Summer is approaching, and that means it’s time to write my fourth novel. I have two ideas and I’ll talk about one of them right now. Like THE VASE, it’s a story that’s been brewing in my head for a long time. But unlike my fiction stories, it’s actually a TRUE story. Thus it would be a Historical Novel, also known as Historical Fiction. You know the old saying that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction – or more interesting, anyway, for the mere fact that it’s true, and there are a lot of true stories that are quite fascinating.
And one of them is the story of John Dunn. If you never heard of him, go ahead and Google him. He’s a 19th Century white man who lived in Africa. And even though he was white, (Scottish descent,) he became best friends with the Zulu king, Cetshwayo, and rewarded by Cetshwayo with his own Zulu sub-kingdom. So yeah, he was actually a white Zulu king, with near fifty Zulu wives and he fathered over a hundred Zulu kids. (He also had a white wife, and she wasn’t so fond of sharing him with so many black ones. But, hey, he was a king!) I’m telling you it’s a true story. Otherwise, I wouldn’t dare think of such a premise.
This man, John Dunn, has a story worth telling, and though his biography was written already by Charles Ballard, I would like to tell it in a novel-type format. You know, focusing on the adventure and the conflict. (He was thick in the middle of the Anglo-Zulu war, which, for him, was a horrible situation. After all, his ethnic ancestry was from the UK, (Scotland) but his allegiance was to the Zulus. (Again, he was a king!)
But even though he was a Zulu king, he was no fool. He knew the British would win that war, and if he sided with the Zulus, guess what would have happened to him afterwards. The British would hang him for treason! (They told him as much!) So what would you do? Right. That’s what John Dunn did. He sided with the British. But he didn’t forsake the subjects of his sub-kingdom. He took them (near ten thousand) to the British side of the Tugela River.
Anyway, I haven’t decided yet. I’m only thinking about it. But as I do, I’m buying as many books about John Dunn, the Zulus, and Cetshwayo as I can for research, particularly the autobiographies of both men. Certainly, I want to stay true to the real events within the story. So yeah, it’s a story that needs to be written by someone. Maybe it’ll be me.
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