A feature of Kruger's long life was the endless "Native Wars" he was a part of.
Kruger was involved, on commando, in over twenty of these, beginning at Vechtkop. Between the ages of 27 and 42 Kruger took part in nine major campaigns..
These campaigns did not always go well for the Boers.
In the North, in the late 1860's the Venda overran and burned down Schoemansdal (1867) and Potgietersrust (1868) despite the efforts of Kruger's commando to save the area. The Soutpansberg and Waterberg districts, the area between the Limpopo and Olifants Rivers, was mostly abandoned by the Boers. Kruger was repeatedly criticised for "allowing" Schoemansdal to be burned - he claimed to have had too little ammunition to save the town.
In the 1870's the Pedi in the east raided Boer farmers with impunity - around this time more than half of the Boers retreated to the southern half of the state. In 1871 Kruger declared that local Africans were "the fervent enemies of the whites, and would not let the whites remain in the country for a single day".
It took the British occupation of the ZAR (1877 to 1881) to turn the tables on the local Africans, and it was only from the early 1880's that the trekkers began to win the wars and control of the land.
These wars served four purposes for Kruger and his people.
Firstly, many were wars of revenge and punishment. The above printed notes from Kruger's Memoirs describe terrible attacks on the boers, with massacres of "the innocents", women and children. Possibly these stories were exaggerated over time, but the reality was that the small boer trek-parties were endlessly threatened, and death on the veld was an everyday reality.
It was of course not just the boers who were massacred. We have noted above Kruger's description of captives being "court-martialled" and shot. It is easy to imagine the tribesmens' people seeing this as an unjustified massacre. There was more also. In August 1858 a patrol under Kruger, then Assistant Commandant-General, captured Gasebone, a chief who had given them many challenges. "His head was sent to Mahura (another chief) as proof of his death, no novelty this in frontier war".
With such atrocities underway, it is understandable that both sides, boers and Africans, would repeatedly rise in raids of punishment and revenge. War creates war.
Secondly, the wars were about livestock. There is hardly an example of a skirmish in which the winning side didn't run off with the livestock of the weaker party. Obviously, as their herds increased considerably over time, the boers were the long-term winners.
Thirdly, the wars were about slaves.
From the beginning, in fact from before the beginning, the trekkers of the Great Trek verbally renounced slavery. The statement Piet Retief sent to the Grahamstown Journal before trekking off included "no one shall be held in a state of slavery". Both the Sand River Convention (which gave a style of independence to the ZAR) and the Bloemfontein Convention (ditto, Free State), stated that the new governments would not allow slavery in their territories.
The reality on the ground was quite different.
Women and children became the spoils of victory. This was vigorously denied by the boers, who claimed the stories of slavery or apprenticeship was the fabrication of malicious missionaries. One such missionary was David Livingstone.
In 1852 Kruger was deputy-commandant in an expedition sent to crush Secheli, a chief of the Bakwains (Kwena) who was a friend of Livingstone's. Kruger's memoirs read:
After hostilities were concluded, Commandant Scholtz sent up to the house of Livingstone, the English missionary, which was not far from the Kaffir town. Here Theunis Pretorius found a complete workshop for repairing guns, and a quantity of materials of war which Livingstone was storing for Secheli. This was a breach of the Sand River Convention of 1852, which prescribed that neither arms nor ammunition should be supplied to the Kaffirs, and that they should not be permitted to provide either for themselves. Scholtz accordingly confiscated the missionary's arsenal, and in consequence the Boers were abused by Livingstone throughout the length and breadth of England, and slandered in every possible way as enemies of the missionaries and cruel persecutors of the blacks.
Predictably, Livingstone saw it differently:
The Boers, four hundred in number, were sent by the late Mr Pretorius to attack the Bakwains in 1852, and, besides slaughtering a considerable number of adults, carried off two hundred of our school-children into slavery. The people under Sechele defended themselves till the approach of night enabled them to flee to the mountains; and having killed a number of the enemy, the first ever slain by Bechuanas, I had the credit of having taught them to destroy Boers! My house was plundered in revenge. English gentlemen, who had come in the footsteps of Mr Cumming to hunt in the country beyond, and had left large quantities of stores in the keeping of the natives, were robbed of everything; and when they came back to Kolobeng found the skeletons of the guardians strewed about the place. The books of a good library - my solace in our solitude - were torn to pieces and scattered about. My stock of medicines was smashed; and all our furniture and clothing were carried off and sold by public auction to pay the expenses of the foray.
This all fell into a pattern of similar behaviour, Livingstone believed.
Many of them (the Boers) felt aggrieved by the emancipation of their Hottentot slaves, and determined to remove to distant localities where they could erect themselves into a republic, and pursue without molestation the ‘proper treatment of the blacks'. This ‘proper treatment' has always involved the essential element of slavery - compulsory unpaid labour (13).
I have myself seen Boers come to a village, and, according to their custom, demand twenty or thirty women to weed their gardens. These poor creatures accordingly proceeded to the scene of unrequited toil, carrying their own food on their heads, their children on their backs, and instruments of labour on their shoulders. ‘We make the people work for us', said the Boers, ‘in consideration of allowing them to live in our country'.
Livingstone had many more unpleasant slaving stories to tell, and these are backed up by J.M. Orpen, who served for a while as a landdrost in the Free State, and who recorded many details of "apprenticeships", which were, in fact, the end product of the raiding of tribes and the removal of (mostly male) children to be then trained as servants.(15).
