of racialized hierarchy. The League explicitly distinguished itself from nineteenth century international law through a racial paternalism that claimed to act in the interests of the “lesser” races (Anghie Reference Anghie2007, 116). But as Adom Getachew (Reference Getachew2019) argues, the League’s reassociation of the language of self-determination facilitated domination through integration into liberal order.

By arguing for a soft position on Germany, Smuts saw whiteness and reconciliation in more expansive terms than his Anglo-American counterparts. He called for the transnational unification of the white race in the League of Nations as the creative advance of the universe moved toward a higher spiritual unity and peace. While scholars have pointed to the importance of Smuts’s domestic racial politics, they consistently turn to the British Empire as a model for the League of Nations (see Getachew Reference Getachew2019; Morefield Reference Morefield2014). Here I argue that Smuts just as consistently turns to the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War and South African unification as a model for white reconciliation in the League. This experience also profoundly shaped his cosmological outlook and provided an exemplar for the incorporation of parts into greater wholes through white unification and racial peace.

This story begins with an exchange of letters between Smuts and the journalist W. T. Stead. Stead, with his friend Cecil Rhodes, imagined the unification of the British and American empires as a path toward global peace (Bell Reference Bell2020, 100–51). In 1899, during the Anglo-Boer War, Stead organized a peace movement that traveled under the heading “War against War in South Africa.” Stead’s characteristic searing tone chastised the British Empire for sowing discord between the two white races. It was “a war between brothers living together inextricably intermixed” (Stead Reference Stead1899, 8). His support for the Boer cause and ability to captivate an audience caught the eye of Smuts. Smuts wrote Stead earnestly in a long letter that foregrounded the suffering of Boer women and children as a stain on the benevolent patriarchy of the British Empire. But the true horror was not directly inflicted by the British. Instead, it was the fact that the British introduced an intermediary into the conflict that raises Smuts greatest concerns and places the dream of white unification that he shared with Stead in the greatest peril.

For Smuts, any atrocity committed by the British paled in comparison to the arming of the African tribes. In his letter to Stead, Smuts deflects from the British camps and foregrounds the supposed fact that the natives “have committed horrible atrocities on fugitive or peaceful women and children” (Smuts Reference Smuts1966a, 482). For Smuts the threat is twofold. First, interracial sexual contact or “miscegenation” will deteriorate the “purity” of the white race and bring them into a state of degeneration that prevents their natural human evolution. Second, this sexual contact will inhibit the reproductive capacities of the white population, while enabling an already numerically dominant Black population to further reproduce (Smuts Reference Smuts1966a, 484). The British, by arming the African population, threatened to both exacerbate the real possibility of race war and undermine the future of a white racialized peace. While the white races may achieve a lasting peace, the threat of race war is persistent and omnipresent: it always was and always will be a fact of life on the African continent (Smuts Reference Smuts1966a, 485). And by threatening the future of white racialized peace, the British threatened the entire edifice of white supremacy. To prevent the entrance of Africans into the sexual and political economy of white affairs “is essential to the continued existence of the white community as the ruling class in South Africa” (Smuts Reference Smuts1966a, 484). The end of white supremacy entails a relapse into barbarism and the end of civilization.

To prevent this relapse, Smuts plead for Anglo and Boer to come together: “cannot the two blood-stained races reason together; cannot their leaders, in a spirit of mutual forgiveness, try to write the world reconciliation over all our feuds and differences?” (Smuts Reference Smuts1966a, 488, emphasis in original). In the early history of South Africa, the “race” question was primarily conceived of in terms of the often-antagonistic relation between English and Boer (Dubow Reference Dubow1989, 22). Contra to both British and Boer discourses at the time, Smuts consistently foregrounded the natural, affective ties that brought them together as a civilizing force on the African continent. For Smuts “in that appalling struggle for existence the unity of the white camp … will not be the least necessary condition … of warding off (the ultra-pessimists say of postponing) annihilation” (Smuts Reference Smuts1966a, 46).

