Fritz – Against the Grain
R450,00
An extraordinary story, meticulously crafted. – Albie Sachs
Owen Rogers’s biography traces the life of this extraordinary man across ninety-one years of South African history, from the Witwatersrand gold rush to the apartheid dawn. A life that reads, as those who knew him predicted, ‘like a romance’.
Fritz Krause (1868–1959) lived one of the most remarkable lives in South African judicial history.
Born in the Orange Free State when the Boer republics were still young, he was educated in Stellenbosch, Amsterdam and London, returning as advocate and prosecutor to a country on the brink of war.
He commanded Johannesburg for the Boers when it fell to the British, was convicted at the Old Bailey of inciting murder, and served time in Pentonville Prison. Yet he rebuilt his career to become a celebrated defence counsel, judge and one of the most restless, principled legal minds of his era.
Campaigning against the death penalty, flogging and the pass laws long before such views were fashionable, he remained engaged, combative and intellectually alive into his ninety-first year.
Owen Rogers’s biography traces the life of this extraordinary man across ninety-one years of South African history, from the Witwatersrand gold rush to the apartheid dawn. A life that reads, as those who knew him predicted, ‘like a romance’.
