The Adventures of John Dunn

Well I think I have decided on which book to write next. Tuesday night I started the manuscript on John Dunn, and I’m over a thousand words into it now, so that’s what it will be. Don’t have a title for it yet. John Dunn, the White Chief of Zululand is already taken. That’s the name of the biography written by Charles Ballard. And what I would give to get a copy of that. Still looking.

But the reason I’m choosing that story is because of all the tension, conflict and the improbable success John Dunn achieved. I mentioned in Tuesday's post the fact that Dunn’s story contained a lot of conflict. Well, check this out. Not only was he stuck between the black/white tension of the time, and all the conflict that came with that, but he was involved in two major Zulu wars. The Anglo-Zulu war which I mentioned already, and the Zulu Civil War that took place twenty-two years before that. So here we have a guy involved in two major African wars in his lifetime, and both in the prime of his life. He was twenty-three years old when the Zulu Civil War ended, and forty-five when the Anglo-Zulu War began. So this will be the time span of my book.

The story will begin in 1856, when the Zulu king Mpande was getting old, and two of his sons, Cetshwayo and Mbuyasi vied for the right to succeed him. And the issue was not decided with any kind of chivalry. It was an all out war. I’m talking to the death. Not only for one of the brother princes, but of thousands of their followers, too.

Now I’m not sure if John Dunn had met Cetshwayo at this point in time, (still researching that) but I do know that he sided with Mbuyasi, even though Cetshwayo had a much larger army. Maybe it was Mbuyasi who solicited John Dunn’s support, (and the guns to which he had access) and that’s how he got Dunn on his side. But regardless, after a horrible toll in terms of the lives of their warriors and of the massacres of women and children, as well, Cetshwayo won the war, and John Dunn barely escaped the deciding battle with his life.

He dived into the Thukela River (which at that point was red with the blood of thousands of slaughtered Zulus. I found in my research that as he struggled to keep from drowning, he clutched onto the nearest floating object and discovered to his dismay that it was a woman’s dead body, and her baby had been impaled onto her before being thrown into the river by Cetshwayo’s victorious troops.

So yeah, it’s going to be a fascinating story. But still got a lot of research to do. Can’t wait.