Paul Kruger

Paul Kruger (born October 10, 1825, Cradock district, Cape Colony [now in South Africa]—died July 14, 1904, Clarens, Switzerland) was a farmer, soldier, and statesman, noted in South African history as the builder of the Afrikaner nation. He was president of the Transvaal, or South African Republic, from 1883 until his flight to Europe in 1900, after the outbreak of the South African (Boer) War.

Youth and early career

Kruger’s parents were respectable farmers of Dutch descent on the northern outskirts of the British Cape Colony. He had little formal education but was able to express himself clearly in writing. Of more importance was the religious instruction he received from his parents according to the strict tenets of Dutch Calvinism. When he was 10, his family took part in the general emigration of frontier farmers who sought to found an independent political existence in the northern interior. As a young boy, he was strongly influenced by the stirring events of the period when the emigrants had to struggle against the warlike tribes surrounding them and to establish an orderly government of their own.

While still in his teens, Kruger played a part in public life as a local field-cornet, a post in which civil and military duties were combined. In January 1852 he was present when the Transvaal leader, Andries Pretorius, concluded the Sand River Convention with representatives of Great Britain, by which the independence of the Afrikaners (Boers) north of the Vaal River was recognized. He took part in 1855–56 as member of a commission that drew up the constitution of the new republic. During the civil disturbances of 1861–64, he played a prominent part as commandant general in unifying and pacifying the country in support of constitutional authority.

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Leader of the Boers

Upon the British annexation of the Transvaal in 1877, Kruger became the recognized champion of his people in the struggle to regain independence. With that purpose in mind, he visited England in 1877 and 1878, and, when he failed to persuade the government of Benjamin Disraeli to undo the annexation, he helped organize a movement of passive resistance to British administration in the Transvaal. In 1880 he pinned his hopes to the promises of William Gladstone, the Liberal leader. Disappointed when the new Liberal government failed to live up to his expectations, Kruger succeeded in gaining the sympathy and political support of the Cape Colony against the British attempt to force South Africa, including the Transvaal, into a general federation. In December he led his people into active opposition, and, after a series of military victories that culminated in the Battle of Majuba Hill (February 27, 1881), with great diplomatic skill he succeeded in negotiating peace based on a limited independence. In 1883 he was elected president of the restored republic.

Meanwhile, in 1883 Kruger again visited England and, after protracted negotiations, concluded a new convention in London on February 27, 1884, which rectified the western border and removed any reference to British suzerainty over the Transvaal. On his return he found his republic embroiled with the Cape colonial authorities over control of the area along the western border, which was considered by Cecil Rhodes, the Cape statesman, to be the “Suez Canal” to the territory north of the Limpopo River. In 1885 Kruger was forced to accede to British demands to withdraw from the area in question and to agree to a British protectorate over Bechuanaland. At the same time, the way was opened for the future expansion of the Cape Colony to the north.

Gold rush in the Transvaal

Kruger’s greatest problem began in 1886 with the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand area, where a new metropolis, Johannesburg, arose, some 40 miles (64 km) south of the tiny republican capital, Pretoria. Large numbers of “outlanders” flocked to the Transvaal and established a cosmopolitan, mainly English community in the midst of a rural Boer society. Kruger saw this as a threat to the separate national identity of his people, “God’s people,” as he called them, and in 1890 he severely restricted the franchise to men resident at least 14 years. At the same time, he called into being a separate Volksraad (legislative body), in order to represent mining interests, but this did not satisfy the demands of the outlanders. The mining magnates of Johannesburg criticized Kruger’s economic and railway policy, which was aimed at promoting the independence of the Transvaal but which resulted at the same time in raising the cost of production of gold. They complained of high railway tariffs, which Kruger’s concessionaires, The Netherlands South Africa Railway Company, imposed in order to protect their railroad linking Johannesburg with Delagoa Bay. For political reasons, Kruger had to support this railway against the cutthroat competition of the Cape railways, which he was unable to exploit to his country’s advantage.

Rhodes, the Cape premier, who had extensive gold interests and much political influence, hoped to achieve a united British South Africa. He supported the Rand capitalists and the outlander movement against Kruger’s regime. When he failed to persuade Kruger to join a South African customs union, he decided to bring matters to a head. Kruger, after all, was the one obstacle that prevented Rhodes from realizing his dream of empire. By 1895 Kruger was aware that trouble was brewing in Johannesburg and that, behind the scenes of the internal conflict within the Transvaal, a larger issue was at stake, that of British supremacy as against republican independence. He felt that the matter of extension of the franchise to the newcomers was merely being used as a cat’s-paw to further the schemes of Rhodes.

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The South African (Boer) War

Ever since 1890 he also had had to contend with growing opposition from some of his own people; but when Rhodes, with the full knowledge of Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, sponsored the ill-fated Jameson Raid against the republic at the end of 1895, Kruger handled the affair so successfully that his prestige soared again. In the presidential election in May 1898, he received almost unanimous support. While Rhodes was forced into the background, British imperial interests now came to the front. The colonial secretary took up the cudgels on behalf of the outlanders and, in 1897, sent Sir Alfred Milner to South Africa as governor of the Cape Colony and high commissioner. Supported by Chamberlain, Milner began to force the issue and demanded that the residential qualification for voters in the Transvaal should be lowered to five years. In May 1899 a conference took place in Bloemfontein, the Free State capital, between Kruger and Milner. Although no agreement was reached, Kruger decided on a seven-year residential qualification. Milner refused the offer, tension increased, and Britain prepared an ultimatum. Both sides prepared for war, which was precipitated by Kruger when, on October. 9, 1899, he presented his own ultimatum, demanding the withdrawal of British troops from the border.

War broke out two days later, and, notwithstanding initial Boer successes, British invading armies occupied the two Boer capitals. Kruger was forced to retreat with the last Boer army along the Delagoa Bay railway. Being too old to keep up with the ensuing guerrilla struggle, he was delegated to Europe, where he lived in Holland to the end of the war in May 1902. He died in Switzerland in July 1904, and his body found a temporary resting place at The Hague. He was finally buried at Pretoria on December 16, 1904.