Paul Kruger

President of the South African Republic (1883-1900)

• Born: October 10, 1825
• Birthplace: Colesberg, Cape Colony (now in South Africa)
• Died: July 14, 1904
• Place of death: Clarens, Switzerland

The most important Afrikaner leader of the nineteenth century, Kruger rose from backcountry farmer to the presidency of the Transvaal region’s South African Republic, which took on the British Empire in two wars. Although he was ultimately vanquished by the British, he helped raise Afrikaners to a position from which they would dominate modern South Africa through most of the twentieth century.

Early Life

Paul Kruger (KREW-yer) was the son of Caspar Kruger, an Afrikaner (Boer) farmer of German ancestry who lived in the Cradock district of Cape Colony. Most of the British colony’s Afrikaner families were scattered throughout the interior, where their living conditions were primitive, and most Afrikaners were poorly informed about the outside world. The Calvinist religion played a major role in Afrikaner homes, such as that of the Krugers. Paul’s parents belonged to the Dopper branch of the Dutch Reformed Church, which was far more conservative than most branches of the Dutch church. Paul himself had little formal education, but he developed an ability to express himself clearly—in both spoken and written language.

Afrikaner resentment against British rule in the Cape Colony escalated after 1833, when Great Britain abolished slavery through its empire, with only little compensation for former slaveowners. Emancipation also flooded the colony with unemployed former slaves, whom Afrikaners regarded as potentially dangerous. Thousands of farmers organized what became known as the Great Trek—a mass exodus of Afrikaner families from the Cape Colony to the interior regions to the north and northeast. These pioneers, who became known as voortrekkers, gathered their belongings onto ox-wagons and formed wagon trains for the difficult trek inland. The Kruger family was among the slowest to leave but eventually caught up with a voortrekker group that had entered the region that soon afterward became Natal Colony. Twelve-year-old Paul bore much of the responsibility for protecting the family’s livestock during the journey. He was considered bright, capable, a good horseback rider, and an excellent shot—valuable traits in the face of the constant danger of attacks by both wild animals and human marauders.

In 1837, Kruger’s family arrived in Natal at a moment when other voortrekkers were treacherously betrayed by the Zulu king Dingane, the half brother and assassin of King Shaka. When Piet Retief and other voortrekker leaders called on Dingane to deliver presents and sign a treaty giving the voortrekkers the right to settled on Zulu land, the Zulu king entertained them with a feast and signed their treaty. When the voortrekker men removed their weapons in order to share a toast to peace, Zulu warriors descended on them and slaughtered them. The Zulu then raided the settlers’ farms and killed other Afrikaners. Paul’s awareness of this example of African duplicity very likely reinforced whatever negative feelings he harbored toward black Africans; the experience almost certainly affected his adult attitudes toward Africans.

After leaving Natal, the Krugers settled in the fertile Rustenberg region of the western Transvaal in 1842. There, at the age of twenty-three, Paul was appointed an assistant field cornet, an important administrative post that gave him magisterial rights during peacetime and command over fighting men during wartime. A year later he became a field cornet, a post that he held for five years. When he was promoted to commandant, he set up his own home and married Marie du Plessis. The last events set the stage for his life’s work in war and politics.

Life’s Work

Kruger’s life’s work was the political consolidation and development of the Transvaal under Afrikaner rule. His work formally began in 1852, when he was a member of an Afrikaner delegation, under the leadership of Andries Pretorius, that signed the Sand River Convention with representatives of the British Empire. Under the terms of that convention, the British recognized the political independence of the Afrikaners living north of the Orange River. In 1855, Kruger was a member of the commission that wrote a constitution for the government of the Afrikaners in the Transvaal region, who named their new nation the South African Republic . Meanwhile, the Afrikaners living between the Orange and Vaal Rivers formed the Orange Free State.

Among the challenges that the new South African Republic faced was a serious fiscal problem. To obtain much-needed manufactured goods from other lands, Afrikaners needed to replace their local system of barter with a hard currency. Kruger was a member of the government’s inexperienced executive council. Under the leadership of President Marthinus Pretorius (1857-1871), the council decided to manufacture currency by printing bank notes of nominal value. Unsupported by any tangible assets, the new currency proved almost worthless and contributed to civil unrest. Realizing that a major political change was needed to avert disaster, Pretorius resigned in 1871, and the citizens of the republic elected a new president—Dutch Reformed Church minister Thomas Burgers. Thirty-six-year-old Kruger was elected vice president.

Burgers procured European loans, built schools and roads, reorganized the government, and put his own personal fortune into the treasury. However, because he was not a member of the conservative Dopper sect, Kruger and other religious conservatives put obstacles in his way. Although the republic appeared again to be menaced by the Zulu of King Cetshwayo, its men did not respond enthusiastically to Burgers’s calls to fight and to pay taxes. In response to the republic’s international disorders, the British Empire stepped in and annexed the Transvaal in 1877.

In 1877 and 1878, Kruger led unsuccessful Afrikaner delegations to England to seek redress from Benjamin Disraeli’s government. He then helped organize passive resistance campaigns against the British occupation of the Transvaal. Finally, in December, 1880, he agreed that it was time to fight the British. In the brief conflict that followed—which is sometimes called the First Boer War —the Transvaalers inflicted several defeats on the British. After a major Afrikaner victory in the Battle of Majuba Hill in February, 1881, the British agreed to negotiate their withdrawal from the Transvaal. In 1883, Kruger was elected president of the South African Republic. The last person to hold that position, he was reelected in 1888, 1893, and 1898.

