Arjuna Badger Press
Brave and Scared
The year around the Battle of Blood River — 1838 — told from three sides at once: a Voortrekker girl, a Zulu youth, and an English boy, all about seventeen, all frightened, none of them the monster the others were told to expect. The villain is never one of the children; it is the machine that turns frightened children into enemies. Published here as an open, in-progress draft (Movement I): the Zulu voice is deliberately left open, to be co-created with a Zulu reader rather than imagined for him — and you are invited to help write it true.
Other languages
AI-translated first drafts of an already-unfinished book — offered so isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, and Setswana readers can meet it in their own language now. Names and in-culture words are kept as written. These have NOT yet had a mother-tongue editor; first-language and sensitivity readers are warmly invited to correct them.
A first-language speaker? Fix a colloquialism in these editions.
An open, in-progress draft — Movement I is live to read now, free on the site; no download while it is still being written. One voice is a deliberately empty seat (see the note below).
A note on the original
This is an open, unfinished draft — published mid-write on purpose. Brave and Scared tells the year around the Battle of Blood River (1838) from three sides at once, and its whole moral claim is that all three voices must be equally true and that none may be one people’s imagining of another’s inner life. The author is Afrikaner; the Voortrekker girl and the narrated history are his to write, and the English boy is grounded in the documented record. The Zulu youth’s chapter is deliberately left empty — a visible open seat — because it will be co-created with a Zulu reader and co-author, not written for him. What you can read now is Movement I, the beginning. If you can help write the empty seat true — a Zulu reader, a historian, a descendant of any side, or anyone who can say where this rings false — you are warmly invited to write to the press. Every hand that shapes it will be named in the acknowledgements.