Discarded ‘Annex’ from an earlier draft of Importunity by Jon Lunn

Introduction by Jon Lunn

This ‘Annex’, a talk by a fictional Professor of colonial culture and literature about my novel Importunity, was originally intended to be its final section; but in the end, I decided to take it out. 

Why? Because, although a minority of readers of my final draft of the novel liked it (one even described it as the best part), the majority either did not, or thought it confused more than it clarified. I was (and remain) in more than two minds about it.

So, the Annex was ultimately replaced at the end of the novel with a briefer ‘Acknowledgements’ section, along with a more detailed ‘Note on Sources’. A few passages from the Annex survived but the bulk of it did not. 

Nonetheless, I kept open the possibility that the discarded Annex might somehow be shared with readers if the novel was ever published.  This small miracle has occurred thanks to Carnelian Heart Publishing, which has now kindly agreed to put the piece on its website as ‘bonus material’. I have made minor alterations to the version of the Annex that was part of the final draft, but it is fundamentally unchanged. 

I strongly recommend that you do not read this Annex until after you have read the novel. This is in order to avoid spoilers. Of course, if you have no intention of reading the novel, go ahead.

The Annex was inspired by the last part of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which is set at an academic conference long after the events described in her novel. Freed up by this contrivance, like Atwood, I could not resist injecting some humour into the piece. I imagined into life an academic who has interviewed somebody purporting to be me. Inspired, if that is the right word, by existing digital platforms/marketplaces like Ethereum, I invented one called Academeum, on which scholarly products such as Professor Tyre’s talk might in future find an afterlife of sorts as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

At the same time, there was a serious purpose to the Annex.  Through it I wanted to offer fuller background on my struggles, over three decades and more, to do something with the story of Iorwerth Jones, his wife Alice and their unnamed African domestic servant, the three main protagonists in the first 1923 trial. I also felt it might be interesting for some readers if (through the fictional Professor) I provided some insight into the scholarly ideas and debates that informed my thinking when writing the novel. Last but not least, I used the Annex as an opportunity to anticipate – and to some extent respond to – criticisms that might be made of the novel.

Since the novel was published, an issue has been raised by several readers that I addressed neither there nor in this Annex. Let me do so now. Why, I have been asked, do I barely use the dominant racial epithets of the time in the novel, namely ‘native’ and ‘kaffir’? Would that not have been more authentic? 

My response is that while authenticity is important it is not the be-all and end-all in a work of historical fiction. I find these descriptors particularly dehumanising and upsetting and so feel no obligation to use them; for better or for worse, I have mainly used other terms (white, black, European, African) which, while not unproblematic either, are less disturbing to me. 

I hope you will enjoy reading this discarded Annex and find that it adds something to your understanding of Importunity. To those who don’t get much from it, I apologise for inflicting it upon you. 

Annex NFT/2027/83-A (Talk by Prof. Stephen Tyre):

Interrogating Importunity by Jon Lunn

Academeum Administrator’s Note (February 2035): This transcript of a 2025 talk by a professor of colonial culture and literature at the New Lacuna University was the second item to be put on this blockchain as a non-fungible token (NFT). 

There are now 1.2 million items, colloquially known as “thought sausages” by our users, on Academeum. 

Click here to own this digital file, which represents a significant piece of this blockchain’s history!

·      100 digital files with the author’s cryptographic signature were created.

·      Current value: US $1 [Original Value: US $20]

·      Number purchased as at 5 February 2035: 24

Prof. Tyre’s Note (20 September 2028): After several unsuccessful attempts to interest an academic journal in this topic, I turned my ideas into a talk for my colleagues and students. The day after Academeum was launched (1 April 2025), as an experiment I uploaded a digital file of the transcript of this talk so that others could own it if they wished.

I added several footnotes to the digital file to direct readers to further background reading. I did not include the question-and-answer session in the file, which soon had to be abandoned due to protests by a student group calling itself the Anti-Woke Brigade (AWB). 

My initiative was rewarded when I was allowed to include it as a ‘measurable impact’ in the 2027 research assessment exercise. All the money raised goes to the University’s student hardship fund. 

Introduction

Importunity, by Jon Lunn, was published in 2023. The novel attracted a respectable, if niche, audience and some limited social media attention. As an expert on the culture and literature of southern Africa’s settler colonial societies in the 20^th century, I was alerted to the novel in early 2024 by a doctoral student of mine – unfortunately, just before they dropped out. [Audience Laughter][i] Intrigued, I read it over three sittings that April, between semesters. 

Meeting Jon Lunn

I did not decide to write something about Jon Lunn’s novel straight away. My first inclination was to find the author and learn more about what he had been seeking to achieve by writing it. It took a while, but eventually I tracked him down. With reluctance, he agreed to talk with me. We did so over Zoom. At first, he had little to say. He appeared annoyed, rather than pleased, that I wanted to talk with him. [Laughter]

But he did say one thing during our first meeting that got me interested. He revealed that the central character, Iolo James, albeit under an altered name, was based on a real person. Perhaps there is something worth writing about here, I thought. Gradually, I won Lunn’s confidence and, in subsequent meetings, he began to open up to me. 

He told me that he had first come across the real person on which Iolo James is loosely based in the course of his doctoral research in the early 1980s on the history of the railway system in colonial Zimbabwe. That person appeared at three moments in the historical record. 

