“There Is No God in Mashonaland”: A Story of the British South Africa Company’s Atrocities in Zimbabwe in the Wake of the First Chimurenga (1896–1897)

Paul Henry Gundani

doi:10.25159/2412-4265/19522

Authors

Paul Henry Gundani University of South Africa

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25159/2412-4265/19522

Keywords:

British South Africa Company (BSAC), Cecil John Rhodes, Trooper Peter Halket, the Stranger, The First Chimurenga, coloniality, Christian missionaries, postcolonialism

Abstract

The novel Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897) presents the reader with Olive Schreiner’s striking and idiosyncratic exposé of the atrocities that the British South Africa Company (BSAC) perpetrated against the Shona people as punishment for revolting against the company’s settler occupation. The scorched earth measures adopted by the BSAC expose the values and aspirations that motivated its volunteer mercenaries recruited from the United Kingdom and South Africa to suppress what they believed to have been a “rebellion.” The dialogue between Peter Simon Halket, the novel’s protagonist, and a Christly “Stranger” exposes the moral decadence and greed undergirding the colonial project and further raises serious moral questions about the Christian pretensions that masked the British colonial project in Zimbabwe throughout the colonial period. In this reflective article, we interrogate the scorched earth tactics, portrayed by Schreiner, used against the Shona to weaken their resolve. Secondly, we interrogate the implications of the claim that Trooper Peter Halket, Schreiner’s protagonist, makes when he exclaims that “There is no God in Mashonaland.” Using a postcolonial approach in this article, Halket’s claim begs the following question: What role did European missionaries play during the First Chimurenga?

Author Biography

Paul Henry Gundani, University of South Africa

Zimbabwe Open University

Research Fellow, Department of Christian Spirituality, Church History

and Missiology, University of South Africa

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