As Shula Marks (Reference Marks2001) notes, this letter set out a vision of racial politics that was consistent throughout Smuts’s life: the ever-present menace of race war, the threat of interracial sexual contact, an evolutionary ideology that placed whites at the head of a racial hierarchy, and the idea that South Africa offered a model for white racial unification. Smuts takes on the fin de siècle discourse of white racial unification leading to global peace and refracts it through his metaphysical vision of holism. As W. H. Hancock argues, Smuts was developing his metaphysical principles of holism against the background of these racial questions. The repeated use of “reconciliation,” “fusion,” and “association” in Smuts’s descriptions of the coming together of the two branches of the Teutonic races against the threat of “100,000,000 barbarians” (see Smuts Reference Smuts1966a, 82–3) indicates that Smuts saw their merging as part of his metaphysics. As Hancock describes it, for Smuts “the relation was so obvious that it scarcely called for proof: the principle of association meant for South Africa the coming together of Boer and Briton within each separate territory and the coming together of the four territories within the emergent South African nation” (Hancock Reference Hancock1962a, 29). The first political consequence of holism that Smuts derives at the age of twenty is the (transnational) unity of the white races.

By transforming the fin de siècle discourse of racial peace into a reflection of the creative advancement, Smuts was able to translate the lessons of holism, race war, and white unification after the Anglo-Boer War into his understanding of the League of Nations. Repeatedly in his letters and speeches he turns to the fact that the “white races” were able to reconcile after a devastating conflict in South Africa as a model for the “white races” to reconcile in the wake of the Great War. South Africa is for Smuts an “expert witness” to the stage of world affairs post-1918. For South Africa, too, had “our age-long contention between the white races in South Africa, which culminated in a great war” (Smuts Reference Smuts1966c, 196). In a speech to an American audience, Smuts (Reference Smuts1917b, 105) contends that the Boer war, like the American Revolution, had a tremendous influence on the course of history and was capable of reviving the spirit of sympathy and cooperation among the white races. Smuts argues that the experience of South Africa “bears immortal testimony to the wisdom of the policy of conciliation” the prospect of which may lead “perhaps even to the disappearance of war itself” (Smuts Reference Smuts1966b, 16).

In a speech during the war entitled, “The Future of South and Central Africa,” Smuts articulates how this vision of racial unification contrasts with the German ideology of biological racism. The Germans emphasize an imperial ideology of racial purity that place the Germanic stock ahead of the Anglo, “they simple debate themselves and become degenerate if mixed with alien blood” (Smuts Reference Smuts1917b, 74). The South African model emphasizes an opposing temporal direction to the mixing of alien blood: “We want to create a blend out of the various nationalities and to create a new South African nation out of our allied racial stock” (Smuts Reference Smuts1917b, 74). The fusing of the races is part and parcel of a progressive process that moves toward cooperation, equilibrium, and harmony. In a separate letter to M. C. Gillett, Smuts articulates how, like the League of Nations, the reconciliation between Anglo and Boer is a cosmic event, a key part of the creative advance and a manifestation of holism: “as if some great Spirit is back of things and quietly moving the pieces of history behind the camouflage of our petty stage” (Smuts Reference Smuts1966b, 152). For Smuts the League of Nations continues the work of racialized peace in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War.

For Smuts, the creative advance entailed an expansive rather than merely defensive vision of global peace. By imagining the League of Nations as a continuation of Rhodes’s ideal of racial peace in a unified Anglo-American empire, Smuts also believed that the unification of the white races would facilitate the settlement of the African continent. Smuts evokes Rhodes’s Last Will and Testament (Reference Rhodes1902, 27–9) as a part of the League’s spiritual and creative inheritance. Rhodes’s ideas about the unification of English-speaking peoples leading to peace and African settlement were part of his contribution to the creative development of Mind that ensured his spiritual immortality beyond his biological death (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 38–9). As part of the League, they would be part of a “a living, growing entity; its roots itself ever more deeply into the soil of life” (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 122). For Smuts this vision entailed “a large European community settled on the healthy high lands in the heart of Africa,” which “may well revolutionize the whole outlook for the future” (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 43). South Africa would be more than a model for an already settled and established nation-state within an architecture of transnational white supremacy and global governance. It would be an exemplar for the continued white settlement of the globe.

