"IN DARKEST AFRICA": MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE TO COLONIALISM IN RHODESIA1

INTRODUCTION

This work focuses on a historiographical issue, the "fragility of historical memory." It relates this issue to the author's research on the Salvation Army in Zimbabwe in 1991 and 1998. To write the first international history of the Army by a professional historian, I set out on a research trip to Zimbabwe. This was a site of one of the Army's earliest colonial adventures in 1891. On the journey I discovered African resistance to the 1890-91 British-Christian "invasion" of a foreign lard inhabited by a foreign people with a foreign culture.

British historian Arnold J. Toynbee advised students of human affairs to travel as a first step in researching the unknown. Of course an archival search for documentary evidence of the Army's invasion of Mashonaland and Matabeleland would be necessary. But knowing the land, the people and the culture proved to be just as important as paper-work in this instance.

The two-thirds world is the home of two-thirds of the Salvation Army's soldier members. Africa contains a higher ratio of Salvationists than any other continent and in Zimbabwe the Army is the fourth largest Christian denomination, This history of researching and writing about the Army's imperial adventure in what the British South Africa Company (BSAC) renamed Rhodesia for its owner Cecil John Rhodes, would be a sequel to a book on the Army's origins in Victorian England.2

The Army was originally a home mission in the East End of London. But after it changed its name to "salvation army" in 1878 it began to spread its Christian imperium across Britain and its immediate environs to North America, Europe, and particularly colonies of its growing empire. And by 1890 it was acquiring a reputation as a social service agency as well as an evangelical mission.

The principal question that led me to a thesis for this work was: how did the Salvation Army grow into a Christian imperium of 109 countries with two-thirds of its membership in the two-thirds world'? And how congenial was the relationship of colonizers and the colonized?' In particular, how did it the majority of its 1,010,829 soldiers (lay members) who lived in Africa, Asia, and Latin America relate to their colonizing overlords?3

This arable, but largely uncultivated field of historical research has only been published in officially censored "histories" written by EuroAmerican Salvationists with virtually no training in historical research. These "histories," more appropriately termed chronicles of Western dominance, look at the Army from the top down, from the pinnacle of the Army's London-based leadership and its Western, largely American-based financial benefactors.

As for the fragility of historical memory, the primary training for historians has meant finding documents, primary and secondary, in archives and libraries. This has meant that an historian's retrospection has mainly relied on those who wrote rather than those who spoke and passed down their oral traditions to their descendants. But Third World research experience must reach beyond the Western researcher's imperial baggage of cultural predilections that attach only to the written sources, whether primary or secondary. Primary documents they tend to rely on for information often bias the histories they invent, since the voice of the native is lost. In this light it may be of value for historians to work outside their primary field of research and on foreign soil to open their ears to new voices, indigenous ones, whose conversations carry different ideas than those spoken with Western tongues.

There is always the problem of whether an historian is capable of hearing foreign voices and interpreting foreign words accurately. That is the challenge. But since educate in Latin means to draw out from the other, work in the two-thirds world is a great opportunity to educate oneself, to develop an ability to do historical research beyond one's native space as well as beyond one's own time. An historian is always as his/her best as an "outsider." And no one could be more of an outsider to Africa than a parochial American with no previous research experience in the Third World and no speaking knowledge of the languages.

Preparation for my Zimbabwe research began with visits to Salvation Army archives in Alexandria, Virginia and London, where archivists opened massive documentation, largely produced by missionaries and government officials in the late-19th to the mid-20th centuries. Archival research convinced me that the best documentary evidence came from personal memoirs and histories written by missionaries and officials in the field, the "hush" as it is sometimes called. Seldom were publications from the Army's imperial headquarters in London useful, unless they had been written by missionaries in the field and were uncensored. Mission headquarters altered material to make it produce a desired effect for fund-raising to support mission schools and hospitals. Living with the Shone and Ndebele in Rhodesia's rural settings made missionary teachers and physicians sensitive to the language and customs of "native" Salvationists. Thus much of my best research work has been in correspondence with missionaries who lived with the people, outside the capital of Salisbury, as Harare was known in colonial times from 1890 to 1980.