In this way, farm labour was acquired.
Did this all happen? Of course. We have already quoted Kruger in this regard, and there are more references to children being "ingeboekt" in his Memoirs.
The taking on of apprentices became so commonplace that in 1851 the ZAR Volksraad issued an Apprentice Act to attempt to regulate this activity. This act allowed boers to indenture African children "given as gifts or obtained in any other legal or voluntary manner", called for their release from indentures when they reached twenty five, and allowed the sale of inboekelinge from boer to boer. Kruger was censured by the Volksraad in 1867 for capturing women and children during an attack on the chief Machem, and distributing them amongst his commandoes - for there were not people left destitute after a war, but captives turned into slaves (M pg66). By 1858 the Rev van der Hoff wrote of the Transvaal boers: "they are not very energetic and prefer everything to be done by the Kaffirs". Most agriculture on the farms, Kruger's included, was done by blacks by this time.
Plainly "Native Wars" were useful opportunities to acquire farm labour.
The fourth, and most significant, characteristic of the "Native Wars" was the acquisition of land.
When the Kruger party and his trekker companions arrived north of the Vaal in 1841, the "Native Wars" quickly began. First it was the Ndabele, who immediately realized that this small number of boers in their wagons and with their guns, was a deadly threat to Ndabele occupancy and control of the land. After a few skirmishes, Mosilikatse decided "no more" and he trekked north of the Limpopo, where the Ndabele eventually established Bulawayo as their central settlement.
From this tiny beginning, a few wagons and a few families in 1841, the process of dispossession and acquisition of land flowed.
On the evening of 23 December 1898, a banquet was held in Pretoria. This was a victory banquet for burghers and the Government of the ZAR.
The conquering hero was the Transvaal Commander-in-Chief, Commandant-General Piet Joubert, and they were not giving him a send-off, they were celebrating his safe return. Joubert and his commandos had just marched back to Pretoria after subduing, with the help of their Creusot artillery, a troublesome African chief called Mpefu.
For the battle-hardened commandos, it was the triumphant end to half a dozen native wars in nearly as many years. No wonder that in the Grand Hotel, Pretoria, that evening the candlelight playing on the blue-and-gold uniforms of the state artillery and the green sash of the President reflected a certain swagger - a kind of imperial glow, Afrikaner-style - that would not have been out of place in the Hotel Cecil, London. The champagne, too, was excellent in Pretoria. Since they had grown rich on the profits of the Rand, the Boers had come to recognize that imported French wine, like imported French artillery, could add to the success of most occasions.
Oom Paul (‘Uncle Paul'), as the burghers affectionately called Kruger, spoke briefly at the banquet. For the last few years he had been visibly failing in health, plagued by eye trouble and other infirmities. Still, he remained a prodigy. At seventy-three he was a national monument in his own lifetime, a heroic survivor from the Great Trek. It was those days he recalled in his speech. He told the story, as he loved to tell it on every possible occasion, of his own part in crushing Dingaan and the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River.
‘I do not say what I heard', he said, speaking the taal (Afrikaans) in his gruff, jerky voice, ‘but what I have seen with my own eyes".
The significance of the evening was clear to all, and was not mentioned in the speeches. The final Black nation in the Transvaal had been subdued. The entire Transvaal was under white, boer, control. In Kruger's life, or fifty-seven years of it at least, the Transvaal had gone from a Blacks-only state to one dominated by white boers who now controlled all the land. The party went on late into the night.
Were these wars principally about land? Again, there is a clue in Kruger's Memoirs.
In 1865 the Great Basoto War broke out in the Free State. Kruger was deployed with about 800 men to "assist".
We held a council of war in which it was decided that the burghers of the South African Republic should receive farms in the territory which was not about to be freed of the enemy and hold them under the laws of the Orange Free State. This Government of the Free State was informed of this resolution. An attack was made on the Malap Mountains and met with perfect success. The enemy was driven off, a large number of his men killed and wounded and a quantity of cattle captured.
From there the commando marched further in the direction of Moshesh's town. On the way, near the Katskatsberg, we came upon a strong Kaffir force of about 20.000 men. The strength of the enemy may be estimated to some extent from the following observations. When we Boers first saw the Kaffir forces, who were all mounted, we noticed some loose cattle among them, but these seemed so few compared with the number of the Kaffirs that we concluded they were cattle which the Kaffirs had brought with them for food. But, when we had succeeded in capturing the cattle, we counted no less than 8.000 head. The Kaffirs made their way back to town, pursued by our men, and, after some more fighting, we managed to capture 80.000 more sheep, 8.000 oxen and a few hundred horses.
Commandant Fick here received word from President Brand of the Free State that he could not consent to the resolution, which had been passed at the council of war, by which Transvaal burghers were to obtain grants of ground in the reconquered territory to be held under the laws of the Free State. In consequence of this the burghers of the South African Republic refused to fight any longer and went home.
Rory Riordan founded the Human Rights Trust in Port Elizabeth in 1986, and was its director for seventeen years. He became an ANC City Councillor in 1994 and chaired Port Elizabeth's Finance Committee through six successive budgets, leaving local government in 2000. He is now a development activist, and has written over 200 newspaper columns and magazine articles. He is working on a book on South Africa up to union, of which this article is a part.
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