Through his four terms as president, Kruger sought to preserve the traditional rural way of life of Afrikaners, whom he regarded as “God’s People.” However, the discovery of major gold deposits in the Transvaal’s Witwatersrand region, near Pretoria, in 1886 started a gold rush that attracted perhaps sixty thousand foreigners—whom Afrikaners dubbed uitlanders (outlanders)—to the Transvaal. Although the national economy and many individual Afrikaners flourished, the outsiders—who were mostly Englishmen—posed threats to the cultural cohesiveness of Afrikaner society and Afrikaner control of their own republic. To protect his government, Kruger ruled that newcomers would not be eligible to vote until they had resided in the Transvaal for fourteen years. He also imposed a heavy tax on mines.

The predominantly British uitlanders naturally regarded Kruger’s policies as unreasonably discriminatory and enlisted outside forces to bring pressure on the Afrikaner government. During the last few days of 1895, Cecil Rhodes’s close associate Leander Starr Jameson led an armed body of men into the Transvaal from the British South Africa Company’s territory north of the Limpopo River. Operating on the mistaken assumption that discontented uitlanders would spontaneously rise up against Kruger, Jameson and Rhodes believed that a strong show of arms would bring down Kruger’s government. Instead, the members of the so-called Jameson Raid simply meekly surrendered to South African Republic police as they entered the Transvaal. The incident strengthened Kruger’s resolve to resist British encroachments and also helped to bring down the government of Rhodes, who was then prime minister of the Cape Colony.

Afterward, Kruger attempted to divide uitlanders by playing English-speaking workers and investors’ groups against one another. This tactic backfired, however, and prompted Britain to send an army to the Transvaal border in 1899. After months of armed confrontation—and an ultimatum to the British to withdraw—Kruger declared war on the British on October 11. The South African, or Boer, War then began. At first, Afrikaner forces made skillful use of guerrilla tactics to win victories. However, the vastly larger and better-equipped British forces eventually won the war, On June 5, 1900, they captured Pretoria, Kruger’s capital. Kruger, who by then was nearly seventy-five years old, fled to Europe, where he unsuccessfully lobbied for help from continental governments. After the South African War finally ended, on May 31, 1902, the South African Republic and Orange Free State were transformed into British colonies, which became provinces when the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910. Meanwhile, Kruger quietly died in Switzerland, on July 14, 1904. He was buried in Pretoria five months later.

Significance

Although Paul Kruger performed the impressive achievement of rising from a backcountry farmer with limited education to become the powerful leader of the South African Republic, his critics claim that he was doomed to failure by his narrow mind-set and prejudices against non-Afrikaners—both black and white. However, he was shaped by his environment. Had he been different, he—like Thomas Burgers—would have been unable to succeed politically. His greatest achievement was formulating policies that changed the Transvaal’s Afrikaners from an almost inconsequential aggregation of farmers into a nation. Moreover, he held his republic’s presidency for seventeen years, until he was brought down by foreign conquest.

Kruger helped knit the Transvaal’s Afrikaners into a political entity that won the powerful British Empire’s recognition of its independence. Then, after the South African Republic fell into such disorder that Britain annexed its territory, he sagaciously employed passive resistance, lobbying campaigns, and force of arms to persuade Britain to permit his country a second chance at independence. However, Kruger’s narrow-minded pursuit of a nation governed solely by conservative rural Afrikaners—“God’s People”—and his prejudice against black Africans were major shortcomings that eventually contributed to his fall.

Bibliography

Farwell, Byron. The Great Anglo-Boer War. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. A solid book on the South African War that describes battles and opposing policies, with consierable attention to Kruger’s own role.

Fisher, James. Paul Kruger: His Life and Times. London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1974. A general description of Kruger’s life and Afrikaner society and culture. It weaves into a tapestry Kruger’s presidency, wider South African developments, and the British-Afrikaner wars.

Hillegas, Howard Clemons. Oom Paul’s People: A Narrative of the British-Boer Troubles in South Africa, with a History of the Boers, the Country, and Its Institutions. 1899. Reprint. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. This contemporary narrative describes Kruger, the Transvaal, and Afrikaners. It covers the Afrikaner religion, Afrikaner attitudes toward Africans and Uitlanders, and the British statesmen and generals involved in the wars with the South African Republic.

Holmes, Prescott. Paul Kruger: The Life Story of the President of the Transvaal. Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1900. This straightforward biography of Kruger contains useful pictures of aspects of the times. It is organized chronologically to deal with both his failures and accomplishments.

Kruger, Paul. The Memoirs of Paul Kruger: Four Times President of the South African Republic—Told by Himself. 1902. Reprint. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. This autobiography presents Kruger’s own views on his life, career, and political and military battles.

Magubane, Bernard. The Making of a Racist State: British Imperialism and the Union of South Africa, 1875-1910. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1996. This book, not primarily about Kruger, describes the times and considers his role in the wider framework of the events leading to the creation of the Union of South Africa.