Stephanus Johannes Paulus 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, and State President of the South African Republic (or Transvaal) from 1883 to 1900. Nicknamed Oom Paul (“Uncle Paul”), he came to international prominence as the face of the Boer cause—that of the Transvaal and its neighbor 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 figure; admirers venerate him as a tragic folk hero.
He took part in the Great Trek as a child during the late 1830s. At the age of 11 he killed a lion to save his uncle’s life. 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.
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 recognized the South African Republic as a completely independent state.
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.
Gezina, with whom Kruger had had 16 children—nine sons, seven daughters (of whom some died young), had eight sickly grandchildren transferred to her from the concentration camp at Krugersdorp, where their mother had died, in July 1901. Five of the eight children died within nine days, and two weeks later Gezina also died. A “strange silence” enveloped Kruger thereafter. By now partially blind and almost totally deaf, he dictated his memoirs to his secretary Hermanus Christiaan “Madie” Bredell and Pieter Grobler during the latter part of 1901,
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.
“Kruger is the central figure of Boer history and one of the “most extraordinary” of South Africans”.