attraction
Stephen Gray
The scene is the modest veranda of the state president’s residence, Church Street West, Pretoria.
The barrel-chested curmudgeon is one day older than 74, a relic of the Great Trek. He is in his fourth term as head of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR). Thanks to British exploitation of gold, his small country has grown from bankruptcy to boom. Once his postmaster general had had to pay himself in stamps; now it is all monopolies, dividends.
Annually he has fought wars of extermination against the indigenous people and one against the British. He has never lost a campaign.
The date is October 11. His ultimatum to the British agent to retreat from the Transvaal borders is expiring. He now examines the letter from that kwaai vrou, Queen Victoria, stating that she will negotiate no further.
Rising with coffee mug in one hand, pipe in the other, he reads out her message to his still unlettered wife and all his assembled burgher commandos, in due course to be outnumbered eight to one. They gallop off in his honour to their shocking doom, firing off scarce live ammunition .
This is not really Paul Kruger, nor is it his great send-off parade to initiate the second Anglo-Boer South African War. It is a rather touching re-enactment by members of the National Cultural History Museum, taking place one century later to the minute.
But so indeed began the last of those ZAR wars, in which no less than 31 of Kruger’s descendants would fight. He and his wife would lose three of their sons, and then their own lives.
That ramshackle Oom Paul in his top hat and comic opera sash was the most famous South African of the 19th century and, inevitably, Pretoria’s great tourist attraction. His name has been used to merchandise everything from lemonade and beer to gold. And no one objects to a modernising touch like the machine dispensing Holkrans Natural Mineral Water on Tant Sannie’s kitchen stoep.
According to Anneke Lugtenburg, curator of the Kruger House Museum, long may his worldwide fame last, as budgets have been cut and they are over-dependent on the till. And luxury mega-coaches just pile up outside the Dopper church the oubaas founded, engines requested to be off during prayer time.
But major restoration is chronically necessary, and the east and west exhibition halls behind the old house have not been funded sufficiently to be ready with new displays for the anniversary of the war. Foreign tourists trip over ladders and paint pots nevertheless. The premises have been burgled twice recently, which has set everything back.
Nor do the tourists pause to do Kruger’s leisurely walking route through to central Pretoria, to the wonderfully restored old Raadzaal which, on select days, is open to the public. His office there is another museum – but the key was mislaid last month.
The situation out at Boekenhoutfontein, one of Kruger’s farms and his own home on the old Sun City road, is hardly an improvement.
In July it was sold to Recreation Africa, and is now billed in their glossy brochure as the Paul Kruger Country House – with restaurant attached. It’s private property, with a guarded game-fence gate. The old museum sign with its welcoming tea kettle is rusting away.
Their operations manager, Gary Purdon, asked if the North-West Parks and Tourism Board had several hundred thousand rands to spare for cleaning and maintenance, and a team of 50 to reconstruct old Cape colonial piles – with landscaping, and computer-programmed sprinklers, ox-blood floors and new wallpaper.
The country house has a desk supposedly used by Kruger when the Gelderland took him away to France, and another Kruger family Bible.
What of the other Kruger sites? His Saulspoort winter grazing land now falls in the care of the Pilanesberg National Park; his Driefontein farm, near Leeuwpoort in the Waterberg, has nothing really surviving to preserve, but is safely incorporated into the Tilodi Wilderness area. In the 1880s, photos of his showplace at Baviaanskrans near Magaliesburg were used to attract immigrants, but of this there is no trace.
The Thomas Leask House in Wolmaransstad, where Kruger put up on his annual rounds to receive his voters’ complaints, has fallen into disrepair and is closed. As far as a birthplace goes, Kruger was never sure where he was born, so the old Bulhoek Trekker House near Steynsburg in the Eastern Cape has to stand in.
Meanwhile, Clarens, named in 1912 after the Swiss town where he died in exile, is a flourishing mountain resort, complete with a Kruger Memorial Hall.
Quite certain is where Kruger spent his last agonising nights in the Transvaal. At Waterval Onder, his final effort at governing was made from an annexe of what used to be the Wayside Inn hotel. There the Krugerhof Museum is still in good nick, with excellent photographic displays. This in a mere cottage in the garden opposite the Tickle Trout Restaurant, surrounded by war graves.
The tourist buses career past it heading for what their tour guides explain is the real Kruger monument, that most famous of all game reserves named after him.
Yet, according to Jane Carruthers in her recent history of the Kruger National Park, the old Bible-thumper could never be persuaded to give much of a damn for any wildlife. In fact, as his memoirs make abundantly clear, he expended most of his youthful vigour shooting out as much of the vermin as he could, to permit civilisation to advance all the faster.
Nowadays his properties, our heritage of his huge wealth, are the ones that need serious conserving, so that as the cash registers ring at the turnstiles, there is something authentic left for those who pay to see them to catch in their cameras.
@Crackdown on top Durban cops
Paul Kirk
This week Andre Vogel, gun shop manager and contract killer, began a 31-year prison sentence for the murder of Johannesburg bouncer Billy van Vuuren, and he looks set to have a few top Durban cops join him soon.
When Vogel was arrested he told investigators how Durban police protected drug lords and offered to assist him murder Van Vuuren, who had fallen foul of KwaZulu-Natal’s main drug syndicate.
His confession led to the first serious probe of massive, widespread and apparently unchecked corruption within Durban police and also led directly to the arrest of Senior Superintendent Piet Meyer and other police on corruption charges.
