Bongani Ngqulunga discusses the role South African military officer, statesman and philosopher Jan Christian Smuts (1870-1950) played in the 1902 Treaty of Vereeniging that ended the Anglo-Boer War and in the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, and his approach to the ‘Native question’ as a minister under Louis Botha, as Prime Minister from 1919 to 1924 and from 1939 to 1948, and in opposition to and then coalition with J.B.M. Hertzog’s National Party.