I've read through THE VASE yet again, and still improved the prose even more. But I'll just wait for the editing process to begin, and go with it at that time.
Meanwhile, I am still researching John Dunn, and even though I have typed over 1500 words and the first five pages, I should wait until all my research is done before I proceed.
But I have found the perfect antagonist. Theopholis Shepstone. He was the Secretary for Native Affairs in Natal, and he didn't like Dunn's native lifestyle. You know, Dunn lived with the Zulus, and he had fifty Zulu wives. And Dunn's white wife wasn't white. I just learned she was half white, and half black.
And even though Shepstone hated Dunn, the other white men admired him and secretly wished they could live the life he was living. That's what it says in the book, The Washing of the Spears, by Donald Morris, one of my main sources of information.
Furthermore, Shepstone harbored a secret wish to become a ruler, himself, at first of a native land, but then he had his sights to become a ruler of the annexed Boer land called the Transvaal. But he needed them to want him, and he needed a conflict to make them want him. (Otherwise, if everything was hunky dory, they had no need of someone who, like Dunn, spoke Zulu and had a way with the natives.) So it was Shepstone who had a part in stirring up trouble that contributed to the war.
Yes, it sounds as if this Shepstone fellow will make the perfect antagonist for the hero, John Dunn.
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