Online Reporter
Elliot Ziwira-At the Bookstore
THERE are books written for the shelves, and there are those written for the soil; for dust roads in Hwange National Park, for rivers winding through Gonarezhou, for weary men and women who patrol Zimbabwe’s fragile ecological frontiers daily—armed more with conviction than comfort.
Chaplain General Alford Trust Mashingaidze’s recent body of work, published by Libsworld Publishing (2025), belongs firmly to the latter category.
Notably, these books do not emerge from insulated scholarship alone, as Mashingaidze explains in an interview recently: “These books were not born in a library; they were born in the bush, in long walks, in grief, in prayer, and in silence.”
This rich collection launched in Harare late last year: “Exegetical Summary of the Minor Prophets”, “Exegetical Summary of the Major Prophets”, “Rangers Daily: Pocket-size Devotional for Guardians of Nature” (2026), and most arrestingly “Theology of Ecology: A Spiritual Companion for Guardians of Nature”, forms a coherent theological response to crises that Zimbabwe knows too well.
These include land degradation, climate stress, human–wildlife conflict, ranger trauma, and the slow erosion of moral responsibility toward creation. At the centre of this project stands “Theology of Ecology”, a work that refuses to treat conservation as a technical or donor-driven exercise.
Instead, it names environmental care as sacred obedience, rooted in scripture, culture, and lived African realities.
From its opening movement, the book grounds theology on earth.
“The soil beneath our feet is not mute matter,” Mashingaidze writes, “it is scripture written in dust, water, and breath.” For a country whose liberation history, food security, and spiritual memory are tied to the land, this assertion is political, moral, and deeply Zimbabwean.
Mashingaidze warns against two parallel dangers that have shaped modern responses to environmental collapse.
He insists: “Theology divorced from ecology becomes abstract religion; ecology divorced from theology becomes godless activism.”
Curiously, in Zimbabwe, both dangers are visible.
Faith communities often retreat into private salvation while rivers choke with pollution and forests recede.
Meanwhile, conservation initiatives sometimes arrive speaking the language of enforcement rather than belonging.
Concerning scripture, Mashingaidze asserts that land was never meant to be treated as expendable.
From Genesis to Revelation, creation is shown to participate in God’s covenant. Isaiah’s vision of harmony, the Psalmist’s declaration that “the heavens declare the glory of God,” and Paul’s unsettling reminder that “the whole creation groans” go beyond poetic excess to function as theological diagnosis.
Mashingaidze maintains that the earth suffers when human beings abandon justice.
“Ecological stewardship is not optional,” he states plainly. “It is sacred obedience.” In this framing, the pollution of rivers such as the Save, Mupfure or Manyame is not merely environmental damage but desecration.
No matter how well it may be argued, deforestation becomes moral failure and not development. One of the most reflective sections of “Theology of Ecology” is its engagement with indigenous spirituality, a subject of particular relevance in Zimbabwe, where ancestral memory and Christian faith often coexist uneasily.
Mashingaidze rejects the lazy dismissal of indigenous ecological wisdom as pagan residue. “Ecology did not spring out of thin air in the twentieth century,” he writes, “it has always been intertwined with how humans see God, creation and themselves.”
Across Zimbabwean landscapes, as in many other African communities, sacred groves, rainmaking traditions, and seasonal planting rhythms have long governed human interaction with the land.
To Africans, the land is mother, as David Lan insists in “Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe” (1985).
Mashingaidze agrees with that view, as he observes: “Indigenous worldviews do not see nature as ‘it’ but as ‘thou’, “Rivers are mothers. Mountains are creators. Trees are guardians.”
Such language, as did totemism, fostered restraint long before the vocabulary of biodiversity conservation entered policy documents.
“What scientists measure as conservation zones,” he notes, “indigenous spirituality guarded as sacred groves . . . In Zimbabwe, reverence for sites that our ancestors left indelible footprints has preserved these natural sites for centuries.”
In communal areas, these unwritten laws preserved ecosystems through reverence rather than force.
Importantly, Mashingaidze refuses to frame indigenous spirituality as rival theology.
“Indigenous spirituality is not competition with the Gospel — it is in conversation with it,” he writes.
Where indigenous wisdom reveres creation as kin, scripture crowns creation as worshipper of the Almighty.
For a nation still negotiating the wounds of colonial land dispossession and ecological disruption, this theological bridge is symbolic.