Because his doctorate was a macro-level analysis of historical forces and processes, he had decided that it was neither appropriate nor possible to incorporate this material, however fascinating, into it. Nor did he do so when a revised version of the doctorate was published in 1997 as Capital and Labour on the Rhodesian Railway System, 1889-1947.[ii] It was not until 2021 that Lunn began writing about it.

The ‘real’ Iolo James

I was able to persuade Jon Lunn to allow me to unveil the ‘real Iolo James’ to the world. Lunn revealed during our third meeting that his name was Iorwerth Jones. He went on to specify the three moments in the historical record of colonial Zimbabwe when this man featured. 

He was a participant in two controversial trials in 1923. In the first trial, he defended his African domestic servant against an assault charged lodged by his wife.[iii] In the second trial, a group of white men were charged with assault on Iorwerth Jones. They had tarred and feathered him as punishment for his betrayal of the white race.[iv] Finally, Jones made an appearance in 1945 before the Tredgold Commission of Inquiry into the causes of a landmark strike by African railway workers.[v]

In writing the novel, Lunn drew extensively on the archival materials he had uncovered, changing details here and there, he acknowledged. He said that most of these changes were minor, but one was a major change. I’ll discuss that change later in the talk.

Of course, this still left massive gaps in James’s life story to be filled in. Lunn went on to tell me the saga of how, over more than thirty years, he had periodically tried and failed to put more flesh on the bones of Iorwerth Jones. Each time, he did so as a historian, looking for more evidence. But he had never embarked on a concerted effort. Other more pressing, commitments (“life”, he said) meant that he tended to be on the look-out for quick wins. 

Lunn attempts to fill in the historical gaps

In late-1991 Lunn placed adverts in independent Zimbabwe’s two main newspapers at the time, The Heraldand the Bulawayo Chronicle, asking if anybody had known Iorwerth Jones and, if so, to contact him back in the UK.

His expectations were not high, but within a month he had received a reply from Jones’ daughter, Olwen. It looked like he might have hit the jackpot. Perhaps she could lead him to her father’s diaries or papers? Naturally, Olwen asked why Lunn was interested in her father. This presented him with a dilemma. He knew that her parents had separated after the dramas of 1923. Would Olwen be loyal to one or other of her parents? Should he tell her everything he knew or be cagey, or perhaps even deceive her? 

He decided to be transparent about it and replied in considerable detail. He added in some information about himself in the hope that this would help build a relationship of trust. The months passed and there was no reply. Clearly, he had miscalculated, although it was not entirely clear how or why. He wrote again to Olwen, asking if he had upset her and how he might put it right. Still no reply.

Nobody else replied to his adverts. It looked like the trail had gone cold. He sent a speculative letter to Doris Lessing in 1997 asking whether she had heard of Jones; she replied in the negative, but added that she sympathised with his plight. [Noises]

Lunn abandoned his search again. More years passed. Then, in 2003, Lunn found himself working for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and living in South Africa with his family. He was travelling to Zimbabwe occasionally as part of UK support to civil society organisations there. He decided to kill two birds with one stone and see if he could find out more about Jones by visiting Bulawayo. 

He had another lead. Nancy Wood, the mother of a Zimbabwean friend of his, remembered ‘Monkey Nut Jones’ – apparently, this was his nickname – from her childhood. Her family had known him. She could arrange a meeting with a nephew of Jones, Ken Harmer. 

Lunn spent a couple of days in Bulawayo at the end of 2003. Jones’s nephew filled in important details about him, ranging from basics about where he was born to more idiosyncratic information about his cultural and intellectual interests. He provided useful insights about the kind of man he was. It was all consistent with Lunn’s identification of Jones as decidedly unusual for his time and place. 

He also found out that Olwen had indeed been put off by his letter. However, it was not the details about the 1923 trials which had been the problem. She and her siblings had stayed with their father after their parents’ separation. No, it was the personal information he had provided. The fact Lunn was unmarried but living with his partner, with whom he had a young daughter, had offended her moral values. [Laughter]

Jones’s nephew also told Lunn that Olwen was still alive. This was completely unexpected. Unfortunately, she was very old and close to death. There was no reason to expect a conversation of any kind would be possible, but did he want to visit? Another dilemma. After thinking it over, Lunn said that he did. 

He told me that it was a deeply dispiriting visit and he wished he had not gone. Olwen was in a Bulawayo hospice. She was being kept in a cage and was lying on a thin mattress on the floor. She was completely unresponsive. All he could do was talk to her. 

He did not apologise for his moral crimes (he had married since then, but not at her behest). He said that he was glad to meet her at last, how sorry he was that it had taken so long, how sad he was to find her so very unwell, and that she would be in his thoughts. After twenty minutes, he left. She died soon afterwards. [Noise]

So, what did he leave Bulawayo with, following his 2003 visit? Yes, he had found a few more fragments, shards of information, but there had been no big historiographical breakthroughs. There were no diaries or papers, to Ken Harmer’s knowledge. He had contact details for some other relatives of Jones who might be able to fill in some of the blanks. Or they might not. Lunn did not have the time to chase speculative possibilities. So, for another decade the ‘case’ went cold again.

From fact towards fiction

But still he could not completely let it go. Lunn retired in 2020, slightly ahead of time due to suffering from Long Covid during the Covid pandemic. At last, he had plenty of time to devote to his search. However, his thinking now shifted. 

