Kruger, Stephanus Johannes Paulus

(1825–1904)

   Paul Kruger was a Boer politician and statesman, president of the Transvaal, and leader in both Boer Wars against British rule in South Africa. Born in the Cape Colony to a family of strict Puritans, Kruger, at the age of 11, migrated with them in the Great Trek of 1834 to the territory beyond the Orange River. A man of high intelligence, Kruger was also an adherent of Old Testament principles and a skilled military commander. He was commandant-general of the Transvaal between 1863 and 1877 and thereafter became vice-president. Kruger bitterly opposed the British annexation of the Transvaal and traveled to London twice in an attempt to reverse it, armed in the second instance with a petition testifying to Boer opposition to British rule. Having failed to secure Boer independence by diplomatic means, Kruger then led the rebellion of 1880 that developed into the First Boer War. Boer forces inflicted a series of small yet shocking defeats on British forces, the most notable at Majuba Hill in February 1881, after which the British agreed to the Pretoria Convention restoring self-government to the Boer population.

   Kruger became president of the Transvaal in 1883, a position in which he negotiated an improved Pretoria Convention in 1884. In 1886, however, the Transvaal again came under pressure after gold was discovered in Witwatersrand and mining entrepreneurs, known to the Boer population at Uitlanders, began to pour into the republic. Rightly apprehensive that the mining boom and the influx of non-Boers threatened the republic’s way of life, Kruger’s government enacted a 14-year residency requirement for voting rights on the Uitlanders, imposed high taxes on mining operations, and controlled the sale of dynamite and spirits. Cecil Rhodes, premier of the Cape Colony, saw in Uitlander resentment of Kruger’s government an opportunity to again attempt British control of Transvaal. After the failure of the Jameson Raid, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany inflamed the situation by sending a congratulatory telegram to Kruger for having preserved the Transvaal’s freedom. For his part, Kruger simultaneously built up the Transvaal’s fighting capacity - not least of all with the import of 37,000 Mauser rifles and Krupp howitzers from Germany -and enticed the Orange Free State into an alliance against the British. He also offered concessions to the Uitlanders and negotiated with Alfred Milner, governor of the Cape Colony and, after 1897, British high commissioner to South Africa. Realizing that Milner intended no compromise acceptable to the Boers, Kruger delivered an ultimatum to the British government and on October 12, 1899, launched an invasion of Natal. After initial Boer successes, it became apparent that Britain intended to prevail. As the tide turned against the Boer forces, Kruger was smuggled out of Pretoria to the frontier of Portuguese Mozambique in May 1900 to travel to Europe in pursuit of aid. He received tea and sympathy, but no more. Kruger was never able to return to the Transvaal. He settled in the Netherlands and died in Switzerland in July 1904.

   FURTHER READING:

    Fisher, John. Paul Kruger: His Life and Times. London: Secker & Warburg, 1974;

    Pakenham, Thomas. The Boer War. New York: Random House, 1979.

   CARL CAVANAGH HODGE