Few Zimbabwean readers will miss the immediacy with which Mashingaidze writes about rangers and conservation workers. This theology is shaped by proximity to ZimParks where he is the chaplain general, patrol routes, and the daily realities of guarding national parks like Hwange, Gonarezhou, and Mana Pools, among others, as well as communal conservancies.
“When humanity forgets, exploits, or negates creation,” he writes, “God raises guardians.”
These guardians are not romanticised figures in shining armour. They are men and women in “dusty boots, khaki uniforms, and weathered faces,” living between armed poachers, frightened yet hopeful communities, and fragile ecosystems.
Reflecting on the inspiration behind the books, Mashingaidze recalls: “I have stood with rangers who had just lost colleagues, prayed with men and women who had slept hungry in the wild, and watched communities wrestle with fear after wildlife incidents.”
In those moments, he realised that “conservation without spiritual strength is incomplete.”
Zimbabwe’s conservation story is inseparable from human–wildlife conflict, as elephants trample crops, predators threaten livelihoods, and communities feel excluded from land they border.
Mashingaidze’s theology challenges fortress conservation.
“True conservation flourishes when guardians and communities forge alliances of trust,” he argues. “When guardians embrace communities not as intruders but as partners, conservation transforms conflict into covenant.”
Far beyond sentimental idealism, this philosophy is a moral reimagining of conservation grounded in justice.
“Exegetical Summary of the Minor Prophets” and “Exegetical Summary of the Major Prophets” provide the scriptural backbone for this ecological theology. Far from being detached academic exercises, these works insist that ancient prophetic voices speak directly into Zimbabwe’s present struggles.
Amos’ condemnation of exploitation, Hosea’s lament over broken covenant, and Malachi’s rebuke of hollow worship find base in a society wrestling with corruption, inequality, and land abuse. The prophets’ insistence that injustice poisons the land feels uncannily current.
Similarly, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel are approached as voices forged in exile, trauma, and moral collapse, conditions not foreign to postcolonial African states. Each chapter bridges ancient prophecy and lived reality, urging scripture to inform ethics, governance, and stewardship.
This philosophy is echoed in Tafataona Mahoso’s “Rupise: Poetry of Love, Separation and Reunion, 1977-2017” (2018), where Rupise the woman, and Rupise, the metaphor, interact and merge into a national discourse that yearns for the restoration of robbed, plundered, bastardised and destroyed African institutions, which Aime Cesaire weeps for in “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” (1947).
What ultimately distinguishes Mashingaidze’s work is its pastoral humility.
“I wrote because I saw brave people carrying heavy burdens with very little spiritual nourishment,” he explains. “These books are my attempt to stand beside them — not above them — and say, you are seen, your work is sacred.”
These are not manuals for policy-makers alone. They are sustenance for rangers on patrol, pastors in rural parishes, conservationists facing burnout, and communities living at the edge of parks. As the author insists, they are “not manuals — they are fuel for the soul.”
In “Theology of Ecology”, Mashingaidze jolts us to the fact that theology, like a river, must flow in response to the land it passes through.
“Science is not a rival of faith,” he writes; “it is a lamp exposing God’s handwork.”
Ecology, conservation biology, and climate science are not enemies of belief but tools for understanding creation’s fragility.
“When we pollute rivers, we desecrate His (God’s) sanctuary,” he warns. The prophets, he reminds us, teach that “the earth itself mourns when humanity sins.”
Cognisant that the land is sacred in the motherland, contested, and central to identity, Chaplain General Alford Trust Mashingaidze offers a theology that refuses detachment. It listens to Zimbabwe’s soil, hears the groaning of creation, and calls for repentance, not only in prayer, but in practice.
These books do not just invite Zimbabweans to read scripture differently but they ask us to walk Hwange’s dust, Gonarezhou’s valleys, and our communal lands differently, as guardians, not conquerors.
- Chaplain General Alford Trust Mashingaidze’s “Exegetical Summary of the Minor Prophets”, “Exegetical Summary of the Major Prophets”, “Rangers Daily: Pocket-size Devotional for Guardians of Nature”, and “Theology of Ecology: A Spiritual Companion for Guardians of Nature”, will soon be available at Typocrafters (DigiHub) retail shop at Herald House, corner George Silundika Avenue and Sam Nujoma Street in Harare.
