BOOK: Looted Gold: Debunking the Myth of the Missing Kruger Millions by Blake Wilkins and Mike Dwight: What really happened to the ‘millions’ in gold that Paul Kruger was believed to have spirited out of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek? Two authors have investigated the matter, with the help of a hitherto unseen Boer War memoir.
The idiosyncrasies of Paul Kruger, President of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) until he went into exile in 1900, have been well documented by numerous authoritative authors over the years.
Through force of personality, Kruger built a state that for years deftly evaded the underhand dealings of British colonialists keen to add the goldfields of the Transvaal to their long list of conquered territories. And when he was finally forced into declaring war on the British Empire, Kruger’s ragtag force of fewer than 55 000 Boers managed to fight off an Imperial force of nearly 450 000 soldiers for two years during a destructive guerrilla campaign.
