Marthinus Theunis Steyn

Marthinus Theunis Steyn (1857-1916), South African judge and president of the Orange Free State (1896-1902). The son of an Orange Free State farmer, Steyn was educated at Grey College in Bloemfontein. He studied law at Leiden in the Netherlands and at the Inner Temple in London. In 1882 he began practicing law in Bloemfontein, became state attorney, and was appointed to the high court of the Orange Free State in 1889. He won the presidential election in 1896.

Steyn supported the Afrikaners (Boers) in the South African Republic (in the Transvaal region) following the raid by a British force under Sir Leander Starr Jameson. In an effort to prevent a British-Boer conflict in the Transvaal, Steyn was host to the unsuccessful Bloemfontein Conference in May-June 1899 between Alfred Milner, the British high commissioner at the Cape Colony, and President Paul Kruger of the South African Republic. Once the Boer War began, however, in 1899, Steyn led the Orange Free State against the British, commanding the troops in the field. In 1902, at the end of the war, he again worked to bridge the difference between British and Afrikaners, advancing the idea of a united South Africa. By 1908 when the negotiations for the Union of South Africa were underway, Steyn was determined to preserve Afrikaner culture. He attacked pro-British South African leader Jan Smuts for passing an education bill that did not place the Dutch language on a par with English and supported instead the demand from Boer War general J. B. M. Hertzog that the two languages be treated as equal.