In response to an article on Meyer’s arrest in the Mail & Guardian, Durban police management claimed in a letter that the arrests of Meyer and others were result of a request by KwaZulu-Natal police management for an investigation into corrupt cops by detectives from outside the province.
This week, in the aftermath of Vogel’s trial, it is apparent that no such request was made.
Sipho Ngwenya, representative of the National Director of Public Prosecutions, Bulelani Ngcuka, said: “After making extensive inquiries I can state that the investigation into Meyer was the direct result of the arrest of Vogel. At no time was any request made to us for an investigation into Meyer.”
Investigators from Ngcuka’s office are now set to launch a probe into the officers who protected crooked cops like Meyer and sheltered the drug syndicate for which Vogel worked. The court record of Vogel’s trial will form the basis of the investigation.
Investigators have already been instructed to look into the financial affairs of the assistant commissioner of police and provincial commander of detective services, Commissioner Frik Truter.
Truter is believed to have protected Meyer from investigation and a number of “irregularities” have been found in the way Truter dealt with complaints about Meyer.
Senior Superinten-dent Beyers Marx, pro- vincial commander of the anti-corruption unit in KwaZulu-Natal is also being scrutinised.
Said a source within the Ngcuka’s Office: “We have discovered that the first complaints about Meyer began within months of him taking up his post. Yet, when our investigations began, Marx told our people he had no documentation on Meyer and no investigations were pending.
“He had either not done his job properly and not taken notice of complaints against Meyer or he lied to our investigators.”
Another cop, Superintendent Alan Alford, the deputy commander of the Durban murder and robbery unit, has also been made a target for investigation by the arrest of Vogel. Alford has been implicated in protecting drug dealers and being a party to the contract killing of Van Vuuren.
According to Vogel’s statement to police, Alford protected a drug syndicate in return for payment.
One of Alford’s friends, former murder and robbery unit detective Bruce Bekker, is one of the alleged drug syndicate leaders. His partner is allegedly Jeff Meyer, a power lifter and nightclub owner.
Presently out on R100E000 bail each, the pair ran a gang that gave themselves the nickname the “untouchables” – a name that, according to the high court confession of Vogel, they richly deserved.
Bekker initially recruited Vogel into the drug- dealing syndicate and taught him the narcotics trade. Bekker told Vogel that the price of ecstasy in Durban was so high because it included protection money paid to police.
Now, without police protection, it is Ngcuka who is deciding whether to prosecute Bekker and his accomplices with being part of a conspiracy to commit a contract killing.
Said one investigator who asked not to be named: “We cannot say at this stage who will face what charges now, but it is likely Vogel will soon have some more company in jail.”
@Revolutionary Baruch Hirson dies
Tom Lodge Obituary
Baruch Hirson, South African revolutionary and historian, died on October 3 in London, after a long illness. Hirson belonged to a political generation which led South Africa to “national liberation” in 1994, but that goal was not his only cause.
Born in 1921, Hirson was the son of a Jewish electrician who had arrived in Johannesburg from Latvia two decades before. After a bleak childhood in lower middle-class white Johannesburg, Hirson’s initial involvement with a Zionist youth club led him into revolutionary Marxist politics, first with the Hashomer Hatzair on the eve of World War II and then from 1944 as an adherent of a succession of Trotskyite groups.
Between 1944 and 1946 he worked as the political organiser for the Workers’ International League, and subsequently he combined his politics with an academic career as a physicist at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Towards the end of the 1950s he joined the Congress of Democrats, the white arm of the African National Congress-led congress alliance. Highly critical of its leadership and policies, with other disaffected left- wing congress activists Hirson formed the Socialist League of Africa just before the Sharpeville massacre.
Socialist League members were to help establish the first of several anti- apartheid sabotage groups, the National Committee for Liberation, later known as the African Resistance Movement.
Arrested and tried in 1964, Hirson was convicted of sabotage and imprisoned for nine years. Five days after his release in 1973 and confronted with a banning order he went into exile with his wife, Yael, and three children, Denis, Allen and Zoe.
Until his death Hirson worked in Britain, as an historian, lecturer and editor. He published five books with two more manuscripts completed just before his death.
His journal, Searchlight, between 1988 and 1995 provided a lively platform for left-wing analysis of South Africa and published the first detailed exposure of the harsh regime which the ANC maintained in Angolan detention camps.
Hirson’s first book, Year of Fire, Year of Ash, a powerful polemical chronology of the Soweto uprising, appeared to be about modern events. The appearance was deceptive, Hirson contended, for no events were modern.
His subsequent work explored the unfolding saga of working-class rebellion from its origins in the 1900s, for Hirson, the central theme in South African history.
Today his explorations of alternative traditions to the ANC’s nationalist narratives remain as authoritative as ever. They are luminous testimony of the philosphical complexity and intellectual richness of South Africa’s liberatory politics.
Hirson had mixed feelings about the advent of liberal democracy in 1994. Unusually for a South African socialist, he was never contemptuous of civil liberties but he never revised his conviction that social oppression was essentially economic.
His later writing focused on biography and the history of ideas, both within and outside South Africa’s Marxist left. It was informed by a strengthening perception that South African democracy was the product of a very complicated intellectual heritage.
Today his subjects may appear unfashionable and the stories they embody may seem to represent lost causes, about what might have been and did not in the event happen.
But Hirson was a historian, not a propagandist. His narratives of how modern South Africa was made may not offer much comfort to its new rulers but their angry honesty and their recognition of human potential still make sense in the world’s most unequal society.