In 1893 Simon and Alice Fonthill return to southern Africa and are caught between the ambitions of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company and the kingdom of Lobengula. A suspected Portuguese attempt to undermine agreements over mineral rights brings Simon back into scouting, but the political struggle soon becomes open war. As company forces advance into Matabeleland, Fonthill and Jenkins are drawn toward the patrol that crosses the Shangani River and finds itself cut off by a much larger Ndebele force.
The story is set during the First Matabele War, when the British South Africa Company used armed columns and Maxim guns to defeat Lobengula’s Ndebele kingdom. Its climax draws on the Shangani Patrol of December 1893, remembered in colonial mythology as a doomed last stand after Major Allan Wilson’s detachment was isolated north of the river. Wilcox places the adventure within the violent expansion of company rule that accompanied the Scramble for Africa.
