Terence Ranger and the Jagged Geometry of Zimbabwe

Percy Zvomuya, The Con

In 2004, after Terence Ranger had delivered a paper at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (Wiser), I went up to him to greet him, make a few comments about his lecture and introduce myself as Zimbabwean. I know, he responded.

Ranger’s paper, “Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: the struggle over the past in Zimbabwe,” was one in which he critiqued the use of history by Zanu PF. The lecture came at the moment when the arc of the social and economic crisis had taken a sharp, jagged turn into the unknown and Zimbabwe’s history, and Zanu PF’s principal role in it, had become handy and expedient.

Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism

Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism 1957-1967, by Terence Ranger. James Currey, 2013., Reviewed by Duncan Money, New Left Project

Terence Ranger is best known for co-editing The Invention of Tradition with Eric Hobsbawm, but his first book Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97, on the first Chimurenga uprising against British colonial rule, was a landmark work of African history. Revolt was a careful reconstruction of how spirit mediums and other religious figures drew on the shared histories of the Ndebele and Shona peoples to organise one of the most widespread and serious challenges to colonial rule in this period. The book quickly became the seminal text for the nationalist movement which fought white minority rule in Rhodesia in the 1970s, with copies dispatched to leaders incarcerated in Rhodesian prisons and to military camps in Zambia and Mozambique. While its specific arguments that the first Chimurenga was inspired and directed by spirit mediums and that the risings were co-ordinated at all have been challenged and largely discarded by later historians,[1] Ranger's more general claims that African societies had a history that was recoverable and significant, and that they themselves had a sense of that history, proved a fatal blow to existing colonial historiography.