Religion, Gender, and Earth Categories in Lauri Kubuetsile’s But Deliver Us from Evil (2019)

But Deliver Us from Evil (2019), a creative postcolonial historical fiction by Lauri Kubuetsile, follows two women bound by grief and cruelty amid the advent of colonial power and imperial Christianity. Nthebolang, whose father was murdered for witchcraft, and Beatrice, a Koranna girl confused as white, have violent lives. When they meet years later, one is a missionary wife and the other’s fiancé is hanged for the same reason as her father. Despite their apparent class and racial differences, their lives are tied together by their historical struggles and commitment to survival in the context of colonial and imperial Christianity, an entrenched traditional witchcraft belief system, and a challenged ecological system in which rain ecological dependence is scarce. Postcolonial Feminist theory frames the female characters’ image through religion, gender, and earth. How are the novel’s female protagonists portrayed? The novel’s ecological representations? The main goals are to study how female protagonists defy gender roles, colonialism, and survival under the imperial culture of violence and witchcraft.