Coert Steynberg

Coert Steynberg was born on 7 January 1905 near the Hennops River, outside Pretoria, and trained as a sculptor. He worked in stone, marble, bronze, copper and wood, and from the 1930s received many public commissions. In 1933 he sculpted the statue of the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias for South Africa House, the country's embassy on Trafalgar Square in London.

Much of his public work commemorated the history of the Afrikaners as the National Party governments of the time told it: the Andries Pretorius monument in Graaff-Reinet, the Peace of Vereeniging monument and an ox-wagon memorial at Blood River. His best-known statue, of the Boer president Paul Kruger, stands at the Kruger Gate of the Kruger National Park. In 1939 he made the statue of the veterinary scientist Sir Arnold Theiler at Onderstepoort.

He also designed the springbok on the reverse of the Krugerrand, the gold coin first minted in 1967. His springbok designs dated from 1946–47, when a version was made for a five-shilling coin bearing King George VI, and the leaping springbok relief was later used on the Krugerrand; the South African Mint's 2017 Natura series celebrated his early springbok designs. He died in Pretoria on 28 July 1982. Such monuments are now read as part of the visual history of apartheid as well as of South African sculpture.

How to look at a Steynberg monument: look at who is shown and who is left out. The figures are heroic and stable, built to read from a distance, and the story they tell is the one the commissioning governments wanted; set that beside the people the monument does not name. That reading is this site's own.

Where to see the work

The Kruger statue stands at the Kruger Gate of the Kruger National Park, the Dias statue at South Africa House in London (La Motte publishes a page on the building), and the Andries Pretorius monument in Graaff-Reinet; the Peace of Vereeniging monument is in Vereeniging. See our list of South African sculptors.