Pretoria - It’s a far cry from Mahlamba Ndlopfu atop Meintjie’s Ridge to the east of Pretoria, but the little house down Church Street, at the opposite boundary of the CBD, was as important in its day.
Number 60 Church Street, as it was (60 WF Nkomo Street today), is an unprepossessing single-storey bungalow, notable only for the two lions just off the stoep, on either side of the path from the gate. One lion sleeps, the other’s eyes are open. It seems to be smiling.
This is the house that Paul Kruger lived in, as president of the old Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek or Transvaal. Kruger – and his home – prove the adage: one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.
The British, particularly the Randlords in Joburg, loathed him. They lampooned him as a backward backwoodsman, illiterate, ill-tempered and ill-advised. The rest of the world thought he was a hero for taking on the British empire and giving it a bloody nose – twice. You see that just beyond the house, where the complex extends to two display halls and a railway coach. The house was the first to be electrified in Pretoria – and had one of the first phones too – and the interior is surprising in the elegance and opulence of its furnishings. It’s a far cry from riempie stoele and rough-hewn tables from ox wagon timbers that a less sanguine visitor might expect. One of the halls reflects the esteem in which Kruger was held by the rest of the world, particularly Europe – from Paris to Vladivostok. The exhibits range from illustrated messages of solidarity to an amazing array of Kruger miscellany from beer to cigarettes and playing cards, not forgetting the cartoons, the pictures, the magazine covers. Just more than 100 years later it’s not a world away from the plethora of artefacts around Nelson Mandela – except in Madiba’s case it’s wine, not beer.
After the British rolled up the Boer republics – after the unimaginable reverses of Black Week the year before – taking Bloemfontein and Joburg, the Transvaal republic decided to send its state president out of the capital to continue the fight in exile. Kruger and the cabinet climbed aboard the presidential coach at the end of May 1900 and left for Waterval Boven, just ahead of the advancing imperial troops. Pretoria duly fell and Kruger stayed in Mpumalanga until September, when he boarded a ship for Europe and an exile from which he would never return.
The second hall records this exile and with it a copy of his last message to his vanquished volk, via his trusted Boer general Louis Botha.
By now, the war was over and Botha was prime minister of the new Transvaal colony, en route to becoming the inaugural prime minister of the Union of South Africa.
He had asked Oom Paul to consider coming home. The diehard republican would have none of it. “I was born under the British flag, I have no desire of dying under it,” was his riposte in what would be his final missive to his people.
Shortly afterwards, he died in Clarens, Switzerland, and, with the permission of the colonial authorities, his remains were transported back to South Africa for a hero’s funeral and interring three blocks away in the Church Street Cemetery.
Kevin Ritchie, Saturday Star
A short history of Oom Kruger
Paul Kruger was born in the Colesberg district in the Cape Colony on October 10, 1825. He and his family were part of the Great Trek, joining Voortrekker leader Andries Potgieter. They settled in the Rustenburg district in the North West.
Kruger first married Maria du Plessis in 1842 and when she died, married her cousin Gezina, who bore him 16 children.
Active in nationalist politics, he played a major role in the first Anglo Boer War between 1889 and 1891 after Britain annexed the Transvaal.
Kruger bought the plot in Church Street in the 1860s while he was still farming in Rustenburg. When the Transvaal became independent again in 1881, Kruger moved to Pretoria permanently and was elected president of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek in May 1883 at the age of 57.
His house was built the following year. The quality of cement was so bad that the builders had to mix it with milk instead of water.
Randlord Barney Barnato presented Kruger with the two lions as a birthday present on October 10, 1896. Eight months later, Barnato was dead, lost in the Atlantic in mysterious circumstances, off a ship going back to Britain.
Next door to Kruger’s house was the ZAR police headquarters, which then became the Native Pass Office and latterly the Bantu Commissioner’s Office. Today it is the Ditsong national museum head office.
Opening times 8.30am to 5.30pm Monday to Friday, weekends 9am to 5pm. Closed on Good Friday and Christmas Day.
Entrance fees: Adults R35, children under 15 R15.