Smuts makes several moves that racialize an understanding of war and peace. First, he emphasizes the tragic aspect of war between the white races, echoing contemporaries who saw the Great War as a civil war (Stoddard Reference Stoddard1920; Younis Reference Younis2017). The war is one of horror and loss because it destroyed natural affective ties between the white races. Second, South Africa is a prime example of reconciliation within the white race that recreates the white race anew. Through South Africa, Smuts reworks the idea of reconciliation in the League beyond his contemporaries who saw the League as an extension of the English-speaking Anglosphere. Finally, Smuts reifies reconciliation in his metaphysics: the League of Nations was the fulfillment of white unification that made racial peace the cosmological destiny of the universe. White unification was the culmination of temporal progress, the formation of a higher whole and a new spiritual life that would direct the future of human affairs above the material world. And directing the world toward peace entailed settling the African continent.

Race War and the Urban Native

While Smuts transformed the “utopian” (Bell Reference Bell2020) discourse of racial peace into a cosmology, this cosmology was equally buoyed by an apocalyptic fantasy of race war. Echoing his earlier exchange with Stead, for Smuts, the use of colonial soldiers in World War I sparked a global crisis. Though these soldiers were used primarily as munition carriers, stevedores, and trench and grave diggers within the logistical apparatuses of the American and British militaries, it was feared that exposing Black people to martial life would inadvertently give them the skills to overthrow their rulers (van Galen Last Reference van Galen Last2015). Throughout the war, Smuts warned that the “Black Peril” could incite a “vaster World War” that threatened both Africa and Europe (Reference Smuts1917a, 119). While the natives proved to have a “great military value” during the war, they threatened to destabilize the emerging peace.

We can trace the genealogy of “race war” to fears of slave uprisings in the Caribbean and the US South (Barder Reference Barder2021). In the 1830s antiabolition rioters in the United States assumed that Black freedom would lead to a race war or race-mixing, both of which would end white rule (Richards Reference Richards1970, 44). US anxieties about race war were also projected onto the British empire, who were imagined to have their designs set on freeing US slaves after abolishing slavery in the British Caribbean (Karp Reference Karp2016). By the beginning of the twentieth century, race war was constitutive of a global imaginary that bound the United States and British empires together (Barder Reference Barder2019; Vucetic Reference Vucetic2011). At the end of the century, the closing of the global frontier—the successful colonization of Africa, and the “complete” genocide of indigenous peoples in the United States–brought the question of race relations to the fore. For James Bryce, the question of racial violence in the US South begot questions about colonial rule: “the likelihood that similar problems will have to be solved elsewhere, as for instance in South Africa and the Philippine Isles, bid us ask: What should be the duty and policy of a dominant race where it cannot fuse with a backward race?” (Bryce Reference Bryce1902, 42).

For pessimistic “race realists” this question was accelerated by fears about white population decline and eugenic ideas about degeneracy. Charles Pearson’s National Life & Character: A Forecast (Reference Pearson1893) predicted the imminent decline of the white world in the face of an ascendant Asian population. Theodore Roosevelt and Lothrop Stoddard, would take inspiration from Pearson to articulate fears about race war. Roosevelt, despite his disagreements with Pearson, shared his broader concerns about the future status of the white population being swamped by a coming “Yellow Peril.” For Roosevelt, only the white race could bring about its own downfall. But if this was to be staved off, white women would have to take on the burden of child bearing and rearing, otherwise the white race would commit “race suicide”—a term Roosevelt popularized from the work of anti-Asian, anti-immigrant scholar E. A. Ross (Bederman Reference Bederman1995, 204–5). For Stoddard, the white world was at an ebb, its best stocks wiped out in the first World War, and it was now most vulnerable to be overthrown in a coming race war by the “rising tide of color” (Stoddard Reference Stoddard1920). The strategy for race realists against this threat was one of retrenchment: abandon the tropics where white men could not adapt and defend the “dikes” of the white world, the Pacific Coasts of Canada, the United States, and Australia. While racial pessimists relied on an equally violent project of immigration exclusion and race rioting, it was difficult for them to reconcile settler colonialism with race war.Footnote ³

