Kitty and the Prince, by Ben Shephard

In 1899, a South African showman called Frank Fillis chartered a liner and filled it with two hundred Africans, assorted whites, countless wild animals and a man who claimed to be the son of the Matabele King, Lobengula. Then he brought all these ingredients together at Earl's Court in London, in a show called Savage South Africa, which combined thrilling re-enactments of the Matabele Wars of the 1890s and a 'K***** Kraal', where the British public could wander among Africans in their natural setting.

At first all went well. But then the star of the show, Prince Lobengula, caused a scandal by trying to marry a pretty, respectably, white girls, Kitty Jewell – the daughter of a Cornish mining engineer, whom he had met in South Africa. 'There is something inexpressibly disgusting in the idea of the mating of a white girl and a dusky savage,' declared the Evening News. Its stable-mate, the Daily Mail, raised an outcry against the behaviour of women visitors to the show who were 'weakening the Empire' by being over familiar with the semi-naked Africans. It showed, said Vanity Fair, that the New Woman could not tell a savage from a savant.

This is the story of the doomed love affair between Kitty Jewell and Peter Lobengula. It is at once a heart-breaking love story, a historical mystery, and a window into popular racism, popular journalism, and feminism in the 1890s.