Doctor Who Companions: Peter Lobengula
Monday Miscellany
Another nomination for an interesting real person who could travel in the TARDIS. (To see the ground rules for this column, read my first entry.)
Peter Lobengula fits the ground rules in that he’s a person that we know a good deal about as an individual and yet he’s someone who could disappear from history for a while without disturbing anything known about his life. He’s also got a compelling dramatic arc to his life that remains open to interpretation.
He first shows up as an identifiable individual in the United Kingdom as one of the stars of a stage show called “Savage South Africa”, a version of which was filmed in 1899 as “Major Wilson’s Last Stand”. The hook for his performance was that he claimed to be one of the sons of Lobengula, the last ruler of the independent Ndebele polity in what is now southern Zimbabwe, who was defeated in 1893 by a group of white mercenaries and settlers who travelled north from South Africa with the back of Cecil Rhodes and his British South Africa Company—and the stage show re-enacted one of the battles in that conflict, with Lobengula himself being a character, played by Peter. This is what initially drew attention to him from historians, when many of us were doing research on the huge growth of “exhibitionary culture” in European empires and the United States from the end of the 18th Century into the 20th Century, in which non-Western people performed in stage shows, were posed in major urban fairs, and in one especially awful case, put on display in the Bronx Zoo.
It’s impossible to say for certain whether the man who appeared on stage in the UK was what he claimed to be. Lobengula had many wives and many children. He died at some point right after the 1893 war, and no one that we know of asked Lobengula’s surviving family about Peter’s identity until much later. It’s not clear in fact that anybody ever asked them, though the British South Africa Company later on claimed to have investigated his relationship to Lobengula and ruled it a deception. Since the Company was frequently inclined to just make up whatever facts it liked when it came to Africans under its rule in what are now Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi, the Company’s assertions about Peter are of little value.
What’s important about Peter Lobengula is that he is one of a number of Black Britons, people of African descent who were living in the United Kingdom not just at the turn of the 20th Century but for centuries before that, a fact that’s evidently stuck in the craw of white supremacists in the UK and elsewhere in recent years. Peter Lobengula became a news story for a brief moment because he was engaged to be married to a white British woman, Kitty Jewell, which attracted the ire of the newspapers for a brief time. The engagement was broken up and Lobengula dropped out of the stage show for a short while, but he eventually came back (in a role other than his supposed father) and he and Kitty were quietly married.
She subsequently tried to commit suicide and then divorced Peter, alleging physical abuse and adultery. Ben Shephard, who wrote a 2004 book about the marriage and its aftermath, was only able to trace Kitty Jewell’s history in fragments, and concludes that he can’t be very sure about anything in her background, only that she was likely not quite the respectable middle-class person described in the newspapers. He can’t say anything about what happened after the divorce.
Peter Lobengula, on the other hand, remarried (without fuss or controversy) an Irish woman and had five children with her in Salford . In 1913, he caused a bit of a stir by demanding the right to be put on the voters’ rolls. He died that same year of tuberculosis; his wife and all but one of his children followed him to the grave. There’s an interesting Ancestry.com entry for someone claiming to be his surviving son, a many who died in 1977.
In terms of fitting into the science fantasy context of Doctor Who, the question of Peter’s family history right away would make for a compelling dramatic background. If the writers went with the “he was a Black man living in the UK who was cast into this role”, then that’s interesting in its own right, especially as part of the long, messy reckoning that white Britons have had with the long-term presence of people of African descent and South Asian descent within the UK. If they went with “he was actually Ndebele or at least from Southern Africa, just not one of Lobengula’s sons”, that’s also a fascinating personal history. (I actually love this possible angle on the story.) But clearly being an actual son of Lobengula who somehow made his way to the UK is also compelling.
Especially in the latter version of his history, he’d also be a chance to bring rage against injustice and being on the receiving end of colonial conquest into the show’s frame. So far the Black British characters on Doctor Who have all been rather nice people and quite polite about anything that looks like discrimination, past or present, with the exception of semi-companion Danny Pink, the love interest for Clara Oswald in Season Eight of the rebooted version of the show. I liked the edgy energy around Pink’s character, especially his pointed challenges to the Doctor’s elitism. An interpretation of Peter Lobengula could provide some of that same energy—and I think particularly bounce off of Ncuti Gatwa’s upcoming portrayal of the title character in the series. (Having two Black men in the TARDIS at once seems like a fantastic way to shake up the formula.) The allegations against Lobengula in the divorce filing would be a challenge for the writers to handle—and Shephard did find a few judicial records alleging public drunkenness in Salford, though nothing particularly serious. You don’t want to downplay a real history of domestic violence; on the other hand, in Doctor Who you don’t really want a protagonist who has committed domestic violence. I can see a way out where the first time the Doctor and Peter meet instead involves, in the show’s usual fashion, some sort of alien menace, and Peter restlessly wants to go on working with the Doctor while Kitty is terrified and unhappy in the marriage. Since “My husband was attacked by a Sontaran and now travels with an alien Time Lord” wouldn’t have been a legally valid reason for a divorce, perhaps the fictional Kitty on the show would use a more conventional explanation for ending the marriage.
Companions on nuWho have also been given richer and more complicated dramatic outcomes when they finally step out of the TARDIS. There’s pathos in some cases, death or pseudo-death in others, and in a few cases, something more like a happily-ever-after. So Peter’s return to a second marriage in Salford, and his untimely death, allow for a lot of possible interpretations and dramatic takes, another important part of the premise of this column—that the inclusion of a real person in a fiction might allow for a new way to think about the later history of a person who only briefly flashed into archival view.
Date of Tardis Departure and Return: Just before the finalization of his divorce. Return maybe a year or two later.
Story Role: The writers could play up his experience on the stage, regardless of his history. If he was really the son of Lobengula, he might have actual military experience. He might also be the first character in a long time to have some real anger to deal with and also some righteousness about conquest, a theme that the show often deals with (though in the older version of it, sometimes on the side of imperial conquerors, if usually in some complicated ways). He could also have an interesting relationship with modern British characters.
Dramatic Arc: For one, resolving the mystery of his background. For another, learning about the wider comparative prevalence of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the universe. Yet another, reflections on racism in modern British society. Finally, there’s some real sadness and melancholy available if in the course of his travels, Peter finds out that all of his family but one are going to barely outlive him. It’s possible that the show could also feature an episode where Peter meets a much older Kitty Jewell, who has gone on to some other life in some other place.