Smuts’s imaginary constantly poses race war as the antithesis to the harmony and peace embodied by the League of Nations. In the wake of the war, as racial violence exploded in Great Britain, South Africa, and across the United States in the long Red Summer, Smuts’s dire warnings of a future race war were reprinted in US newspapers.Footnote ⁴ Blackness posed an organized and existential transitional threat, articulated through the Pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey, who effectively linked racial struggles in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States (Shilliam Reference Shilliam2006). As Smuts saw it, South Africa could be both a warning and an exemplar for consolidating global white rule against race war. Smuts drew on existing parallels between the US South and South Africa that positioned both as a space in which the future race war might begin so the lessons could be applied to the “problem” of race war elsewhere. By invoking the US South, Smuts was participating in a broader discourse that positioned the US South and Africa as parallel “laboratories” to study global race relations (Bryce Reference Bryce1902; Evans Reference Evans1915; Magubane Reference Magubane2008; Ring Reference Ring2012; Tilley Reference Tilley2011; Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2010). The US South, however, paled in comparison to the threat of race war in Africa. For in the Americas, although the threat of race war is present, it is mitigated by the fact that the white population is numerically superior, the African continent is tasked with a greater instability in securing a “foothold” for the white population (Smuts Reference Smuts1917b, 76–7). In Africa, the fact the white races were numerically overwhelmed by “100,000,000 barbarians” in Africa led to the dystopian possibility that the white race would be eviscerated if they did not stand together (Smuts Reference Smuts1966a, 82, 95). If race war was pacified in South Africa, it could be staved off anywhere.

The Mandate System as Global Apartheid

At this point several problems beset Smuts’s cosmology that reflect problems inherent with liberal international order. On the one hand, Smuts needs cheap labor to facilitate his dream of global white rule and settlement. On the other, the violence that this project requires might also unleash a backlash that threatens global white supremacy. In order to maintain the integrity of his metaphysical claims about the movement of the creative advance toward the racialized peace of the League of Nations, he must disavow the violence of settler colonialism and project it onto the native. By deflecting the onus of race war onto a “detribalized” or “urban” native, Smuts begins to carve out a space to respond to racial pessimism’s challenge to settler colonialism. Race war is no longer an inevitable outcome of interracial contact but the result of an African who is out of his proper place within a whole and a material threat to a properly spiritual order.

While this disavowal resolves some of the metaphysical problems of Smuts’s cosmology, he still has to find a political solution to pacify the threat of the urban native that will allow settlement to continue and the creative advance to proceed toward peace. How to get the urban native back into his proper place without inciting violence? As Smuts notes in one of his early letters, overt oppression risks inciting a backlash: “we see how necessary that cautious policy is… . Would … the revolutionary explosion of the huge masses of Native combustible material not devastate what is fairest and loveliest in our white civilisation?” (Smuts Reference Smuts1966a, 96). The anxieties about racial decline, imperial decay, and population reflected through the threat of a coming race war necessitated a novel solution in the League of Nations.

Through his correspondences with Woodrow Wilson, his work with the Imperial War Cabinet in London, and his League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion, Smuts is often credited as the philosophical architect of the mandates system (Getachew Reference Getachew2019; Mazower Reference Mazower2009; Smuts Reference Smuts1919). Smuts proposed a system of international tutelage that would resolve the problem of ungoverned German, Ottoman, and Russian colonies. Some scholars argue that Smuts never envisioned this system to apply to the African continent and instead pursued a policy whereby South Africa would annex the German colonies. In what has been narrated as a compromise between Smuts’s policy of annexation and Wilson’s principles of trusteeship, the mandates system was eventually codified in Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. South-West Africa would be subject to the mandate system but ruled as an “integral portion” of South Africa (see Callahan Reference Callahan1999, 28–46). In the former colonies of the defeated powers of World War I, “which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation” (League of Nations 1920). Article 22 also embodied Smuts fears about race war through the “prevention of the establishment of fortifications or military and naval bases and of military training of the natives for other than police purposes and the defence of territory” (League of Nations 1920). Whether Smuts was engaged in autobiographical revisionism or whether he had thought of a mandates system applying to the African continent, it was apparent that Smuts was thinking of the mandates system as a comprehensive solution to the problems of miscegenation and race war besetting white supremacist global rule. The policies of trusteeship vs. annexation were less important than the question of how these territories were governed.

