First Kruger House
Paul Kruger’s first home at Boekenhoudfontein.
by Vincent Carruthers, author.
Locality
Take the N4 west through Rustenburg and take Exit 169 to the Ottoman Highway north. After 10km take the 1st exit at the roundabout onto the R565. After 2.3km the entrance to Kedar Heritage Lodge is on the left. Enquire at reception for access to the Kruger houses.
What can be seen
The house was built by Paul Kruger soon after he acquired the farm Boekenhoutfontein. It has been restored to its original condition and exhibits articles that were previously housed in the Rustenburg Museum before its closure in the mid-1990s. They include kitchen equipment and carpentry tools from the 1860s.
FIRST KRUGER HOUSE – BOEKENHOUTFONTEIN
Kruger’s first house on Boekenhoutfontein built between 1862 and 1872.
Narrative
Soon after buying the farm Boekenhoutfontein, Kruger built a small house for his own use. It was similar in design to the Bronkhorst house, with simple accommodation and peach-pit floor. The house was built in the decade between 1863 and 1873 when the larger main house was erected.
Politically and personally that decade was a turbulent time in the life of Paul Kruger. Immediately after his appointment as Commandant-General in 1863, a Boer faction calling itself ‘the people’s army’ under Commandant J.W. Viljoen of Marico, rebelled against the presidency of Martinus Pretorius and, as head of the state army, Kruger found himself fighting in a minor civil war against some of his own people. The rift was reconciled in 1864 but a new problem to the north threatened to discredit Kruger. The Boer settlement at Schoemansdal was attacked by the Venda chief, Makhado, and Kruger’s punitive commando was unable to prevent the town being sacked by the Venda and abandoned.
At the same time he became deeply involved in the nefarious ‘inboekseling’ system whereby black children were kidnapped in raids on local communities and put to work as child labour on Boer farms – a thinly disguised form of slavery. Many of the child-trafficking raids were carried out on his behalf by the powerful Kgatla chief, Kgosi Kgamanyane, who had an uneasy submissive-cum-collaborative relationship with Kruger. Kgamanyane would bring captured children to Kruger at Boekenhoutfontein where, in his capacity as Commandant-General, he would allocate them among farmers in the district.
Kruger had acquired the Bakgatla and Bafokeng homelands as his own farms, Saulspoort and Kookfontein, and he demanded indentured labour as ‘rent’ from people living on their ancestral land. Boekenhoudfontein lay close to both of these tribal centres and was a useful base from which to conduct this activity.
A crisis arose in 1870 when the Volksraad legislated against unpaid indentured labour. Kgamanyane refused to continue supplying men as labourers and, in defiance of the legislation, Kruger had him publicly flogged by veldkornet Harklaas Malan. In protest, more than 10,000 BaKgatla migrated from the Rustenburg district to a new homeland at Mochudi in Bechuanaland. The exodus crippled the labour-dependant Boers farms around Rustenburg and Kruger faced a Volksraad commission of enquiry. He was eventually exonerated, but in 1871 Thomas Burgers was elected President of the Transvaal and his enlightened views were anathema to the conservative Kruger. He relinquished his position as Commandant General in 1873, moved his home to Boekenhoutfontein and temporarily withdrew from public life.