Yes, he could return to the fray as a historian, hunting down evidence. It was what he knew how to do. But always in the back of his mind over the past three decades had been the idea of integrating the history into a broader work of fiction. He had always dismissed the idea in the end because – well, he was a historian. 

He had never really felt he had a novel in him. Yet if he was ever going to find out whether he did or not, the time was now. As long as he enjoyed the exercise, what would it matter if the result was mediocre, or even execrable? If it was appalling, he could always destroy the text.

So it was that, in June 2021, Lunn began writing. From the very start, he found it enjoyable and rewarding. It flowed pretty easily, he told me. He struggled to evoke place (fair-minded readers will agree that it was clearly not his strength) but he began to feel he might be capable of writing a decent story. 

By the end of 2022 he had finished the book. It was published in 2023, the 100^th anniversary of trials which form the centrepiece of the novel. 

Some of those who read drafts of the novel expressed doubts that it achieved the literary standard, or had the sales potential, to justify publication. But whether the novel is a good work of art or not is neither here nor there for me. I am approaching the book as a scholar.

As I have said already, Lunn was reluctant to discuss the book in scholarly terms. He claimed that he had given himself up to the creative process in writing it and was happy to leave interpretation to others. I took this as permission to go ahead – not that I needed it – and have never received any complaint from him. 

So, the rest of this talk is my ‘scholarly take’ on Importunity. I have organised my reflections around a discussion of the three main characters in the novel, Iolo, Doris and Michael, starting with the one who has the greatest base in reality, Iolo. I will then make a few short remarks about some of Lunn’s other characters, before returning to the issue of the relationship between fact and faction in the novel.

Iolo James

The title of the novel makes it clear what the author thinks James is: he is importunate – according to my dictionary, this is somebody who is persistent to the point of annoyance. In the case of Doris, his wife, James might even be described as persistent to the point of literally engendering madness or breakdown. For Michael, their African domestic servant, Iolo’s persistence is nearly fatal. [Noises]

The original concept of importunity lies in religion. The Book of Luke (8:11) contains the story of the ‘importunate widow’. She causes what one commentator has called “good trouble” – Lunn has a minor character utter this phrase.  James has a strong Christian, non-conformist, background, although by the time he arrives in Southern Rhodesia, his religious interests are more eclectic. Under the influence of Gandhi, he has gravitated towards Hinduism. This eclecticism never leaves him. 

So, what is James persistent about? Above all, he is persistent in his attempts, through good deeds or solidarity, to dissolve, or at least, mitigate, the relations – not so much the structures, I think – of racial domination that characterise settler colonial Southern Rhodesia. 

Somebody unsympathetic to James might argue that he is a man who cannot bring himself to accept the consequences of his life-choices. If he had not been willing to experience the privileges of whiteness in the colonial world, he would not have taken the job on the Cape Government Railways, boarded the RMS Walmer Castle and sailed to South Africa. 

And, once James had got there, he could have left and gone home again at any point. He doesn’t. By contrast, his daughter Gwerfyl leaves quite soon after reaching adulthood, although we don’t get much insight into why. 

His son, Mervyn, eventually has a moment of bitter revelation following his father’s death which leads to him departing too. So, it may seem to some readers that they drew the appropriate conclusion from their – and their father’s – decidedly chequered settler colonial experience, while he didn’t.

No, James stays. Instead, he engages in ineffectual acts of rebellion, some of which place the Africans whom he is trying to help at great risk, most obviously, Michael. His motives are mixed at best, base at worst. Because he always flies solo, he never makes serious or sustained efforts to promote collective European action in solidarity with the oppressed African majority. 

Defenders of James might respond that, yes, there is truth in this critique, but there are good grounds for viewing his character more empathetically. How ‘free’ and ‘privileged’ is James actually? He is of poor working-class origin, although his education and aptitudes help him to find relatively decently paid and satisfying work, first in Wales and then in southern Africa. 

In the story, his homosexual encounters, including one that crosses the racial divide, also place him at risk. He needs to leave Cardiff quickly, although his choice of South Africa, in the circumstances, might look bizarre to some. Complicating things further is the sub-plot of his childhood abuse in Corris by his English teacher, Mr Williams, which clearly has had unresolved traumatic effects on his psyche. You will recall, at the bottom of the letter from Mr Williams that Michael stumbles across, he has written “Pydru yn uffern!” Lunn does not translate it in the text, but google translate reveals that it means “Rot in Hell!”

James’s whiteness is certainly a privilege, even if from time to time he tries to blur it. His maleness also brings privilege with it, and on this front, he makes little effort to escape. We’ll come back to this, along with his ambivalent, somewhat low voltage, sexuality later. [Laughter]

Broadly speaking, I align myself with those who think that James warrants some empathy. In my view, Lunn explores something crucial about the European settler colonial experience which has sometimes been missed by scholars.[vi] It was anything but monolithic. 

European settlers came in many shapes and sizes. They did not all march in lockstep behind the banner of racial solidarity. They lived like all of us arguably do, navigating relationships on a day-by-day basis, full of half-formed thoughts and emotions structured by wider social values and pressures. 

No, he is not a typical member of the wider European settler community, but he is an illustration of its variety. It is reasonable to assume that he is representative of a small, but significant minority who dissented, often silently, in small ways, from the dominant opinion. By definition, while it may have made some difference here and there, in terms of individual relationships, this kind of dissent amounted to little in the wider scheme of things. 

