Henri Joseph Depelchin

First Superior of the Zambezi Jesuit Mission

Henri Depelchin was a Belgian priest who belonged to the Society of Jesus. Depelchin was the first superior of the failed Jesuit Mission of the Zambezi. He traveled the length and breath of Rhodesia starting missions from 1879 to 1882 when he left Africa.

Depelchin also served founder and first superior of the West Bengal Mission in India. As an educator, he was the founder and first director of three major colleges in India. 

During his years in India in 1878 Depelchin was recalled to Europe where he was assigned to organise and head the Zambesi Mission in southeastern Africa. The Mission was to cover, in today’s maps, all of Zimbabwe, most of Zambia and some of Mozambique. At that time, very few Europeans knew anything about that part of Africa. But finding funds and volunteers were not a problem.

In 1879, Depelchin sailed for Cape Town in the Cape Colony with an international team of five other priests and five lay brothers from various Jesuit provinces. They then went to the Zambezia bush to establish a mission base in Bulawayo in Matabeleland (now western Zimbabwe). The journey took almost six months. It was the first of three successive expeditions, taken between 1879 and 1882, Each of them began in the town of Grahamstown (about 70 kilometres  from the coast), also in the Cape Colony, and involved hundreds of miles (kilometers) in ox-carts in a painful climate and through a hostile environment.

The goal was always the same – to ask the natives for the permission to open a mission station in their land. But, each time, they said no. Each time, Depelchin and his men were dogged by misfortunes, trails, diseases, accidents and even probably poison. His letters sent “from the lands of the Matabeles”, “in the huts of the Batongas” and from “the valley of the Barotses”, were published in Brussels as a two-volume set in 1882 and 1883. Under the title of Trois ans dans l’Afrique australe (Three Years in Southern Africa), the collection was an immediate best-seller, drawing more missionary vocations to the Church.

But, in the end, the Zambesi Mission was a fiasco. It was cancelled in April 1883 by the superiors of the orders of the surviving missionaries. Ten missionaries, aged between 29 and 50, lost their lives. Depelchin himself was out with a broken leg from an ox-wagon accident.

Depelchin was recalled to Belgium in 1883 to regain his health and to allow his leg to heal. It took him four years to completely recover. He was assigned light duties at the schools in Aalst and Mons but his heart was still in the missions. So he went to the local parishes to speak about life in the missions, to encourage financial support for them and to recruit future missionaries. Like his books, his appearances were popular and successful. His letters and reports from India were also presented in numerous missionary periodicals in Europe.

He died 26 May 1900, Calcutta, District of West Bengal, British India.