South African fiction and a case history revised: An account of research into retellings of the John Ross story of early Natal

Abstract

In 1825-28, during the establishment of a British trading outpost and harbour facility at Port Natal, 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 eye-witness to affairs in Zululand who was consistently there at the formation of the Zulu imperium, and he came to act as a translator and mediator, liaising between the Zulus and the coastal settlement in some crucial dealings. In white accounts of his story he has been remembered exclusively as a minor character among the white pioneers, for whom, when they were ailing in 1827, at the age of 14 he undertook a remarkable marathon rescue-run from Port Natal to the Portuguese fort at Delagoa Bay in quest of "medicines and other necessaries." This feat is commemorated in many existing monuments, and has been the subject of much historical writing and fiction, including the SABC-TV serial, John Ross: An African Adventure. His biography is now also the subject of my own novel, John Ross: The True Story, published in 1987 by Penguin to coincide with the release of the movie. 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.