At this point I want to bring in a potentially useful concept, originating in social anthropology, which I think encapsulates much of what I have been exploring with regard to the life and times of Iolo James: the concept of ‘anomaly’. 

An anomaly, if we accept the definition in the Oxford Languages English Dictionary, is something, or somebody, that deviates from what is normal, standard or expected.  Anomalies can be dangerous to the cohesion of an institution or society. In such situations, they can no longer be tolerated or ignored; they must be challenged, marginalised, punished, or even eliminated. 

For Mary Douglas, an anomaly is a vector of what she calls “social pollution”. An anomaly often violates the taboos that operate in any society. If you want to know more about the idea of anomaly, take a look at her famous work, Purity and Danger.[vii] Here, by way of a taster, are a couple of brief extracts from the book: 

Four kinds of social pollution seem worth distinguishing. The first is danger pressing on external boundaries; the second, danger from transgressing the internal lines of a system; the third, danger in the margins of the lines. The fourth is danger from internal contradiction, when some of the basic postulates are denied by other basic postulates, so that at certain points the system seems to be at war with itself […]

A polluting person is always in the wrong. He has developed some wrong condition or simply crossed some line which should not have been crossed and this displacement brings danger for someone. Pollution can be committed intentionally, but intention is irrelevant to its effect […]

So, as already stated, Iolo was part of a small, but significant, minority of dissenters within the settler community of Southern Rhodesia. But he did go further than most, a lot further sometimes. Unlike most other anomalous persons within the settler community, James keeps “sticking his head above the parapet”, as Lunn puts it. Lunn recounts episodes of this kind in Belmont, South Africa, in 1910-11 and in Hartley, Southern Rhodesia, in 1919. Things then climax in Bulawayo in 1923.

Iolo James’s most egregious social crime, one which mobilises some of the deepest psychological fears of a white community that feels perpetually outnumbered and threatened (even as it violently represses and controls what it feels threatened by), comes in the first trial of 1923 in Bulawayo, when James defends his African domestic servant, Michael, against his wife’s allegation of sexual assault. 

James’ challenge to ideas of the Black Peril causes outrage and leads to his collective punishment. He is tarred and feathered, a highly symbolic, humiliating and dehumanising form of punishment with a long history in settler colonial societies. A second trial follows and his attackers, while convicted, avoid prison, having been declared innocent in the court of settler public opinion. 

Iolo’s tarring and feathering is punishment for his anomalous actions.  But, as the novel progresses, it emerges that he has not been entirely or permanently expelled from the white community, let alone eliminated. With time, he is somewhat rehabilitated. Several other characters in the story, most notably Doris and Michael, experience worse fates. This, surely, is because however different they are, their initial status or position in society is much more vulnerable than Iolo’s.

In the final phase of his life, Iolo appears to achieve what has eluded him until then: a productive way of turning his dissent into support for the oppressed African majority in Southern Rhodesia. By now known as “Citizen Number One”, he secretly writes reports for African labour and community leaders describing the meetings and decisions of the Bulawayo Municipal Council. 

It is a modest salvation. I asked Lunn if he was mocking Iolo James for one last time by reducing him to a secretarial role. He strongly denied this. Lunn said that, in stark contrast with Iolo’s earlier quixotic misadventures in solidarity, this was a suitably humble apotheosis. “Iolo finally does more good than harm in this note-taking incarnation,” he insisted. 

Doris James

Let me turn now to Iolo’s wife, Doris. Of course, Iorwerth Jones had a real wife, but beyond her name, Alice, and her actions in 1923, we have little historical material to go on, and none from sources that knew her well or were sympathetic to her. So, Doris, even more than Iolo, is a character imagined into existence by the author. 

There is an important issue to address before proceeding further. You will recall that Lunn admitted to having changed some aspects of the historical record for dramatic and illustrative effect. The most important change, in my view, comes in relation to the first trial of 1923, where he converts a common assault charge against the unnamed domestic servant into an indecent assault charge against Michael.

I asked Lunn why he had turned the first trial into what was known at the time as a Black Peril case. These cases, which were far less common than was often alleged, reflected a deep fear in European society that white women, living in close proximity to their domestic servants, were highly vulnerable to the predatory sexual desires of African men. 

He gave two reasons. First, he said, it made for a more interesting and dramatic plot. Second, he added, the Black Peril phenomenon illuminated some of the most fundamental dynamics of settler colonialism in southern Africa. The small white minority population lived in a permanent state of paranoia and insecurity, he said.[viii]

Fair enough, but I still can’t help feeling uneasy. Some of Lunn’s fiercest critics have condemned him for putting the largely imagined threat of African male sexuality at the centre of his novel when the real sexual peril in the settler colonial setting was the White Peril, the sexual assault of African women by white men. If he was going to change the historical record, why not write about the White Peril instead? 

Lunn acknowledged that these critics may have a point. At the time, he’d felt that the change he made went sufficiently with the grain of the archive to justify it. To have brought the White Peril into the novel would have been to depart entirely from the archive.

Many of you will have your own views about this. Perhaps we can discuss it further when I take questions at the end. For now, let’s return to the plot and the character of Doris. 

