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This chapter focuses on London, one of the world's greatest and grandest cities. London was described as in equal parts oppressive and enthralling, growing at an astonishing pace, spreading rapidly and without restraint in every direction, creating a vast middle class and an overcrowded and appallingly impoverished laboring class, attracting unprecedented levels of capital investment. This chapter explores how London appeared to its guests from South Africa. In 1836, during the week of 20 June to 27 June, Jan Tzatzoe testified for two and a half days before Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton's House of Commons Select Committee. Tzatzoe declared himself the chief of a tribe, subject to the great chiefs but independent enough to fight against them. He insisted that he had a voice regarding the matter of the war of 1835 and would have been consulted on a planned invasion.

This chapter discusses the period when Jan Tzatzoe lived in the Reads' Bethelsdorp household, which served as a sanctuary for him. This period is important because, later on, the lives of Jan Tzatzoe and James Read Junior became intertwined. Two trees born of the same soil, growing so close at first as to appear as one, but then splitting apart and separately seeking the nourishment of sun, rain, and earth, their roots burrowing in different directions for security and sustenance. James Read misses most of his son's first year of life. In late 1811, he and Van der Kemp were called to Cape Town to testify before the British Governor of the Cape Colony and a new judicial circuit court the Governor has created.

This chapter describes Reverend James Read's accident as he was about to cross the Cape Colony's eastern border at the Sundays River. The description goes thus. His horse suddenly slips on a muddy slope and falls on all fours, trapping itself between two small trees. Read runs his hands over his body and makes sure that he is not injured. All the while, the rain continues to drop heavily, so unlike the drizzle of his English childhood that gently dripped off his hat brim. Along with seven men who have accompanied him from the London Missionary Society's Bethelsdorp mission station, Read is officially on the hunt for stolen cattle. However, his real aim is to search for a young Caffer Chief with a longing desire to return to his place—Jan Tzatzoe.

This chapter focuses on Read's Xhosaland mission, where Joseph Williams, Jan Tzatzoe, and a few Khoisan assistants were granted permission to enter Xhosaland. At the time, the British were having a difficult time administering the European settlement zone, the boundary of which they have recently extended. By sanctioning the Xhosaland mission, colonial officials wished to introduce the Xhosa, who have already witnessed the power of British military might, to the more compassionate aspects of their civilization. Others likely saw the missionaries being able to gain access where soldiers cannot, providing invaluable knowledge of their current antagonists and potential future subjects. The next step for Bethelsdorp was preparing a convoy to deliver men and material into Xhosaland to establish a mission station.

This book discusses the life of Jan Tzatzoe, an African leader and intermediary who flourished in the European world of the missionary, Reverend Read, who helped raise him from boyhood, and the African world of his father, Kote Tzatzoe, chief of the amaNtinde lineage of the Xhosa state, to whose people he eventually returned. Tzatzoe shaped and bore witness to the advent and imposition of colonialism in South Africa. As an intermediary, Tzatzoe was actively engaged with mediating European colonialism and acquiring its best attributes. He was the subject of evangelical mission Christianity and its attempts to colonize the consciousness of Africans, but he also took on Christian beliefs and practices and mingled them with his own understandings.

This chapter describes how little of Jan Tzatzoe's life is publicly known, even though he helped build King William's Town. This is in contrast to John Brownlee, who was canonized as town father with a bronzed plaque in the main square. A few vestiges left of Tzatzoe's life include the Room painting now hanging in Kuruman and profiles and engravings in several books published during his lifetime. A prominent biographical portrait of Jan Tzatzoe lies alongside those of Phillis Wheatley, Toussaint L'Ouverture, and Olaudah Equiano. Tzatzoe also features as the preeminent example of a Kafir of the Amakosa tribe of the Great South African Race in Dr. J. C. Prichard's 1855 Natural History of Man.