Paul Kruger
Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger (10 October 1825 – 14 July 1904) was a South African politician. He was one of the dominant political and military figures in 19th-century South Africa. Nicknamed Oom Paul, he came to international prominence as the face of the Boer cause against Britain during the Second Boer War of 1899–1902. Kruger left for Europe as the war turned against the Boers in 1900 and spent the rest of his life in exile. He died in Switzerland at the age of 78 in 1904, and was buried with his wife Elsje, his two children and two grandchildren.
About Paul Kruger in brief
Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger (10 October 1825 – 14 July 1904) was a South African politician. He was one of the dominant political and military figures in 19th-century South Africa. Nicknamed Oom Paul, he came to international prominence as the face of the Boer cause against Britain during the Second Boer War of 1899–1902. He has been called a personification of Afrikanerdom, and remains a controversial and divisive figure. Kruger left for Europe as the war turned against the Boers in 1900 and spent the rest of his life in exile, refusing to return home following the British victory. His body was returned to South Africa for a state funeral, and buried in the Heroes’ Acre in Pretoria. His first two names were chosen after his paternal grandfather, Johannes Paul, but rarely used. He died in Switzerland at the age of 78 in 1904, and was buried in a private ceremony in the city of Pretoria, where he was buried with his wife Elsje, his two children and two grandchildren. His last name was changed to Paulus, after his maternal grandfather’s first name, Johannes Meintjes Meintes, but his last name remained a mystery until 1974 when a biographer wrote a biography of him. He had almost no education apart from the Bible, and through his interpretation believed the Earth was flat. His paternal ancestors had been in South Africa since 1713, when Jacob Krüger, from Berlin, arrived in Cape Town as a 17-year-old soldier in the Dutch East India Company’s service.
His great-grand-uncle Hermanus Steyn had been president of the self-declared Republic of Swellendam that revolted against Dutch Company rule in 1795. His mother’s family, the Steyns, had lived in South African since 1668 and were relatively affluent and cultured by Cape standards. The Kruger and Steyn families were acquainted as a young man and visited Bulhoek and Casper Gerbrand occasionally as a man. He married Elsie Cradock in 1820, when he was 19 and she was 14, and they had a boy and a girl, Sophia, born before Paul was born in 1825. The family was of Dutch-speaking Afrikaaner or Boer background, of German, French Huguenot and Dutch stock. He served until 1883 as a member of an executive triumvirate, then was elected President. In 1884 he headed a third deputation that brokered the London Convention, under which Britain recognised the South African Republic as a fully independent state. The uitlander problem and the associated tensions with Britain dominated Kruger’s attention for the remainder of his presidency, to which he was re-elected in 1888, 1893 and 1898, and led to the Jameson Raid of 1895–96 and ultimately the SecondBoer War. His children dropped the umlaut from the family name, a common practice among South Africans of German origin.
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