[3] Joubert was born in the district of Prince Albert, British Cape Colony, a descendant of a French Huguenot who fled to South Africa soon after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV.

[4] Left an orphan at an early age, Joubert migrated to the Transvaal, where he settled in the Wakkerstroom district near Laing's Nek and the north-east corner of the Colony of Natal.

[5] The esteem in which his shrewdness in both farming and legal affairs was held led to his election to the Volksraad as member for Wakkerstroom early in the sixties, Marthinus Pretorius being then in his second term of office as president.

[5] He was in command of the Boer forces at Laings Nek, Ingogo, and Majuba Hill, subsequently conducting the earlier peace negotiations that led to the conclusion of the Pretoria Convention.

[9] He took little part in the negotiations that culminated in the ultimatum sent to Great Britain by Kruger in 1899, and though he immediately assumed nominal command of the operations on the outbreak of hostilities, he gave up to others the chief share in the direction of the war, through his inability or neglect to impose upon them his own will.

Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem upon his death, Piet Joubert, wherein he absolved him from complicity in instigating the war, and held his colleagues to account (excerpt):[11] With those that bred, with those that loosed the strife, He had no part whose hands were clear of gain; But subtle, strong, and stubborn, gave his life To a lost cause, and knew the gift was vain.