What she does to Michael is terrible and sickening. But one of the virtues of Lunn’s story is that all of the main characters embody both light and shade. And there are circumstances that offer some explanation of why Doris acts as she does. [Noise]

To put it mildly, Iolo’s marriage to Doris is a disaster zone. At their first meeting in Kimberley, South Africa, Doris is the agent and Iolo the catch. But her agency flows from desperation and anxiety, rather than strength and desire. 

Well aware that a European woman’s destiny is determined by marriage, which the death of her beloved father has made much more difficult to arrange, Doris, worried about being ‘on the shelf’, as the saying of the time went, ventures forth to find a man, almost any man, some might say.

Iolo is a plausible candidate and, with a dearth of choice, Doris selects him. He is acquiescent. What she does not yet know is that he too is feeling some pressure to conform socially. He has had relationships with both men and women, but not many. Those with men seem better to reflect his sexual inclination, but it is not a binary matter – Iolo is quite modern in this respect. 

His continuing penchant for risk-taking with men, in a settler community which is as homophobic as it is racist, nudges him towards finding cover through marriage when the opportunity presents itself.

Yet the marriage is not predestined to fail. Two children are successfully produced. It is not so much Iolo’s wayward urges that destroy all affection between him and Doris. It is his sheer lack of care and kindness towards her, in combination with his indifference to physical intimacy. 

She tries to keep things together. He reciprocates intermittently, usually after he has disgraced himself, a disgrace which, as the person who misguidedly chose him and who cares deeply about social conformity and respectability, she gradually internalises. 

Whether he is fully aware of it or not, Iolo appears to me to opt for celibacy as a way of gradually exiting the relationship.

Communication breaks down. Feeling responsible for the success or failure of the marriage, Doris puts up a fight and at points it looks like she is in the ascendant. But this ascendancy cannot endure because European women cannot escape their subordinate status within settler society.

As Iolo periodically revisits his urge to take stands which bring social humiliation and shame upon them both, her health deteriorates. She begins to self-medicate, with disastrous effects. Here, Iolo is at his most callous. He does absolutely nothing to help her until it is too late. Any moments of self-reproach on his part are, to my mind, more about self-pity than anything else. 

When Doris accuses Michael of sexually assaulting her, she is confused and hardly knows what she is doing. Behind her zombie-like state, she now is in great distress. Alcohol and cigarettes, are added to the mix. Her mind cracks. She has seizures. She disavows her family and retreats into delusions in which her father, who she clearly adored, reappears in her imagination and provides some comfort.

Doris, unlike Iolo, has no critique of wider European society or the system of racial domination from which she benefits. She is, as far as we can tell from Lunn’s portrayal of her, conventional in her thinking, given her time and place. She completely shares its pathologies and fears. 

European society initially comes to her defence during the trials in 1923. But as it becomes clear that she is unwell, she also becomes an anomaly. The underlying social impulse is to remove her from its ranks. 

In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas reflects on how entry into a mental hospital almost universally crosses the “threshold of tolerance” that society has for anomalous behaviour.  Although she is not permanently incarcerated at Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum, Doris is permanently consigned to the margins of society thereafter.[ix] Addicted and impoverished, it is now she who threatens to disturb that society’s self-image and values. 

Although in a state of confusion himself, following his punishment in Market Square, Iolo is complicit in her incarceration at Ingutsheni. But he does appear belatedly to have accepted his responsibilities when he pays for her treatment by Dr Wulf Sachs in Johannesburg. 

His final betrayal comes towards the end of the novel when it emerges that, after a year or so, Iolo stopped paying for her treatment, effectively sealing her fate. He assuages his guilty conscience with a small and intermittent monthly allowance during the last decade of her life, but it is much too little too late. 

Just before Doris’s death in late-1935, Wulf Sachs drops into Bulawayo in search of her. With him on the journey is John Chawafambira, about whom Sachs would later publish his famous book, Black Hamlet.[x] Iolo refuses to help Sachs. 

When Sachs find Doris, it is a brief, painful reunion. In a moment of relative lucidity, she utters words which poignantly distil the tragedy of her plight, “I used to be white, you know”. 

Here, as at other points in the novel, Lunn shows that he understands the simultaneous power and artificiality of ‘whiteness’ as an ideology. There are echoes of the millennial visions of the African adherents of the Watchtower Movement, with whom Iolo becomes somewhat haphazardly embroiled in Hartley in 1919, who imagined a world turned upside down, in which blacks would become white.[xi]

Is Doris the novel’s main victim? While some may say, no, surely that must be Michael who is jailed for a crime he did not commit, or even Iolo himself, tarred, feathered and humiliated, personally, I think she is. [Agreement] Michael loses his freedom for a prolonged period, but he never entirely loses his agency or dignity.

Michael

Like Doris, Michael is also real, but there is literally nothing in the historical record about him bar an acknowledgement of his existence and the attribution to him by others of motives or actions. This is not unusual in a settler colony like Southern Rhodesia. It leaves Lunn with even more work to do than with Doris to conjure Michael – given the birth name of Gopane Matala by Lunn – up as a fully-developed character. 

As I mentioned a moment ago, Lunn foregrounds Michael’s agency and dignity throughout the novel. Michael agrees to Iolo’s request to take a package to Samuel in Kimberley prison when working for the family in Belmont, but he has his own good reasons for doing so, both of them having fought against the Boers during the 1899-1902 war.[xii] He adds something of his own (a knife) to the package. 

Having fallen on hard times because of his involvement in a strike at Wankie Colliery, he accepts Iolo’s invitation to come and work for the family once again after he arrives in Bulawayo. 

