Francis Reginald Statham

The Bishop and political leader John Colenso famously summed him up as "a keen knife, liable to shut upon the hand that used it, and therefore to be used with caution".

He then fled to continental Europe, disguised as a Catholic priest, but nonetheless suspiciously accompanied by a female "dancer" companion.

Unstable and hypersensitive, Statham wrote The Fiery Furnace (1895) about his mental state, and underwent a brief religious conversion during his time in jail.

If it should happen to be too long in the sleeves, or ridiculously short in the back, I may be able to shift a button a few inches, and I am at least unalterably determined that my name shall be stamped on the loop you hang it up by.

In the subsequent murder trial, the farmers were acquitted, and the resulting outrage focused on Attorney General Thomas Upington.

[3] Returning to England briefly, he moderated his radical views and wrote Blacks, Boers and British: a Three-Cornered Problem (1881), attempting to appeal to the mainstream in advocating a compromise coming together of the three population groups.

Once again his writings were controversial, attacking the colonial establishment including the powerful Shepstone family, Sir Henry Bulwer, and Garnet Wolseley's settlement in Zululand.

After another brief spell in England and a failed attempt to reinstate himself and his reputation there, he returned again to southern Africa and served as editor to the Natal Advertiser, which was based in Durban.

In 1889, Statham's predictions of the situation in that year - printed a decade earlier in 1879 - were unearthed and reprinted verbatim, due to their extraordinary accuracy.

The Star in Johannesburg offered him an editorship position, but he refused due to its pro-Rhodes agenda, preferring unemployment to endorsing an ideology he hated.

The British government's granting of the BSAC's royal charter to occupy and administer what became Rhodesia was, Statham wrote, "the most extraordinary usurpation of power ever perpetrated, since the Popes gave over the Peruvians into the hands of Pizarro".