Written by David Macmillan – Trade Exchange Specialist
Looted Gold, explores the ‘global’ narrative, zeitgeist if you will, of the “missing Kruger Millions”, the age-old adage that the British, while en route to capturing the capital of the newly formed Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek (ZAR), coming across gold and diamond-filled train carriages; namely, coins bearing the bust of the president of the ZAR, Paul Kruger. However, not the entirety of the “millions” were confiscated and thus have gone unrecorded, lost to time, and widely believed to be buried somewhere within the lands of Southern Africa. With this rhetoric in mind, the authors; Blake Williams and Mike Dwight, investigate the truth behind the penchant for academic bias used to conceal clandestine motivations by the political elite during the period and a plunder of the infant republic by the ZAR themselves through the story of a New Zealand soldier, stationed on guard duty at the Eloff Family farm estate.
The disappearance of the vast amounts of gold coins that left Pretoria in early 1900 as President Paul Kruger retreated down the railway line towards Portuguese East Africa, towards the Lorenco-Marques region of Mozambique, said to be for the Netherlands but instead, intercepted by Field Marshall Roberts’ men. This is widely believed as the general historical narrative for the last one-hundred-plus years. The gold coins referenced here have wrongly become known as the “Missing Kruger Millions”. Furthermore, these specific coins are referred to as the ZAR-era coinage from 1892 to 1902, or numismatically, Ponde and Half-Ponde, modally congruent to the British Pound, in both weight and value.
The origins of the myth come from the initial audit of gold stock by the British forces after they took control of Pretoria leading to the conclusion that 183 138 gold coins and 457 bars were unaccounted for. While it has been postulated that President Kruger purposefully buried his private reserve of coins along with the remainder plundered by the British to account for the entirety of the “unaccounted” coins, the authors claim that the ZAR political elite and connected purposefully coveted the coins along with Swiss-based gold industrialists to covertly smuggle an estimated $500m worth of gold coins with the idea that President Kruger’s ZAR was about to fold as well as later to fund the Apartheid regime. Furthermore, the Kiwi soldier provides an eyewitness account of coins being exhumed on a very particular farm.
Looted Gold investigates the role of the Eloff Family, key figures in Kruger’s extended family and heirs to his stately secrets. ...And this is where the tale of the New Zealand combatant, Thomas Brown, retells his first-hand account of the proposed complicity of the Eloffs in the seizure of illicit gold, rediscovered from the family farm estate. His eyewitness accounts are included in his unpublished memoirs and embellished upon in, Looted Gold.
So, how many coins exactly were minted by the ZAR during their tenure, more specifically the gold Ponde and Half-Ponde? From 1892 to 1902, President Paul Kruger commissioned the minting of approximately, 352 885 – 353 000 Half Ponde, and approximately 1 430 918 – 1 430 950 Full Ponde. No one will ever be able to establish exactly how much gold and other treasure was siphoned out of the ZAR illegally during the turbulent period leading up to the declaration of war in 1899. Without a doubt, the missing treasure amounts to millions of US dollars at today’s values, with the added caveat that there were never “millions” of individual coins to begin with, and therefore is often manifested as a misnomer of value over quantity.
In 2001, The Independent newspaper reported that according to officials in Mpumalanga; a family in the 1960s found around 4000 Ponde on their farm in the Ermelo area.
As late as March 2021, a substantial collection of 900-910 historical Kruger Ponde and Half-Ponde was bought by the South African Mint, from an undisclosed Swiss vault which does give some credence to what the authors pose in Looted Gold. However, the so-called “Missing Kruger Millions” do not exist because there were never that many to begin with. For the most part, they could be accounted for (granted with extensive due diligence and access to vault records with full transparency) so in that regard, one can agree with the authors – that it was never buried but smuggled overseas by the ZAR elite and their constituents.
An effigy over a century old: The classic profile of Paul Kruger was used in ZAR coinage, and was revived in 1967 and used for the Krugerrand.