Transvaal president Paul Kruger might have died 120 years ago but he lives on in his restored farmhouses about 20km northwest of Rustenburg, in the grounds of Kedar Heritage Lodge, on land belonging to Recreation Africa.
Driving through the gate I felt my Joburg-stressed shoulders ease as I slowed right down to take in the scrubby thorn trees and brown tufts of bushveld grass, with koppies in the distance.
About 30 years ago the late Robert Forsyth bought a small piece of Boekenhoutfontein, the name of Kruger’s farm, and as he learnt more about the history of the farm, he purchased more land, then built the lodge. He then decided to theme the hotel around the history of that time and include the SA War as he loved military history, says his daughter, Sarah, the general manager at the lodge.
Now a game reserve of 500ha, with 500 head of game, including zebra, giraffe, wildebeest, eland, waterbuck and blesbok, it has several wetlands, fed by a stream rising in the koppies behind the houses. Kruger used the boekenhout (beechwood) trees growing on the farm in the construction of the houses.
The lodge offers conference facilities, a spa, two restaurants and, if you’re an SA War enthusiast, a smorgasbord of war memorabilia, from pith helmets, rifles, uniforms, portraits of war heroes and flags, to small mementoes like President Kruger playing cards and money boxes, pocket bibles, penknives, Victorian cut-throat razors, Christmas chocolate tins from Queen Victoria, tobacco tins and Gen Louis Botha’s silver-topped walking stick. You can even marvel at how Kruger fitted into his tiny tin bath, which now resides in the foyer.
The two restaurants — Heroes’ Bar and the Armoury Restaurant — are festooned with flags, and portraits and rifles line the walls, there is even a large wagon wheel light fitting.
If hunting is your thing, there is plenty of game. Forsyth has recently obtained her professional hunter qualification, and bubbles with enthusiasm over taking foreign and local hunters on guided hunts. “We hunt for culling, as we need to bring in more animals for the gene pool. Every three years we bring in new males,” she says.
About a kilometre from the lodge are the four farmhouses, two of which were built by Kruger. The oldest house, a simple three-roomed structure made of sun-dried mud walls, plastered with clay, and with thatched roof, was built sometime after 1840 when the first Voortrekkers reached the then Transvaal. It was built by Rudolph Bronkhorst, and is called the Bronkhorst House. As there was no glass in the Transvaal at the time, the small windows are closed with the wooden shutters of boekenhout.
Kruger bought his house from him in 1862, and set about building his own modest house nearby. It has thick whitewashed walls, a tall reed ceiling, thatched roof, and peach pip and cow-dung floor.
Kruger and Gezina, his second wife, who bore him 16 children (nine of whom survived), stayed in the house until 1873, when he built a double-storey house alongside it, a rare style in the Transvaal at the time. This first Kruger house now contains display cabinets with artefacts and implements used at the time, including a butter-making machine and wooden shoe moulds. It even has what is believed to be Kruger’s pump organ.
The double-storey house has a flat roof and flat façade, in typical Georgian style, which Kruger was familiar with from his childhood, having grown up in the Colesberg area. It has a cow-dung and blood floor, with tall wood-slated ceilings, and contains three small bedrooms. The dining room is wallpapered.
When restoration took place in 1977 by the Simon van der Stel Foundation, which had bought the property, a small piece of wallpaper was found. The sample was sent to the Netherlands, where it originally came from, and it was reproduced. Though Gezina looks austere and unsmiling, dressed in black in photos, she evidently liked pretty things in her house.
Walking into her and Paul’s bedroom, I was struck by how colourful it is. My impression of Gezina was improving with each step. Bright blue walls with scattered photos, a brass bed and wooden furniture. But the truth is that the blue walls were believed to repel insects, in particular mosquitoes. The children’s room next door consists of two single brass beds overlooked by blue walls. A guest bedroom, voorkamer, dining room and kitchen completes the ground floor; the top floor was used for storage.
Alongside this house is the Victorian-style home of his youngest son, Pieter Kruger. It has a wooden balustrade running along the long stoep and a pitched roof. It is looking rather worse for wear and Forsyth is looking to raise funds to have the house restored.