To facilitate Smuts’s expansive vision of white supremacy with his pessimistic appraisal of race war, Smuts turns to a new model of global governance—indirect rule and segregation in the Mandates system. Indirect rule and segregation as a model of global peace fulfilled the League’s principles of liberal paternalism by announcing its intentions in the name of native interest. It gained coherency, however, by defining itself as a project that keeps the deadly threat of sexualized Blackness in abeyance, thereby justifying the most brutal forms of violence that liberal order and settler colonialism require to function. The principle of indirect rule stretches back to Henry Maine’s response to the 1857 uprising in India (Mantena Reference Mantena2010). Indirect rule serves as a patriarchal model of governing an imperial population where the colonizers are heavily outnumbered by the colonized (Owens Reference Owens2015). In the place of direct rule, where the imposition of colonial force can generate pushback, indirect rule was meant to pacify the native population by relying on native customs and tribal chiefs who would serve as intermediaries for imperial governance. As Mahmood Mamdani (Reference Mamdani1996) has argued, in practice, this amounted to the colonial invention and reification of tribal customs, “chiefs” who were in reality appointees of the imperial government and could be removed if they did not acquiesce to colonial command.

Smuts is explicit about these benefits of indirect rule to global white supremacy and the settlement of Africa. Smuts’s racial politics strove to match the principles of holism: the management of “heterogeneous” parts within wholes requires a high level of Mind, an evolutionary ethos that can appropriately guide the creative advance. For Smuts this ultimate authority rested with white capital: “The easiest, most natural and obvious way to civilize the African native is to given him decent white employment. White employment is the best school; the gospel of labour is the most salutary gospel” (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 48–9). While for Smuts this was a natural part of the cosmological destiny of humanity, the threat of race war, miscegenation, and the urban native meant that “no one can tell what equilibrium will be reached eventually between their traditional system and the more complex features of European civilization” (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 26). The “urban” or “detribalized” native threatened both the “natural” relations of tribal dependence and authority and the projects of white capital that Smuts’s vision of settlement, peace, and pacification relied on. Indirect rule provided a means of reaffirming Africans’ “natural” place within the hierarchy.

Under a system of indirect rule in the mandate, this principle would be carried through by inscribing tribal dependence on white rule. Smuts argues this principle of indirect rule is “enshrined in the Covenant of the League of Nations” which by definition must entail the ruling of “these backward peoples in accordance with their own institutions, customs, and ideas, in so far as these are not compatible with the ideals of civilization” (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 88–9). To give force to this interpretation, Smuts invokes the genius of his personality, as he “was in a measure responsible for this mandate principle and for its formulation in article 22 of the Covenant” (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 89). The best mandates in Africa already embody these principles. “Schools” under the management of European magistrates were established to train tribal patriarchs and their sons in the principles of imperial rule and leadership. These exist “not only in South Africa, but under the Tanganyika and Uganda administrations, and may prove most helpful in preserving the traditional native chieftainship … as a vital link in the organization of native society” (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 88). For Smuts, these institutions would be in the interest of the natives, whose culture would be preserved from the deleterious effects of colonization. Native chiefs would be tasked with maintaining “good order and good government within its area” and have control over native law and custom, land cultivation, and control of liquor (Reference Smuts1930, 89–90).

Although Smuts argues that this will be part of native training and tutelage, as Jeanne Morefield argues, Smuts’ gives no indication that Mandates will be temporary or that progressive tutelage will enable the “lesser races” to achieve self-governance (Morefield Reference Morefield2014). Ultimately, indirect rule returned to a project of Black dependence on the gospel of white labor, with two ends. First, indirect rule would facilitate mobility of cheap labor to ensure white settlement continues, and second, it would restrict Black movement off demarcated native lands. Ultimately, indirect rule would restore the telos of the creative advance toward global white rule while also resolving the problem of race war. To do this, indirect rule would have to be supplemented by a project of territorial segregation (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 92).

For Smuts, territorial segregation entailed containing agricultural and pastoral natives in native reserves, designed “for his exclusive occupation,” which would ultimately rely on white administration and white capital to function within the broader politics of the African continent (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 92). The imposition of territorial segregation ensures the patriarchal dependence of laborers on tribal leaders who facilitate the laborers dependence on a white boss. Under the patriarchal guidance of the white capitalist, the African would be cured from his inherit laziness, and he would learn a new work ethic and the value of participating in a money economy. “The men, instead of lying in the sun, or brawling over their beer, or indulging in the dangerous sport of tribal warfare, will go out to work” (Reference Smuts1930, 103). Moreover, territorial segregation would ensure that the colonial imposition of a heteronormative patriarchal family would not be disturbed. While Black labor would be free to move to fill the needs of white capital: “the family life in the native home will continue on the traditional lines; the routine of the family and of the tribe will not be altered in any material respect. The male adults, father and sons, will no doubt imbibe new ideas in their white employment, but their social system will not suffer on that account” (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 99).

