Jan Smuts and the Remaking of South Africa

Join us for another Storytelling dinner with Angus Douglas.

Jan Smuts and the Remaking of South Africa by master storyteller, Angus Douglas.

Date: 7 May 26

Time: 18:30 Meet in the bar

19:00: Dinner in the ballroom

Cost for the 2-course meal: R300 for members and R400 for guests.

Jan Smuts was the man who made South Africa; the pivotal figure behind Union in 1910 and the country's prime minister or deputy prime minister for 28 of the next 40 years. Yet Smuts was no ordinary politician. He was a philosopher and a romantic; a close friend to some extraordinary women of the day, including Emily Hobhouse, Oliver Schreiner and Queen Frederica of Greece. He was an astonishing personality who expounded a unique philosophy about the human personality. He believed that the driving force of life, the harmonizing principle of the universe, was an impulse towards wholeness that manifested in each individual through the evolution of their personality.

But in 1948, two years before he died, with the victory of the apartheid government South Africa underwent a political tragedy and a crisis of the national spirit. Given the disappointments of the post-1994 order, we face another great tragedy, another great crisis of the national spirit.

Writer and speaker Angus Douglas plumbs the personality of Smuts to bring a perspective of hope as to the meaning of South Africa.