Litnet

“The only people we think of as normal are those we don’t know very well.” – Sigmund Freud

“History is a branch of literature, not science.” – Antony Beevor, British historian

Photo supplied by the author, with acknowledgement to The Illustrated London News record of the Transvaal War, London, pub. 1901.

There you can see it, in the photo above, clearly visible: Kruger’s earring.

It’s taken me years of sleuthing to finally nail the ring in his left lobe, allegedly the wedding ring of his first wife. I’ve had a bit of an obsession about it, ever since reading, in a since mislaid article 50 years ago, that it was an actual adornment on the Kruger ear.

Having read about it, I was immediately fixed on locating a portrait of the great man sporting the earring. I then paid a visit to Kruger House, the historical home (now a museum) of Kruger. But in front of a large, contemporary oil painting of Oom Paul, I discovered that my search was in vain, because on closer inspection, the painting had obviously been tampered with; fairly recent paint was crudely overlain on the earlobe to cover up the exact spot where an earring might once have been visible.

I then fell into a rather heated discussion with the museum custodian, who angrily dismissed my suggestion that Paul Kruger had once worn an earring, and who denied that the painting had been altered in any way. This was in the seventies, when any suggestion that Kruger was given to wearing jewellery of any kind, let alone an earring like a common hippy, was clearly a slur too far on the reputation of the father of Afrikanerdom. I was shown the door in an icy huff.

Ever since then, I have searched high and low for any photo or painting that might show Kruger wearing an earring – and have been constantly surprised by what seems to have been further attempts to expunge the evidence of same, rather like those unpopular Russian politicians being airbrushed out of group photos. So, you can well imagine my absolute delight when a pristine, popular, illustrated account of the Boer War, which had lain unread in a Welsh attic for over 100 years, was gifted to me by a good friend recently. This contained the photo of Kruger proudly and romantically advertising his earring, like a latter day Raleigh, or Drake.

There are many books and articles written about President Kruger, including his own memoir. In general, he comes across as a rather dour fellow, a tragic hero to his admirers and an anachronistic throwback to his detractors. He is a classic late nineteenth century figure, whose image has been whitewashed, even deified, by his supporters or sabotaged by his enemies. He reminds one a bit of Bismarck, perhaps, or one of those Italian leaders – a regular Garibaldi, all beard and medals and sashes.

His statue in Church Square, like all those statues of South American or European heroes, is a haven for pigeons. However, the respected travel writer Jan Morris was much taken with him in her first visit to Pretoria in 1958.¹ His was not an immediately endearing figure, she wrote, noting that although “no uglier man ever lived”, there was an overpowering sense of pathos to his presence.

Like I did, Jan Morris also visited Kruger’s house, with its marble lions at the door and the rocking chair on which Kruger used to sit, cocking a snook at the British and accepting telegrams of goodwill from the Kaiser. Morris finds a pocketknife once belonging to Kruger, preserved inside the museum, and thinks this is the most pertinent of all the variegated Afrikaner totems. It was with this pocketknife that Kruger amputated his own thumb after a hunting accident. The wound went gangrenous and was cured only by plunging the hand into the entrails of a freshly killed goat. Kruger often related the tale proudly, and Morris says that the “soul of a people is crystallised in that old pocketknife” – nothing being more vividly expressive of the “Afrikaner tradition of hardships, rebuffs, gangrenous attacks, brave women, huntsmen, knives, stoical courage and old Boer remedies”.

And so it is with Kruger’s earring. I begin to see a new man emerging through the prism of that earring. Someone who didn’t give a toss what others thought of him, and who was perhaps more of a colourful character than we generally suppose, radiating gruff bonhomie and goodwill, and a lot more sophisticated than one might think.

His earring may not have been only a sentimental gesture to a dead wife. It may have held additional symbolic significance. In history, sailors wore earrings as a superstitious safeguard against drowning, and other cultures wore them to denote rebellion and consistency of purpose and affiliation.

President Kruger’s earring, in this sense, may therefore not be just a piece of jewellery; it could be a symbol deeply embedded in the history and identity of South Africa, carrying historical, cultural and political significance. In this sense, the earring is an iconic accessory, representing Kruger’s traditional Boer values, rugged individualism and defiance against Britain.

Perhaps he also wore the earring as a visual marker of his identity, distinguishing him from the British officials and representatives he often clashed with. After all, in England, only labourers, “navvies”, able seamen and the like wore earrings. Upper-class gentlemen certainly did not. While the British sought to impose their authority and customs on South Africa, Kruger’s earring stood as a reminder of his refusal to conform.

For there is no doubt that the British were rattled by Kruger in more ways than one. An official British history of the Boer War² notes that “notwithstanding his humble origins, [Kruger] had proved perhaps the most astute and formidable enemy that England ever encountered” – and that Kruger’s aim to wage war on England in alliance with Germany had only very narrowly been averted.

For Kruger to have been considered a more dangerous enemy to Britain than even Napoleon was, speaks volumes. This was no “Boer peasant”, as British publications dismissed him as, but a very focused, modern man indeed who knew exactly what he wanted.

Quite apart from his earring, Kruger manifested other marks of a hitherto unsuspected sophistication. His “simple” Kruger house, for a start, was not as simple as we think. He lived there from 1884 for 15 years, in an architect-designed building, with Renaissance touches, cornice-moulded gables, and drawing and dining rooms large enough to seat 60 guests in elegant splendour. He gave dinner parties. Nor was this his only house – he was a canny investor and owned various plots of land and houses around Pretoria.

In fact, he was a rich man by today’s standards. He was also not untravelled, having journeyed abroad, teaching himself English with the help of a bilingual Bible. The man who constantly underrated Kruger was Cecil John Rhodes, architect of the Cape to Cairo dream and instigator of the Boer War.

