Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger (Afrikaans pronunciation: [ˈkry.(j)ər]; 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, and State President of the South African Republic (or Transvaal) from 1883 to 1900. Nicknamed "Oom Paul" (Afrikaans for 'Uncle 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 admirers venerate him as a tragic folk hero.
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. 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. In 1863 he was elected Commandant-General, a post he held for a decade; he resigned soon after the election of President Thomas François Burgers.
Kruger was appointed vice president in March 1877, shortly before the South African Republic was annexed by Britain as the Transvaal. Over the next three years he headed two deputations to London to try to have this overturned. He became the leading figure in the movement to restore the South African Republic's independence, culminating in the Boers' victory in the First Boer War of 1880–1881. Kruger 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 completely independent state.
Following the influx of thousands of predominantly British settlers with the Witwatersrand Gold Rush of 1886, "uitlanders" (foreigners) provided almost all of the South African Republic's tax revenues but lacked civic representation; Boer burghers retained control of the government. The uitlander problem and the associated tensions with Britain dominated Kruger's attention for the rest of his presidency, to which he was re-elected in 1888, 1893 and 1898, and led to the Jameson Raid of 1895–1896 and ultimately the Second Boer War. 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. After he died in Switzerland at the age of 78 in 1904, his body was returned to South Africa for a state funeral, and buried in the Heroes' Acre in Pretoria.
Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger was born on 10 October 1825 at Bulhoek, a farm in the Steynsburg area of the Cape Colony, the third child and second son of Casper Jan Hendrik Kruger (1801–1852), a farmer, and his wife Elsje (Elisa; née Steyn; 1806–1834). The family was of Dutch-speaking Afrikaner background, and of German, French Huguenot and Dutch stock. They also had some Khoi ancestry as descendants of the colonial era South African interpreter Krotoa.
The Kruger family’s paternal ancestors had lived 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. Jacob's children dropped the umlaut from the family name, a common practice among South Africans of German origin. Over the following generations, Kruger's paternal forebears moved into the interior. His mother's family, the Steyns, had lived in South Africa since 1668 and were relatively affluent and cultured by Cape standards. Kruger's great-grand-uncle Hermanus Steyn had been president of the self-declared Republic of Swellendam that revolted against Company rule in 1795.
Bulhoek, Kruger's birthplace, was the Steyn family farm and had been Elsie's home since early childhood; her father Douw Gerbrand Steyn had settled there in 1809. The Kruger and Steyn families were acquainted and Casper occasionally visited Bulhoek as a young man. He and Elsie married in Cradock in 1820, when he was 19 and she was 14. A girl, Sophia, and a boy, Douw Gerbrand, were born before Paul was born in 1825. His first two names, Stephanus Johannes, were chosen after his paternal grandfather, but rarely used. The provenance of the third given name, Paulus, "was to remain rather a mystery", Johannes Meintjes wrote in his 1974 biography of Kruger, "and yet the boy was always called Paul."
Paul Kruger was baptised at Cradock on 19 March 1826. Soon thereafter his parents acquired a farm of their own to the north-west at Vaalbank, near Colesberg, in the remote north-east of the Cape Colony. His mother died when he was eight; his father Casper soon remarried and had more children with his second wife, Heiletje (née du Plessis). Beyond reading and writing, which he learned from relatives, the only education Kruger received was three months of study under a travelling tutor, Tielman Roos, and Calvinist religious instruction from his father. In adulthood, Kruger would claim to have never read any book apart from the Bible.
In 1834 Casper Kruger, his father, and his brothers Gert and Theuns moved their families east and set up farms near the Caledon River, on the Cape Colony's far north-eastern frontier. The Cape had been under British sovereignty since 1814 when the Netherlands ceded it to Britain with the Convention of London. Boer discontent with aspects of British rule, such as the institution of English as the sole official language, led to the Great Trek—a mass migration by Dutch-speaking "Voortrekkers" north-east from the Cape to the land on the far side of the Orange and Vaal rivers. Many Boers had been expressing displeasure with the British Cape administration for some time, but the Krugers were comparatively content. They had always co-operated with the British, and had not owned slaves. They had given little thought to the idea of leaving the Cape.
A group of emigrants under Hendrik Potgieter passed through the Krugers' Caledon encampments in early 1836. Potgieter envisioned a Boer republic with himself in a prominent role; he sufficiently impressed the Krugers that they joined his party of Voortrekkers. Kruger's father continued to give the children religious education in the Boer fashion during the trek, having them recite or write down biblical passages from memory each day after lunch and dinner. At stops along the journey, the trekkers made improvised classrooms, marking them with reeds and grass. The more educated emigrants took turns in teaching.
The Voortrekkers faced indigenous competition for the area they were entering from Mzilikazi and his Ndebele (or Matabele) people, a branch from the Zulu Kingdom to the south-east. On 16 October 1836, the 11-year-old Kruger took part in the Battle of Vegkop, where Potgieter's laager, a circle of wagons chained together, was unsuccessfully attacked by Mzilikazi and around 4,000–6,000 Matabele warriors. Kruger and the other small children assisted in tasks such as bullet-casting, while the women and larger boys helped the fighting men, of whom there were about 40. Kruger could recall the battle in great detail and give a vivid account well into old age.
During 1837 and 1838 Kruger's family was part of the Voortrekker group under Potgieter that trekked further east into Natal. Here they met the American missionary Daniel Lindley, who gave young Paul much spiritual invigoration. The Zulu King Dingane concluded a land treaty with Potgieter. But he reconsidered and massacred first Piet Retief's party of settlers, then others at Weenen. Kruger later recounted his family's group coming under attack from Zulus soon after the Retief massacre, describing "children pinioned to their mothers' breasts by spears, or with their brains dashed out on waggon wheels". But "God heard our prayer", he recalled, and "we followed them and shot them down as they fled, until more of them were dead than those of us they had killed in their attack ... I could shoot moderately well for we lived, so to speak, among the game."