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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:South African fiction and a case history revised: an account of research into retellings of the John Ross story of early Natal
Author:Gray, S.ISNI
Year:1988
Periodical:Research in African Literatures
Volume:19
Issue:4
Pages:455-476
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:Zulu polity
novels
biographies (form)
About person:John Ross (1812-?)
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/3819797
Abstract:In 1825-1828, during the establishment of a British trading outpost and harbour facility at Port Natal (South Africa), a boy apprentice, commonly known as John Ross, spent a considerable period at the court of Shaka, first king of the Zulus. He was the only white eyewitness to affairs in Zululand who was consistently there at the formation of the Zulu imperium. The author, who wrote a novel about John Ross which was published in 1987, in this paper traces the research necessarily undertaken in order to reconstruct a biography of the period and cast it in the form of a historical novel for modern-day readers. A summary of previous writers' reliance on the interpretative texts of historians is given, showing how the John Ross story has been used as a popular episode in larger projects ultimately devised to justify the rightness of white control in early Natal. The chief primary sources are the accounts of two Natal pioneers and John Ross's own account, which gives a radically different perspective on the same events. Bibliogr., notes, ref.
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