Makanna

Paul Laroon (a French operative of ambiguous or mixed ethnicity[1]) and Makanna (a character based on the prophet Makhanda ka Nxele) jointly fight against British imperial ambitions.

[2] Makanna is the leader of the Amakhossae (Xhosa), and together they save Bertha Falkland, the daughter of a British official.

[7] Upon its release, the novel received a mixed review in the Literary Gazette, which complained that the writing was "as a whole ... incongruous, forced, and extravagant".

[8] One article in Leigh Hunt's London Journal understands the novel as "defective in artifice of management, but very interesting on the whole", particularly for its descriptions of the rhinoceros, which the article describes as "a sort of hog-elephant, or mixture of elephant, hog, tapir, and cattle-mouth, cased in compartments of armour".

[9] Literary scholar Ian Glenn understands Makanna as a captivity narrative that ultimately reads as a "conventional romance".