‘Let me tell you about Jan Smuts,’ my grandfather, a doctor born not far from Johannesburg, would begin. And we, as children, would mutter and glance sideways and sink into our chairs. The story would go something like this: ‘Smuts was a Boer War leader, later feted by the English political establishment and central to international moves towards a liberal world order, a segregationist back home and reviled by the Afrikaner nationalists, who instituted formal apartheid from 1948.