There is an undercurrent of duress involved in this decision and it proves far from a positive experience, but despite Doris’s intense hostility towards him and Iolo’s overfamiliarity, Michael takes genuine pleasure from his friendships with their children, Mervyn and Gwerfyl. He also looks after Doris at a moment of crisis, although this swiftly backfires on him.

Throughout the course of their relationship, but particularly in Bulawayo, Michael’s feelings towards Iolo are characterised by enormous ambivalence at best, angry hostility at worst. 

Whether when they first encounter each other in Belmont, South Africa, or subsequently when they are reunited in Bulawayo, Michael shows a high degree of awareness of how his relationship with Iolo potentially places him in danger. Iolo’s desire for a closer relationship violates the social codes of settler colonialism. 

In the end, Michael has more to lose from this than Iolo and his luck runs out when Doris accuses him of sexual assault. But once again, he is undefeated by his trial and imprisonment. After he is released, he sets to rebuild his life, far from the well-meaning but naïve Iolo, back with his people, the Kgatla. 

Michael’s 1925 letter to Iolo, revealed towards the end of the novel, reflects his deep pessimism, borne of painful experience, about the possibility of breaking down the racial divide in settler colonial Rhodesia. 

His view is clearly that the races should disavow illusions of intimacy. They should stay separate. Lunn underscores this view on the final page of the novel by using several extracts from Ethiop’s well-known 1860 article, “What Shall We Do with the White People?”[xiii]

But the paradox of settler colonialism is that it simultaneously inscribes separation while unavoidably bringing the races together through the structures of exploitation and domination that underpin white wealth and power. This operates both materially and psychologically. 

To echo Jacob Dlamini’s words, the intimacy this produces is “unwanted” and potentially “fatal”, but it is unavoidable.[xiv] Survival is the only feasible goal in such circumstances, as Michael and Samuel agree. Michael suggests to Iolo in his 1925 letter that the only solution for Iolo, and all white settlers, by extension, is to leave, to go home. [Noises]

Of course, such a mass emigration was never going to happen. Some commentators have described Michael’s perspective as a counsel of despair, in that he throws doubt on whether genuine multiracial cooperation and solidarity is possible.  When I asked Lunn about his own views on this question, he said that while he believed it is certainly possible, it is often much more difficult to achieve than many hope or imagine. 

“It requires those white people with substantial power and privilege in the world to renounce it,” Lunn remarked. “Not many of them seem willing to make space, to step aside. I am sure that I’ve been guilty of that,” he added. [Noises]

Another complaint that has been made about Lunn’s portrayal of the African characters in his novel is that they are less well-developed than the European ones. Some have also claimed that he has substituted a certain ‘heroic posture’ for nuance and depth. 

I think they are being overly harsh. [Disagreement] Lunn provides considerable information about Kgatla life and society in the course of telling the story of Michael’s involvement in the Second Boer War of 1899-1902 and his subsequent banishment by King Linchwe I.[xv] His estrangement from his son, Molemane, is very much explored in terms of Michael’s feelings, his ‘inner life’. 

When I asked Lunn about this, he said that he had tried to develop the African characters as the evolving story demanded, just as he had done all the characters. European settlers tended to view Africans as props in their lives, rather than as fully-fledged human beings, he added. He had sought to explore – and, as far as possible, challenge – this viewpoint. 

When told that some people thought that his own highly privileged background meant that he was incapable of getting inside the lives and heads of African characters and perhaps he should not have made the attempt to do so, Lunn acknowledged that this probably shaped and limited what he was capable of imagining, and, by extension, writing.  All he could hope was that he’d not fallen into too many undesirable traps in this regard. 

He said that he would leave readers to make their own judgement. As I said earlier, I think his main failure is the problematic deployment of the Black Peril phenomenon in the context of Michael’s trial in 1923. 

One final thought about Michael. I did some research of my own and found out that the Kgatla emblem is the vervet monkey. Michael is eventually undone by his relationship with Iolo James, whose nickname, intriguingly, is ‘Monkey Nut’.[xvi]

I asked Lunn if this was a deliberate ploy on his part. He replied that it was an interesting coincidence, but nothing more. ‘Monkey Nut’ is another word for peanut, he added, so it is probably best be interpreted as a reference to Iolo’s vegetarianism – which, of course, would have been seen as decidedly cranky at the time. 

But, when pressed, Lunn admitted that it was not impossible that the nickname might also have been intended to suggest that the original Iorwerth was a little unhinged, that is, nutty. I may be being fanciful here, but I also can’t help wondering whether the fact that Iolo/Michael share a Monkey totem is an example of the author’s unconscious at work. 

Other characters

I do not propose to talk about all the other characters that Lunn creates. I will limit myself to three: Samuel, Mervyn and Gwerfyl.

As just mentioned, some the criticisms made about Michael have been applied to Samuel as well, whose actual name is Gopane Mpisidi.  Both of them are initially deployed by the author to educate us about hidden dimensions of the Second Boer War. It was not simply a violent conflict between the British and Afrikaners – there was an African insurrection too, which while partly aligned with the British cause, at points also became an anti-colonial movement. 

Michael and Samuel are both Kgatla. Both are involved in armed action during the 1899-1902 war. Samuel goes on the run as a result. If the ‘heroic posture’ critique has force, I’d say it applies more to Samuel, who defiantly leads the singing of a Kgatla anthem in Kimberley prison, a knife supplied by Michael secreted amongst his possessions. 