For Smuts, the combination of patriarchal indirect rule and territorial segregation has a pacifying effect. It limits internecine tribal warfare, but more importantly it constrains and limits the destructive effects of the urban or detribalized native who might incite a race war. Smuts’s metaphysics naturalized the solution of indirect rule as the congruous coming together of parts and wholes to serve a higher function of peace. The “equilibrium” between higher and lower parts would manage the threat of race war as Black labor’s patriarchal dependence on white capital. Pace Morefield, this enables a temporal resolution to the problems that beset Smuts’s metaphysics and enables the creative advance to continue apace. But rereading Smuts through the lens of urbanization also recovers the way Smuts’s metaphysics both poses and resolves the problem of race war as a spatiotemporal problem. The urban native, perpetually on the move, threatens to disrupt the bioecological whole of African settlement. By reinscribing the African to his “natural” environment, Smuts’s metaphysics seeks to achieve the vision of global peace set out in his understanding of the League of Nations. Smuts’s metaphysical solution of indirect rule and segregation thus challenges contemporary understandings of global racial conflict that saw a coming race war as an inevitable outcome of settler colonialism. Instead, for Smuts indirect rule and segregation are part of a natural, evolutionary reassertion of (white) Mind to direct the cosmos: “The assumption of conflict and incompatibility is quite wrong. White settlement along proper economic lines and on proper ethical principles is what black Africa most needs to-day for its development and civilization” (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 50). As a natural cosmological evolution of less complex parts within greater wholes, indirect rule and segregation provide racial capitalism with the cheap labor needed to fulfill Smuts’s vision of settlement that he saw as synonymous with global peace. All of this was accomplished in the name of native interest: “the native needs the white man even more than the white man needs the native” (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 50).

While Smuts’s metaphysical resolution announces itself in the name of native interest, it also relies on transforming race war into a perpetual biological threat to the spiritual life of global white supremacy. Here Smuts’s cosmology was less about emphasizing the congruence between parts and wholes in the interests of natives and more about protecting spiritual white life from the biological encroachment of Black life:

If indirect rule and territorial segregation emphasize the repatriation of Africans to their environment in the name of global peace, the threat of the urban native is redoubled as the hypersexualized threat of race war. The enforcement of territorial segregation in the name of global peace relied on an image of a hypersexualized African savage on the verge of constant anarchic rebellion to function coherently as a fantasy of liberal order. This threat of a “detribalized” native exacerbating “racial antipathy” is, at its core, a sexual threat, the threat of disease posed by prostitutes to “public health,” the threat that miscegenation poses to “racial purity,” and the ultimate moral deterioration of interracial contact that threatens to reverse the process of creative advance. For Smuts, miscegenation continues to embody the infectious influence of Black biology that threatens to incite a race war by its sheer proximity to white life.

In this respect, Smuts’s metaphysical resolution of segregation functions by protecting the spiritual life of white supremacy, as the progressive mastery over biology and ecology against the threat that Black sexuality and miscegenation continue to pose to the creative advance of the cosmos. Against the decaying effects of the universe, Smuts asserts the importance of human influence as having the potential for ultimate control over the creative advance: “Our aspiration is its inspiration, and it is thus the inner guarantee of eventual victory in spite of all set-backs and defeats” (Smuts Reference Smuts1926, 319). The great hope for a progressive universe rests in Mind and the League of Nations. And for Smuts, the League of Nations provides a solution for the degenerative effects of miscegenation that peril the creative advance based off the contribution of his own “personality.” As indirect rule and segregation reassert white control over Black bodies, the sexual influence of Black biology and matter is able to be effectively contained and segregation. Global peace could only be achieved by perpetually pacifying this threat.

