A FEW MONTHS AFTER Mahatma Gandhi was born in India in October 1869, Jan Smuts was born in South Africa’s Transvaal Republic (in May 1870).

In 1893, the young barrister Mohandas K Gandhi, the future ‘Mahatma’, arrived in Durban, South Africa, from Bombay. This was the year before Smuts graduated in law at Christ’s College in Cambridge, England. After passing the Bar examinations in late 1894, he returned to South Africa, where he became involved in politics.

Gandhi remained in South Africa from 1893 until 1915. During his time there, he practised law as a qualified barrister, fought for the rights of Indians in the country, and gradually developed his non-violent approach to protest, which he later practised during the struggle to free India from British domination. During the Second Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902), Gandhi assisted the British with caring for casualties. Meanwhile, Smuts fought with his fellow Boers.

After that war, Smuts was involved with negotiations that led eventually to the union of the four territories, which then became unified as the South Africa we know today. In 1914, the First world War broke out. Smuts fought for the British, most notably in what was then German Southwest Africa, now Namibia. Meanwhile, in 1915 Gandhi returned to India, and the rest is history.

Both Gandhi and Smuts are commemorated by statues in London’s Parliament Square. They stand near each other, but not next to each other. Jan Smuts stands on the north side of the square, and is depicted as striding towards Westminster Abbey. Mahatma Gandhi stands on the east side of the square quite close to the statue of another South African, Nelson Mandela. Gandhi appears to be gazing at the Houses of Parliament.

Seeing those statues standing in the same square today made me wonder how, if at all, Gandhi and Smuts felt about each other. I found an article in a website called “The Observation Post”, which helps understand their relationship. Here are some quotes from it:

“It’s a common misconception that Jan Smuts and Mahatma Gandhi’s relationship was one of animosity. It is a little known fact that both men actually respected each other, remaining life long admirers of one another … Gandhi tried, at all times, to look for the positive in Smuts and said of him that he had a ‘high place among the politicians of the British Empire and even of the world’.”

When Gandhi was about to leave South Africa in 1915, he sent Smuts a pair of sandals that he had made at Tolstoy Farm, a cooperative colony he set up near Johannesburg, from which he ran his campaign of satyagraha (non-violence). Smuts wore these every day when at his farm, and is recorded as having said on Gandhi’s seventieth birthday:

“I have worn these sandals for many a summer, even though I may feel that I am not worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man.”