Samuel briefly reappears in the story at the end when he and Michael are unexpectedly reunited in Mochudi. Together they celebrate the fact that they have survived everything that settler colonialism can throw at them. 

Indeed, unbowed, Samuel and Michael are looking hopefully ahead to an independent African future. Of course, the irony is that Iolo, whose aspiration to intimacy they have understandably rejected, shares this aspiration. But that is not necessarily enough to bridge the divide between them. And it is Samuel who, as a parting gift, gives Michael a copy of Ethiop’s article. 

What, then, of Mervyn and Gwerfyl? Purely as an aside, in real life Iorwerth Jones had six children, rather than two. Well, in a way, Mervyn and Gwerfyl, perhaps like Michael and Samuel, are also arguably props in Lunn’s narrative. There is some character development, but it is not particularly extensive. Gwerfyl is particularly sketchily drawn.

At key moments in Iolo and Doris’s dismal marriage, Mervyn and Gwerfyl mediate events or signify something, for example, the relatively close relationships which African domestic servants in settler colonial societies were able to have with European children, who sometimes saw more of them, cared for them more than their parents. 

Mervyn is fleshed out a bit more than his younger sister. He has a bit-part role in the events of 1923 and then re-emerges to help usher the novel to a close. It is he, rather than his father Iolo, who honours Michael’s injunction to leave southern Africa, although it is worth repeating that Gwerfyl, with much less fanfare, has already done so. 

There are strong hints with both characters that the traumas that they experienced in childhood have affected their subsequent lives, but this is not explored in depth. They are complicit in the editing out of family history of Doris, their mother. 

Final thoughts on the relationship between fact and fiction

As we saw earlier, Lunn described himself as spending decades failing to fill in the many gaps in the life of Iorwerth Jones as a historian before switching to fiction. But the boundary between real facts and unreal fiction is often blurred in the novel. 

There are plenty of moments in the real life of Iorwerth Jones that are arguably stranger than fiction, more surreal than real. Lunn has made much play in the novel with several decontextualised denials made by Jones in his evidence during the second 1923 trial – remember him saying that his rooster did not disappear, he did not hide on the top of a water tank, he did not hide down a well? 

When the judge suggests all of this amounts to “comic relief”, we know what he means. [Laughter]

Muddying the waters further, Lunn has Iolo and Doris associate with a host of real historical figures in the course of the novel, but usually, as far as we know, fictionally. The cast is long but it includes Gandhi, Arthur Shearly Cripps, Wulf Sachs, M.V. Naik, Joshua Nkomo, Willie Sigeca and Sipambaniso Manyoba Khumalo.[xvii]

Then, to add insult to injury, he creates fictional characters who do things which we know real historical figures did. Witness Michael and Samuel. 

Lunn also told me that Iolo’s great friend, Frank Tindler, is based on a real person, Frank Candler – as you can see, in this instance with his surname changed.

Last but not least, the novel is full of documents and quotations, some of which are more or less real, others of which are complete fabulations. But it is nigh-on impossible for the reader to know which is which. 

For example, Lunn told me that the trial transcripts in chapter One come almost word-for-word from the historical archive, but the accompanying unpublished account of Iolo James’s “Origins” is a fabrication. Giving another example, he said that the classified November 1945 briefing written for the Prime Minister, Sir Godfrey Huggins by E.G. Howman (both of whom are real) at the beginning of Chapter Thirteen is purely the product of Lunn’s imagination, apart, that is, from the quotation taken verbatim from the 1944 report on Africans in the urban areas, chaired by Howman, with which that briefing concludes. 

So, the author has by no means switched wholly to fiction. He does so in part, but he never ceases to be a historian. Some critics have argued that, by failing to completely let go of this identity, Lunn allows the story to become unnecessarily bogged down. Of course, for some historians, it will be the three-quarter turn (my rough estimate) to fiction that is his mistake.[xviii]

Ultimately, Lunn’s book is surely best viewed as a historical novel. In my conversations with him, he declined to offer a general defence of the genre. Instead, he directed me towards a 2017 Guardian article by perhaps its most celebrated recent exponent in the English language, Hilary Mantel. “She says it much more eloquently than I can,” he told me.[xix]

Lunn did confess that it was probably the only type of novel which he was capable of writing. However, he then went on to say that he still did not really consider himself a novelist and had no plans to write another one.

When I read the Hilary Mantel piece (pardon the pun) [Laughter], there was one passage in particular that stood out for me. She writes:[xx]

To retrieve history we need rigour, integrity, unsparing devotion and an impulse to scepticism. To retrieve the past, we require all those virtues, and something more. If we want added value – to imagine not just how the past was, but what it felt like, from the inside – we pick up a novel. The historian and the biographer follow a trail of evidence, usually a paper trail. The novelist does that too, and then performs another act, puts the past back into process, into action, frees the people from the archive and lets them run about, ignorant of their fates, with all their mistakes unmade.

Jon Lunn certainly lets his main characters ‘run about, ignorant of their fates, with all their mistakes unmade’ in Importunity. In the process, he reveals some deeper truths about the violent, morally odious, but nonetheless complex, phenomenon of settler colonialism in southern Africa.  And, coming off the fence at the last moment [Laughter], for all its faults, it is an absorbing story. 

