The Influence of King Solomon's Mines on The Creation of Half-Broken People

The Influence of King Solomon's Mines on The Creation of Half-Broken People

This article relates to The Creation of Half-Broken People

King Solomon's Mines, a novel by H. Rider Haggard, is referenced throughout Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu's African gothic historical fiction work The Creation of Half-Broken People.

After Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) had returned to England from a stint as an administrator in South Africa, his brother suggested a wager: he would pay him five shillings if he could write a book "half as good" as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Haggard accepted the wager, and over a few weeks in 1885 dashed off the manuscript for what would become King Solomon's Mines. Once the book hit the shelves it was an instant success. It's credited with being the first in the Lost World genre — a subgenre of science fiction that revolves around the discovery of an unknown population. It quickly inspired others we now consider classics, such as Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888), Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), and Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot (1918).

King Solomon's Mines is an adventure story set in what is now Matabeleland, a region in Southwestern Zimbabwe. In the book, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good enlist well-known hunter Allan Quatermain to help them search for Curtis's brother, George, who went missing while searching for a legendary mine owned by the biblical King Solomon. The party sets off into the dense jungle with a group of servants. The group encounters many perils before reaching the land of the Kukuanas, where they become embroiled in the tribe's politics; it turns out that one of the servants, Umbopa, is actually Ignosi, the son of a wise king deposed by the evil Twala. After helping to restore Ignosi to his rightful place, the three men force Gagool, a sorceress loyal to Twala, to lead them to the mine. She does, but further complications ensue. Quatermain went on to appear in 18 of Haggard's works (14 books and four short stories) and is said to have inspired the movie hero Indiana Jones.

Haggard wrote a few of his African characters with a modicum of sympathy, but the book reflects the common British imperialist mindset of the era, and is profoundly racist. This might make one wonder why Ndlovu used King Solomon's Mines as a starting point for a novel that speaks to racism in Africa. She has said in interviews that it was Haggard's depiction of the character Gagool that inspired her. Haggard describes her in terrifying terms, which gave the grade-school-age Ndlovu nightmares. In an interview with LitNet, she goes on to say:

"[Gagool] was supposed to scare and disgust the reader with her myopic and atavistic, evil ways. It was when I was in high school, I think, that I realised that Haggard had been describing an old Matabele woman, someone who could have been my ancestor. This, of course, made me feel ashamed of my initial reaction to her. It was when I was at university that I realised many things: that I was not the intended reader for the novella; that Gagool was described in racist and misogynistic language that served to 'other' her as much as possible for the reader; and that this way of thinking of black women as dangerous, ignorant and evil still persists. It is up to me as a black woman writer to write against the persistence of this vision regarding black women, a vision that in southern Africa has its roots in how Haggard wrote Gagool."

Although the author does rely heavily on Haggard's work for parts of The Creation of Half-Broken People, it is Gagool who receives sympathetic treatment, not the white men who would vilify her. Under Ndlovu's tender care, Gagool is transformed into the heroine of the story — an act that feels long overdue.

Illustration from H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, by Walter Paget (1888)

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This article relates to The Creation of Half-Broken People. It first ran in the April 23, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.