President Paul Kruger: a biography (Johannes Meintjes)

Published by Purnell Book Services, 1975, hardcover,  illustrated, index, 295 pages, condition: as new.

The author, Johannes Meintjes has set out in his years of research to extract the man as a personality from a veritable bog of hostility and sentiment, prejudice and deification. The result is this important biography of a massively forceful figure, a colossus driven by a love of his people and a single-minded, obsessive sense of divine mission, a giant on the world stage, almost superhuman in intelligence and energy.

Johannes Meintjes was a South African painter, sculptor, amateur historian, writer and playwright.

In a review of John Coetzee's The Message in 1990, Marina le Roux wrote of Johannes Meintjes that he was "almost the ideal librarian: expert craftsman, artist, tireless researcher and entertaining writer, especially on South African history".  But it was par excellence as a painter that he distinguished himself early on when he gained fame almost overnight. According to the art expert and writer Esmé Berman, something like this was unprecedented in South African cultural history.  Because of his appearance and his nonconformism, he is sometimes described as "Molteno's James Dean ".