Kruger got under Rhodes’s skin. In January 1895 while on a visit to Britain, Rhodes’s ambition to become a member of the exclusive Travellers Club was stymied when he was anonymously “blackballed” by a member. To this day, there is no more intolerable insult than to be “blackballed” from membership of any one of the fringe of clubs that run along Pall Mall in London. It means being refused membership because you are regarded as not being a fit and proper person.

Rhodes was known as a moody, even choleric, individual, and this personal slight must have tipped him over the edge. He was on the lookout to pick a fight and completely overreacted when President Kruger, shortly afterwards, gave a sophisticated speech at a banquet at a German Club, proposing a toast to the Kaiser. Kruger said in his speech that the Transvaal was no longer an infant nation, that it was growing up, and that he was confident Germany would help provide the republic with an “adult’s wardrobe”.

His confidence was not misplaced. Germany was even then supplying big Krupp cannon and Maxim machine guns to the Boers for the forts in Pretoria and Johannesburg.

Rhodes admitted afterwards³ that it was this German-minded speech of Kruger’s that finally impelled him to action. Rhodes feared that Germany was on the verge of occupying southern Africa from the west coast to the east coast with the help of Kruger.

He said that some quarrel would have to be picked – “some question of guns or brandy or something”. Rhodes’s biographer, Sarah Millen, noted that Rhodes was sick and frustrated and “could not control” the enormous anger and wild passion he vented. She observed that there was one thing that from the very beginning had infuriated Rhodes against Kruger, and it infuriated him until the day he died – the fact that he had been hindered throughout his career, not by a Great Power, but by the unlettered leader of a struggling nation; “Rhodes did mean … that Kruger wasn’t a fit opponent for him.”

Maybe it was also Kruger’s earring that infuriated him, that emphasised in English terms the unbridgeable class divide. A divide, it must be said, of Rhodes’s own making – his family were brick makers and farmers, his father a small town English vicar whose sermons lasted exactly ten minutes. Kruger’s earring may have been the final straw for Rhodes – the earring that launched the Boer War, so to speak.

And so, we now see the earring-wearing Kruger in a different light – the “unlettered leader” who outsmarted Rhodes and who saw through him, himself an agent of empire, an emotionally incontinent man blackballed by the Travellers Club. Rhodes had been “put in his place”.

Rhodes had a very bad-tempered death from heart disease at only 48 years old, in a corrugated iron shed in Cape Town with a hole torn in the side to give him air. But Kruger, who was to die a few years later, was now seen to live the kind of sophisticated life that very few of us could aspire to.

Shortly before the British occupation of Pretoria and the start of the guerrilla war, with heroes like General Louis Botha and De la Rey rampaging across the veld, President Kruger left for Europe. He went together with Mr Marais, the auditor-general of the Transvaal; Mr Grobler, the under-secretary of Foreign Affairs; the archives of the Transvaal; and a considerable quantity of gold, estimated by the British to be in the region of two million pounds (worth 308 million pounds today). Holland sent a warship to collect him from the Portuguese colony of today’s Mozambique in 1900, and in no time Kruger was rubbing shoulders with the great and good of France, Holland and Germany.

Kruger’s hope was to mobilise European opinion on his side, and he was given a hero’s welcome wherever he went. But behind the scenes, the British were rebuilding their friendship with Germany and France, and the Transvaal president was obliged to concede that the game was up and that Britain would likely win the war.

His final years were initially spent in Menton, one of the most attractive and sophisticated French towns on the Mediterranean coastline. At the turn of the 1900s, Menton was where the rich went to spend the winter. It was then, as it is today, a beacon of sophistication, with hotels that cost a fortune for a single night’s stay.

Kruger lived with his entourage in some comfort; perhaps he even had a suite at the palatial Hotel Royal Westminster (built in 1870) in Menton. He spent a couple of seasons in Menton – two years. A photograph shows Kruger going for his morning walk, his entourage flanking him. Everyone is smiling cheerfully – including Kruger, beautifully dressed in a well-cut suit. Suddenly, warmth emanates from him, this earring-wearing paragon. He seems likably human.

His last laager was in the Swiss village of Clarens, not far from Geneva. I visited the extremely elegant villa – which would have made a significant dent in the so-called “Kruger millions” – some years ago, and inspected the Kruger “museum” exhibits. There was nothing simple or rustic about this place; it was the embodiment of fin de siècle elegance and seemed to be completely at odds with the rustic soul Kruger is supposed to have been. It later passed into the ownership of the South African government.

From his balcony, he could look out over Lake Geneva and reflect that he’d come a long way in his 78 years. He caught a cold, which turned into pneumonia – that “old man’s friend” – and he died in 1904. He was given a proper burial in Pretoria.

Both his wives had predeceased him. He had 16 children, and his family with grandchildren and great-grandchildren was in the region of 200 strong. A vigorous, earring-wearing man, in other words. Nobody was going to push him around – that’s what I think his earring said about Paul Kruger.

Or was it two earrings? One in the right ear and one in the left ear. Certainly, painter Gregoire Boonzaier thought so; his 1937 painting of Oom Paul seems to capture a golden ring in his right ear, if you look closely. Of course, by then Kruger was long dead, and so now is Boonzaier. We’ll never know why he painted it in, but at least we have the left ear now as a definite.

¹ Jan Morris, South African winter. Faber and Faber, 1958.

² HW Wilson, After Pretoria: The Guerilla War. Amalgamated Press Ltd, London, 1902.

³ Sarah Gertrude Millen, Rhodes. Chatto and Windus, London, 1933.

Also read:

Wie was op De Huisgenoot se eerste voorblad in 1916?