page_title: Paul Kruger
section_title: Resurgence
hierarchical_section_title: Paul Kruger / President / Resurgence
caption_attribution_description: English: Official portrait of State President M.T. Steyn of the Orange Free State, in office 1896-1902
context_page_description: Stephanus Johannes Paulus "Paul" Kruger was a South African politician. He was one of the dominant political and military figures in 19th-century South Africa, and President of the South African Republic from 1883 to 1900. Nicknamed Oom Paul, he came to international prominence as the face of the Boer cause—that of the Transvaal and its neighbour the Orange Free State—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; admirers venerate him as a tragic folk hero, and critics view him as the obstinate guardian of an unjust cause.
  Born near the eastern edge of the Cape Colony, Kruger took part in the Great Trek as a child during the late 1830s. He had almost no education apart from the Bible, and through his interpretation believed the Earth was flat. A protégé of the Voortrekker leader Andries Pretorius, he witnessed the signing of the Sand River Convention with Britain in 1852 and over the next decade played a prominent role in the forging of the South African Republic, leading its commandos and resolving disputes between the rival Boer leaders and factions.
context_section_description: The Jameson Raid ruined Rhodes's political reputation in the Cape and lost him his longstanding support from the Afrikaner Bond; he resigned as prime minister of the Cape Colony on 12 January. Kruger's handling of the affair made his name a household word across the world and won him much support from Afrikaners in the Cape and the Orange Free State, who began to visit Pretoria in large numbers. The President granted personal audiences to travellers and writers such as Olive Schreiner and Frank Harris, and wore the knightly orders of the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium and France on his sash of state. Jameson was jailed by the British but released after four months. The republic made armament one of its main priorities, ordering huge quantities of rifles, munitions, field guns and howitzers, primarily from Germany and France.
  In March 1896 Marthinus Theunis Steyn, the young lawyer Kruger had encountered on the ship to England two decades earlier, became President of the Orange Free State. They quickly won each other's confidence; each man's memoirs would describe the other in glowing terms. Chamberlain began to take exception to the South African Republic's diplomatic actions, such as joining the Geneva Convention, which he said breached Article IV of the London Convention (which forbade extraterritorial dealings except vis-a-vis the Orange Free State). Chamberlain asserted that the Transvaal was still under British suzerainty, a claim Kruger called "nonsensical". Kruger and Steyn concluded a treaty of trade and friendship in Bloemfontein in March 1897, along with a fresh military alliance binding each republic to defend the other's independence. Two months later Sir Alfred Milner became the new high commissioner and governor in Cape Town.
  Kruger developed a habit of threatening to resign whenever the volksraad did not give him his way. In the 1897 session there was much surprise when the new member Louis Botha reacted to the usual proffered resignation by leaping up and moving to accept it. A constitutional crisis developed after the judiciary under Chief Justice Kotzé abandoned its prior stance of giving volksraad resolutions legal precedence over the constitution. "This decision would have upset the whole country", Kruger recalled, "for a number of rules concerning the goldfields, the franchise and so on depended on resolutions of the volksraad." Chief Justice De Villiers of the Cape mediated, sided with Kruger and upheld the volksraad decrees.
  Kruger was never more popular domestically than during the 1897–98 election campaign, and indeed was widely perceived to be jollier than he had been in years. He won his most decisive election victory yet—12,853 votes to Joubert's 2,001 and Schalk Willem Burger's 3,753—and was sworn in as president for the fourth time on 12 May 1898. After a three-hour inauguration address, his longest speech as president, his first act of his fourth term was to sack Kotzé, who was still claiming the right to test legislation in the courts. To Kruger's critics this lent much credence to the notion that he was a tyrant.  Milner called Kotzé's dismissal "the end of real justice in the Transvaal" and a step that "threatened all British subjects and interests there".
  Kruger's final administration was, Meintjes suggests, the strongest in the history of the republic. He had the former Free State President F W Reitz as State Secretary from June 1898 and Leyds, who set up an office in Brussels, as Envoy Extraordinary in Europe. The post of State Attorney was given to a young lawyer from the Cape called Jan Smuts, for whom Kruger presaged great things. The removal of Leyds to Europe marked the end of Kruger's longstanding policy of giving important government posts to Dutchmen; convinced of Cape Afrikaners' sympathy following the Jameson Raid, he preferred them from this point on.
caption: President Marthinus Theunis Steyn of the Orange Free State
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "{\"subsource\":\"done_button\",\"uid\":\"D6F36DED-B6FC-4BA3-BB82-CD549B447625_1586281758535\",\"source\":\"editor\",\"origin\":\"gallery\",\"source_sid\":\"D6F36DED-B6FC-4BA3-BB82-CD549B447625_1586281758543\"}", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "144", "Image YResolution": "144", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "PicsArt", "Image DateTime": "2020:04:07 10:49:90", "Image ExifOffset": "344", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2020:04:07 10:49:90", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1219", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1822"}