Martial Law and Military Power in the Construction of the South African State: Jan Smuts and the “Solid Guarantee of Force” 1899–1924

Abstract

This paper seeks to provide a new approach to analysing the crucial period of the building of the South African state between the Boer War and 1924. Drawing on the sociology of Michael Mann, it argues that the construction of networks of military power was of central and partly autonomous importance in giving shape to the new state. It goes on to contend that this generated a legal order which was in many ways shaped by practices which derived from martial law. The paper also asserts that these questions of military power and martial law need to be analysed within a framework which does not limit itself to the boundaries of the South African state itself, but is placed within the wider context of the British Empire and the southern African region. A biographical exploration the role of Jan Smuts as the key leader is used to focus the paper's study of this process of state-making.In the hot January of 1902 the young Boer General, Jan Christiaan Smuts, was leading a commando raid, riding across the vast plains of Namaqualand in the northwest of Britain's Cape Colony. The South African War was now in its third year, and the condition of the Boer forces, down to perhaps 15,000 and facing a British army of almost half a million, was desperate. Arriving at the Methodist mission of Leliefontein Smuts was confronted with an appalling spectacle. In an attack by his subordinate, Manie Maritz, the mission station and the surrounding agricultural settlement had been burned to the ground and looted. The bodies of about thirty black British loyalists lay at the outskirts of the village. 1 Smuts was furious at Maritz. Maritz claimed he had responded to a treacherous and nearly fatal attack. 2 Smuts and his young protégé, Deneys Reitz, thought that what had happened was "a ruthless and unjustifiable act". 3 Smuts held to a belief that military activity should be conducted within the accepted law of war. Less than a month before, he had issued orders to his men that prisoners might only be executed if found guilty of espionage or major criminal offences before a tribunal, that such sentences should be confirmed by him before being carried out and that "all inhabitants must be well treated and no exception made in the case of coloured or Britishdisposed persons where they behave peaceably and perform no

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