Louis Botha: A Man Apart

Louis Botha: A Man Apart

By Richard Steyn
Jonathan Ball Publishers. R260

It’s a cliché that we must take lessons from the past. There are at least two problems with this. The first is hubris. Each generation feels that is unnecessary, since it is clearly wiser and more competent than the previous one. Until, of course, the passage of time proves it wrong. The second is a growing, priggish moralism that demands right-thinking and right-speaking. Swathes of history are ignored, especially in SA, simply because the protagonists don’t fit into contemporary mores. Richard Steyn seems to have a particular contrarian interest in the political giants who have fallen foul of such dismissive revisionism. This is his third biography, following upon his well-received works on Jan Smuts, then the friendship between Smuts and Churchill. But Steyn is no hagiographer. In enviably clear and unadorned prose his is a warts-and-all depiction, especially as regards the casual racism and assumed superiority of the white man. While always sensitive to historical context, he examines in detail the failures and blind spots of Botha, including his 'mixture of respectful paternalism towards any individual with whom he came into contact … and a disbelief that blacks as a group should enjoy the same political rights as whites'. It was an attitude that culminated, under his premiership, in the pernicious Native Land Act of 1913.