Pieter also built a schoolroom around 1890, a rectangular hall structure, in operation until 1915. An interesting feature of the building is the corrugated-iron roof. Some of the iron sheets were originally used on the big house, where they were flattened when Paul underestimated how far they would go. Undeterred, he simply flattened several sheets to make them stretch further. ’n Boer maak ’n plan.
In all, Kruger owned 27 farms, stretching around Rustenburg and down to Heidelberg, south of Johannesburg, and also in Mpumalanga. The Rustenburg area had been settled by the Bafokeng for centuries, and together with the Boers, they drove Zulu warrior Mzilikazi’s impis into Zimbabwe.
“Paul Kruger did very well, he became a prosperous farmer and hunter. He was a military man, and became the commandant of the Rustenburg commando,” says Andre Wedepohl, local history enthusiast. He rose to commandant-general and in 1883 moved to Pretoria when he was elected president of the republic.
Kruger appears to have been a man of contradictions. He was deeply religious — the only book he read was the Bible (he believed the earth was flat). Behind his house is a fenced area with a stone chair where Kruger would go every morning and evening to pray and read his Bible. He cared about his people, but also developed a good relationship — he could speak Setswana — with the king of the Bafokeng, Kgosi Mokgatle, according to Wedepohl.
For a man who is never seen smiling in photos, he apparently had a sense of humour, recounts Wedepohl. “When Johannesburg was laid out, each Christian church was allocated land for its building. The Jewish synagogue, however, was only allocated half as much.” When asked why, Kruger said it was because the Jews only believed in half of the Bible.
Kruger traded in ivory, skins and citrus, which he grew on the farm. Perhaps lesser known is that he also traded in slaves.
In the 2005 paper “Female Inboekelinge [indentured labourers] in the South African Republic 1850-1880”, Fred Morton details life on the frontier, a lawless country. There were conflicts between different Boer groups, and between local pastoralists and the Boers. But one thing that happened in plain sight was raids on local groups for cattle and slaves.
“Since becoming a young man, Kruger had combined hunting with slave trading and, as an assistant veld-cornet in 1845, had been an active participant in commando raids for cattle and children. In 1852 he was elected a full veldcornet and began to acquire farms through sharp-dealing,” writes Morton.
The men were killed, and women and children were taken as slaves. Kruger was not averse to selling the children to other Boer farmers.
“Among the better-documented cases of a female slave is that of Matlhodi Kekana aka Paulina, as told by her descendants to her grandson, Naboth Mokgatle. She was kidnapped and became the inboekeling of Kruger,” documents Morton.
“Paulina’s responsibilities as Kruger’s slave included working in the house, where as a young woman she was trained as a cook for his large family and its many visitors.” She was eventually given to local chief Kgosi Mokgatle in a diplomatic move to smooth relations.
His great grandson, Paul, who admits to having “no sense” of Boekenhoutfontein, says: “Growing up we always knew who he was. He was a pioneer, he had the vision for the Kruger National Park. He was a nationalist for his people, the burghers. It took a lot of guts to take on the British Empire, with the number of men he had compared to the British.”
Could the Kruger millions be buried somewhere on Boekenhoutfontein? Not likely, says Wedepohl, though people have looked. It’s known that gold and coins were loaded on to a train with Kruger on board, heading east towards Mpumalanga in June 1900, shortly before the British took Pretoria. “Jan Smuts got officials at the Treasury in Pretoria, at gunpoint, to load the gold on the train. But it was all spent, on food, clothing and horses, for Boers during the war.”
Boekenhoutfontein was owned by the Kruger family until 1971 and it is likely that one of his grandsons lived in one of the houses until that time.
Kedar is a place to smell the bush, enjoy good food, go on game drives, hunt and immerse yourself in the local history. And if you bump into a history buff there, well, expect a good chin-wag.
Kedar Heritage Lodge
The lodge has five conference venues and 66 hotel rooms. Prices, including specials, are available on the website at https://kedar.co.za/
Contact Sarah Forsyth for details: sarah@rali.co.za
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