The 1874 Burgers' Cross.

By the early 1870s, the gold-fields at Pilgrim's Rest in the eastern Transvaal had drawn a transient population of diggers, traders, and chancers from across the British world. The community was overwhelmingly male, predominantly British-born, and almost entirely unequipped for what came next: a serious fever epidemic swept the diggings, with no formal medical infrastructure to absorb it. Two women — civilian volunteers from the community — stepped into the role of nurses. They did not stop until the outbreak had passed.

The diggers wanted them recognised. The Republic had no mechanism for it. The petition went, eventually, to the President.

The Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek had no official honours system. There were no orders, no decorations, no medals authorised under republican law. When the Pilgrim's Rest petition reached President Thomas François Burgers in 1874, the same year he commissioned the Burgerspond, he answered it by creating one — from nothing, on his own presidential authority, with no Volksraad consultation. The instrument he chose: a gold cross pattée suspended from a green ribbon, with the words "Burgers Cross" on a brooch bar.

It is an open question whether Burgers intended this as a one-off gesture or as the seed of a republican honours tradition. The 1876 Transvaal Cross of Honour — struck two years later under similar ad hoc authority — suggests he was building, deliberately, the framework his Volksraad had refused to authorise.

Three Crosses were struck and presented. Two went, as petitioned, to the women who had nursed the Pilgrim's Rest community through the epidemic. The third went, more surprisingly, to a Dutchwoman who had never set foot in the Transvaal: Catharina Felicia van Rees, the composer of Kent gij dat volk vol heldenmoed — the Republic's national anthem — commissioned by Burgers himself.

The choice tells you something about how Burgers understood his own programme. The same year he had a coin struck bearing his portrait, he commissioned an anthem from a foreign composer, and the same hand that signed the Burgerspond letter also instituted the Cross that honoured her. Coinage, anthem, decoration — three foundational acts of an officially-unauthorised republic, all in 1874, all bearing Burgers' personal stamp.

Three years later, Burgers' administration had fallen. The Republic was annexed by Britain under Sir Theophilus Shepstone in April 1877. The Cross was never re-issued.