Paul Kruger’s Statue Spoiled with Green Paint Again


By Oliver Ngwenya    06-Oct-2015 22:14 UTC+02:00 4
Paul Kruger's statue was spoiled with paint again Image: BD Live.

Paul Kruger’s statue was spoiled with paint again.
Image: BDLive.

On Tuesday some of the Tshwane Metro Police were at the Church Square, where the bronze sculpture of Paul Kruger, the Boer political and military leader and President of  the Republic of South Africa from 1883 to 1900, was spoiled with green paint again.

In April Paul Kruger’s statue was cleaned after it was spoiled with lime green paint. Since then, the statue has been protected inside by a high perimeter fence as it became one of the first to be targeted in a nationwide campaign against white rule. Nonetheless, a vast opening has been forced into the fence which was closed off on Tuesday afternoon by police officers.

Francois Cloete, the spokesperson for the right-wing party Front National, was assessing damage at the scene. He said it is a national annihilation once again against the statues of his people and he wants to know what is happening because Kruger’s statue is part of the Afrikaner tradition. He continued to say the metro police were not cooperating as he tried to speak to them but they did not want to talk to him.

“There has been on-going rumours that there will be another defacement again because of Paul Kruger’s birthday coming up on the 10th of October. On Saturday we have an event, commemorating his birthday, so this (defacement) might be linked to that,” said Cloete, adding that vandalism is an offense and it is off beam. He said if people don’t approve of Kruger’s statue they must tell him (Francois Cloete).

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) gave the Tshwane municipality seven days to remove the Paul Kruger statue in April. At the time, EFF Tshwane chairperson, Benjamin Disoloane, said Tshwane Mayor Kgosientso Ramokgopa should understand that Kruger’s statue was frustrating people on a daily basis.



 4 Comments


  1. Samsoeniesa Salie says:

    Why the hell celebrate the birthday of a dead man..? Spend the monies on the living! Omw

  2. Unknown says:

    Can someone please share the history of South Africa and not just history of the struggle in apartheid, because it seems like any white figure is bad in South Africa. According to my knowledge Paul Kruger was one of main guys to fight against the Britain’s (England) to get Independence from Britain. And if I recall it correctly White, black and colored people fight together against the British in the Boere Wars. Unfortunately the elders and the people the youth need to look up to keep on putting their own visions in the youth to cause havoc and disruption. History is there to show us not to make the same mistakes again. But money and power rules as long as the guy on top get Money he can care less what happens.

  3. Anon says:

    One of the greatest misfortunes of the Second World War was that at the end of the War the Allies destroyed all remnants of the Nazi State, so all statues and iconic landmarks were bombed or ground into dust. History was destroyed, and sadly I would very much like to have visited these places to see for my own eyes what was done there.

    What is happening in Palmyra is another lesson of what happens when a culture becomes the gospel right unto itself to destroy and deface anything their disagree with. The Germans destroyed thousands of books, Churches and lives during the Second World War. At the end of the war, Denazification did much of the same demonizing Germans to this day.

    This is nothing new, nothing old. It is the moral rot of the human soul.

    • Anon says:

      Oh and one last thought.

      Heinrich Heine, whose work was also burned by the Nazis, wrote in his 1820-1821 play Almansor the famous admonition, “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen”: “Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”

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