Thank you for listening. I will now take questions. [Applause]

Footnotes

[i] In subsequent bracketed audience responses, the word ‘audience’ should be taken as read.

[ii] Neither the dissertation nor book were familiar to me (or to any other colleagues in my field). Having now glanced through both, I can see why. They reflect a ‘political economy’ approach which used to be popular but today is viewed by most scholars as rather dated.

[iii] “Magistrate gets a surprise”, Bulawayo Chronicle, 20 January 1923

[iv] “What happened to Jones. The ‘Tar and Feather’ Case”, Bulawayo Chronicle, 27 January 1923. The trial is also covered in the 3 February, 10 March and 17 March editions of the newspaper. See also National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ), S404, Case Number 2460, High Court of Southern Rhodesia, Criminal Cases, Bulawayo, 7 March 1923 and D3/6/116, District Courts, Criminal Cases, Case No. 325, 1923

[v] NAZ, ZBQ 2/1/1, African Railway Strike Commission, 1945, Oral Evidence of Iorwerth Jones

[vi] Happily, this gap has begun to be filled. See, for example, Nicola Ginsburgh, Class, Work and Whiteness: Race and Settler Colonialism in Southern Rhodesia, 1919-79 (Manchester, 2020) and Ushehwedu Kufakurinani, Elasticity in Domesticity: White Women in Rhodesian Zimbabwe, 1890-1980 (Leiden, 2019) 

[vii] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and Oxford, 1966). There are numerous other concepts which could also be deployed usefully in relation to Lunn’s story – perhaps most obviously ‘deviance’. But I did not want to get too bogged down in the scholarly literature, however potentially germane, here. If you want to explore this terrain, a good place to begin would be Howard S. Becker’s Outsiders. Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York, 1963)

[viii] There is an extensive literature on the operation of the Black Peril in Southern Rhodesia. Perhaps the best known is Jock McCulloch’s book, entitled Black Peril, White Virtue. Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902-35 (Bloomington, 2000)

[ix] Lunn told me that his account of Doris’s stay at Ingutsheni draws heavily on Lynette Jackson’s Surfacing Up. Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1908-1968 (Ithaca, 2005)

[x] Many scholars and mental health practitioners have debated and written about Black Hamlet since its publication – for example, see Saul Dubow, “Wulf Sachs's Black Hamlet: A Case of 'Psychic Vivisection'?”, African Affairs, Vol. 92, No. 369, October 1993

[xi] On Watchtower, Lunn draws on Sholto Cross’s unpublished 1973 doctorate, “The Watchtower Movement in South Central Africa, 1908-1945”

[xii] Lunn told me that here he drew heavily on Jeremy Krikler’s Revolution from Above, Rebellion from Below. The Agrarian Transvaal at the Turn of the Century (Oxford, 2011) and Fred Morton’s article, “Linchwe I and the Kgatla Campaign in the South African War, 1899-1902”, Journal of African History, Vol. 26, Issue 2-3, March 1985

[xiii] Ethiop, “What Shall We Do with the White People?”, The Anglo-African Magazine (New York, 1860). I would contend that Ethiop’s article should be considered one of the founding texts of ‘whiteness studies’. The full text is available at: https://archive.org/details/angloafricanmaga1860wool (see pages 41-45)

[xiv] Jacob Dhlamini, Askari. A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (Oxford, 2015)

[xv] See Krikler and Morton in footnote xii. Lunn told me that he had consulted the works of Isaac Schapera extensively. He referred specifically to Schapera’s A Handbook of Tswana Law and Customs (Oxford, 1938) and A Short History of the BaKgatla-BagaKgafela of the Bechuanaland Protectorate (Cape Town, 1942) 

[xvi] Iorwerth Jones was known as ‘Monkey Nut Jones’ in real life.

[xvii] During our interviews, Lunn referred to several authors whose work had helped him to deploy some of these characters in the novel. They were: Owen Sheers, The Dust Diaries (London, 2004) [Arthur Shearly Cripps]; Trishula Rashna Patel, “Becoming Zimbabwean. A History of Indians in Rhodesia, 1890-1980, unpublished PhD, Georgetown University, 2021 [M.V. Naik]; Terence Ranger, Bulawayo Burning. The Social History of a Southern African City, 1893-1960 (Woodbridge and Harare, 2010) [Sipambaniso Manyoba Khumalo]

[xviii] During the question-and-answer session following the end of my talk – before it was disrupted – a member of the audience asked if I had probed Lunn about whether there was anything of himself in Iolo James. I hadn’t, but the question prompted me to email him and ask. He responded succinctly: “Probably.” It was evident that he didn’t want to take the discussion any further.

[xix] In our final interview, Lunn mentioned another book which he said had greatly inspired him – although he was insistent that he could never match its epic virtuosity. This is Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiment: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (2019). Hartman is the pioneer of a methodology she calls “critical fabulation”, in which literature and history combine to fill in the non-accidental gaps in the archive that exist when it comes to poor and marginalised groups. I said to Lunn that some might question how deep that inspiration went, given that African women are almost entirely absent from his novel. “A fair point”, conceded Lunn.

[xx] In fact, Mantel published a book of essays with the London Review of Books called Mantel Pieces in 2020. Hilary Mantel, “Why I became a historical novelist”, The Guardian (UK), 3 June 2017. Available at:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/03/hilary-mantel-why-i-became-a-historical-novelist