Emperor Norton I: His 1820 Settler years in South Africa as a farmer, trader, frontiersman, and failure

Long before he proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States, a young Joshua Norton arrived at the Cape of Good Hope as part of a grand British scheme: the 1820 Settler scheme. His family, like thousands of others, was promised fertile land to serve as a buffer against the Xhosa kingdoms on the volatile Eastern Cape frontier.

This wryly humorous and meticulously researched novel plunges you into the brutal reality of the Albany district, a land far from the promise of prosperity. Here, the Norton family struggles to farm unforgiving soil amidst a maelstrom of cultural conflict. The air is thick with tension between the newly arrived British, the established Dutch colonists, and the resilient Xhosa people defending their ancestral lands, all set against the backdrop of the relentless Frontier Wars.

Witness Joshua’s formative years shaped by violence, economic ruin, and the stark absurdities of colonial ambition. It is on this scarred and contested ground that a boy is forged—his keen sense of justice warped by tragedy, his reality blurred by the immense pressure of a world perpetually at war. This is the definitive account of how a not-very-successful settler’s son began his extraordinary journey to become the beloved monarch of a realm that existed only in his magnificent, fractured mind.