Smuts’s cosmology was thus central to a broader global discourse that saw indirect rule and segregation as a global solution to the twin threats of miscegenation and race war that were posed by increasing urbanization in the United States and the British Colonies (Nightingale Reference Nightingale2012, 264–74). Smuts was at the forefront of articulating indirect rule as a solution to the problem of race war alongside Frederick Lugard, the foremost architect of indirect rule during the 1920s, and the British representative to the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission from 1922 to 1936 (Pedersen Reference Pedersen2015, 108–10). In a 1924 letter on the question of governance of Kenya, Lugard agreed with Smuts on the need for a separate white colony to indirectly administer the Black and for segregation to be a “permanent” solution to the threat of race war (Lugard to Smuts Reference Smuts1966c, 439). For Lugard, who expounded his philosophy in conversation with Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, argued that “in matters social and racial a separate path, each pursuing his own inherited traditions, preserving his own race-purity and race-pride” would be a solution to the “fact” that “miscegenation between two sub-species of the same race tends to deterioration” and the “Rising Tide of Colour, which had been gathering steady momentum from the dawn of the twentieth century” (Lugard Reference Lugard1921, 268). For his part, Smuts turns to the fact that US President William G. Harding cited Lugard’s philosophy of indirect rule, as the solution to “race war” in the US South as an indication of the global reach that this project would have in the name of securing peace (Harding Reference Harding1921; see also Vitalis Reference Vitalis2015 63–4).

By proffering indirect rule and segregation as a solution to the twin threats of race war and miscegenation embodied in the “urban native,” Smuts was once again turning to South Africa as a model for global peace. Here “a grand experiment in racial and cultural contacts is being tried and tested out, which is fraught with enormous issues for the future of our civilization” (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 31). Indirect rule and segregation through the Mandate system would be modeled on a South African native administration, which enforced a territorial segregation, against the threat of Black urbanization (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 60). By offering South Africa as a “grand experiment” for indirect rule and segregation in the League of Nations, Smuts was modeling global racial governance on a burgeoning Apartheid system in South Africa. As Saul Dubow argues, in South Africa Smuts was at the forefront of articulating Black urbanization and sexuality as part of the origins of Apartheid (Dubow Reference Dubow1989, 31). The Native Affairs Acts of 1913, 1920, and 1927 that laid the foundations for the formal enshrinement of Apartheid in 1948 established the principles of segregation, repatriation, and violent “retribalization” that intensified in the wake of World War I (Dubow Reference Dubow1989, 13). While these projects were similarly framed as mitigating the threat of racial violence, Smuts was consciously aware of the violence that such a project of resettlement would rely on. This involved both the forcible shifting of “natives from white areas” (Smuts Reference Smuts1966c, 306) and an increased reliance on policing (a force that has luckily become “ubiquitous” in Africa) to enforce segregation (Smuts Reference Smuts1930, 102).

By placing a project of pacification at the heart of the League of Nations, Smuts inadvertently articulates, at a global and cosmological scale, Michel Foucault’s dictum: “we are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions” (Foucault Reference Foucault2003, 16). Segregation and indirect rule was thus the continuation of racial violence that was facilitated by the sexualized fantasy of a coming racial apocalypse through the League of Nations. This was a different form of race war, one that has been described by Fred Moten as the retrenchment of white violence against the insurgency of Black social life (Moten and Kelley Reference Moten and Robin2016). In Africa it operated through the brutal disciplining of a native workforce into the capitalist money economy; segregation that made Africans available for death if they cross the color line to keep the social sexual threat of the urban native at bay; the expropriation of African lands, which opened them up for white settlement and mining (Grovogui Reference Grovogui1996, 138); the importation of native administration schemes from South Africa and “retribalized” native Africans onto reserve settlements; pass laws, strict curfew, and restrictions on cattle ownership; dog and hut taxes; and centralized forms of discipline and punishment like floggings and beatings in administrative apparatuses that codified the relationship between “master” and “servant,” white and Black (Emmett Reference Emmett1999, 79–80). It was part and parcel of a broader strategy that established white supremacist control over native custom by establishing separate courts governed by colonial administrators, codifying marriage laws and forcing them to be recognized by the colonial state, and pushing Africans further off lands they had themselves claimed as part of their life world (Walker Reference Walker and Walker1990, 185). The reified notion of culture served as a convenient means through which to reassert radical incommensurability, justify territorial separation, and ensure continued exploitation of cheap Black labor. Through the imposition of global apartheid, the creative advance toward “peace” would be able to proceed apace, but only as the continuation of a race war already underway. The creative advance must be defended.