Kitty and the Prince
by Ben Shephard (Jonathan Ball)
Many have cultivated the line that British imperialism of the 19th century was a one-way process. The best of British mores simply got forced upon the hapless indigenes, willy-nilly. Records of written history have long been collared by the overlords, never by those who, after all those gruelling campaigns, obliged by submitting.
Yet scholarship of the popular genres has come to stress the counterflow of resistance that the imperial push inevitably invited. Where the status of victim was least accepted was in the world of common show business.
Sara Baartman began the reverse trend, strutting her stuff, even setting off fashions and balladeers in Europe’s capitals, becoming quite a celebrity there: rather a different picture from the doleful muddle that is made of her story back home these days. Following her went other performers, all knowing they would make it if only they could knock the Queen of England’s socks off. Bernth Lindfors’s recent collection of pieces called Africans on Stage has bumped up the record of this kind of reciprocal achievement beautifully.
Last in this distinguished line came Peter, the illiterate farm- hand and “houseboy”. While Lord Roberts marched into his home town of Bloemfontein, he devised his reprisal. He was a stunning looking, sexy beast, so all he had to do was take up the feathers and develop his war dance. For a stage name he helped himself to Lobengula, the late king of the Matabele having so many children that who would dispute an extra one? While the British had subdued just about everyone in Africa by 1902, this self-created royal simply took their metropolis behind their backs.
As the star of the biggest stage spectacle the civilised world had yet seen — it was called Savage South Africa — “Prince Lobengula” had all of London grovelling at his bare feet.
South African-born journalist Ben Shephard has had a go at this irresistible story once before, in 1986, in a collection of rather dour articles devoted to imperialism’s underbelly. But now he has gone the whole hog, recovering each and every fact about this magnificent deception, relishing the cheek of it all in full.
Of course the prince’s downfall began in the hands of his own grasping fans, notably the gorgeous Kitty of the title, whom he did (or did not) marry. Then, when the British South Africa Company denied any claim of his to a pension, he had to sink about as low as any white man, coal-mining in Manchester. Tuberculosis wiped him out soon thereafter, just as for our Saartjie it was the smallpox.
After years of toiling research, Shephard’s record is, as they say, a thundering good read. A delicious entertainment in itself, it tells how it could be when brave Africans took on their vile conquistadors and had the wit to beat them — if only briefly — at their own game.