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.

Helen Bradford: Not a Nongqawuse Story: An Anti-Heroine in Historical Perspective

Not a Nongqawuse Story: An Anti-Heroine in Historical Perspective (Part 1) by TigersEye99

Feminisms, Motherisms, Patriarchies & Women's Voices in the 1950s

Nomboniso Gasa: Feminisms, Motherisms, Patriarchies and Women's Voices by TigersEye99

Dipesh Chakrabarty: Fifty Years of E.P. Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class'

Dipesh Chakrabarty: Fifty Years of E P Thompson's the Making of the English Working Class by TigersEye99

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.

Ambitious tomes offer grand, unrivalled sweep of history

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA: Volume 1 edited by Robert Ross, ­Carolyn Hamilton and Benard K Mbenga; Volume 2 edited by Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager and Bill Nasson

(Cambridge University Press)

Andrew MacDonald, Mail & Gaurdian

The late master Eric Hobs­bawm, in his biography Interesting Times, recalled his time as a young radical in the English fens in the 1930s and described what he called Cambridge University's peculiar "principal of unripe time": whatever somebody may propose and however good the proposal, the time is inevitably not yet ripe. Thus it is that the last time Cambridge University Press produced a general volume on South African history, pneumonic plague took the lives of 350 South Africans.

Feminisms, Motherisms and Patriarchies and women's voices in the 1950s

by Nomboniso Gasa

Click here to download this essay in pdf.

Are Those-Who-Do-Not-Count Capable of Reason? Thinking Political Subjectivity in the (Neo-)Colonial World and the Limits of History

By Michael Neocosmos, 2012

This article is concerned to show that the historical science of the (neo-)colonial world is unable to allow
for an analysis of the political subjectivities of ‘those-who-do-not-count’ or ‘subalterns’ as rational beings.
Rather, it can only think such subjectivities as the products of people who are merely bearers of their social
location, not thinking subjects. As a result, such history can only be a history of place, not a history of the
transcending of place; it therefore amounts to colonial or state history. Historical objectivity invariably
produces state history. The thought of the possibility of emancipatory politics, which always exceeds place,
is thus precluded. This is an unavoidable epistemic problem in history and the social sciences in their current
form. Following the work of Lazarus, I argue for an alternative historical methodology in Africa in terms of
an internal analysis of the idioms of politics as discontinuous subjective sequences.

Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography

by Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2000

Subaltern Studies: Writings on Indian History and Society began in 1982 as a series of interventions in some debates specific to the writing of modern Indian history. Ranajit Guha (b.1923), a historian of India then teaching at the University of Sussex, was the inspiration behind it. Guha and eight younger scholars based in India, the United Kingdom, and Australia constituted the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies until 1988, when Guha retired from the team. The series now has a global presence that goes well beyond India or South Asia as an area of academic specialization. The intellectual reach of Subaltern Studies now also exceeds that of the discipline of history. Postcolonial theorists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds have taken interest in the series. Much discussed, for instance, are the ways in which contributors to Subaltern Studies have participated in contemporary critiques of history and nationalism, and of orientalism and Eurocentrism in the construction of social science knowledge. At the same time, there have also been discussions of Subaltern Studies in many history and social science journals. Selections from the series have been published in English, Spanish, Bengali, and Hindi and are in the process of being brought out in Tamil and Japanese. A Latin American Subaltern Studies Association was established in North America in 1992. It would not be unfair to say that the expression “subaltern studies,” once the name of a series of publications in Indian history, now stands as a general designation for a field of studies often seen as a close relative of postcolonialism.

Reclaiming African History, Reclaiming Humanity

Hlonipha Mokoena: 'Zuluness on trial'

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

by Ranajit Guha, 1983

When a peasant rose in revolt at any time or place under the Raj, he did so necessarily and explicitly in violation of a series of codes which defined his very existence as a member of that colonial, and still largely semi-feudal society. For his subalternity was materialized by the structure of property, institutionalized by law, sanctified by religion and made tolerable-and even desirable-by tradition. To rebel was indeed to destroy many of those familiar signs which he had learned to read and manipulate in order to extract a meaning out of the harsh world around him and live with it. The risk in 'turning things upside down' under these conditions was indeed so great that he could hardly afford to engage in such a project in a state of
absent-rnindedness.

Remembering Trouillot

Colin Dayan, The Boston Review
Michel-Rolph Trouillot died on July 5. I am still in shock. A transformative presence in multiple fields—anthropology (his main area), history, political economy, philosophy, and even literature—he redefined the meaning of scholarship. I remember his sustained assault on the celebrated uniqueness of Haiti; his hope long ago that the future of Haiti would be decided in the countryside; and the words, truer today than ever, describing Haiti as “the earliest testing ground for neo-colonialism.”

I met Trouillot in March 1987 at the Woodrow Wilson Center of the Smithsonian. I had just returned from a year’s sabbatical in Jamaica and Haiti, where I had gone to write a book calledHistory and Poetic Language in the Caribbean. The anthropologist Sidney Mintz introduced us. With his distinctive irony and warmth, Trouillot repeated thebig words—history and language—and asked whether I thought the terms of the project might not be a bit “too fashionable” to do justice to the complexities of the region.

From the Cult of the People to the Cult of Rancière

A radical social historian as well as philosopher, Jacques Rancière has spent many years rescuing vivid fragments of proletarian life and thought from the  vested interests that claim to speak for them. But in thwarting the instrumentality of intellectuals, he also risks obscuring the material he cherishes and the energies it carries – write Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts in Mute Magazine

Paul Maylam on South African Historiography

The limits of nationalism

Sumit Sarkar

TO start with the obvious: history, described famously by E.H. Carr many years ago as the ever-changing dialogue of the present with the past, is necessarily being ‘rewritten’ all the time. The immediate issues that have given this question great topicality and high media profile need not be rehearsed again. Briefly, they relate to the current state-backed Hindutva drive to ‘rewrite’ history through an onslaught on established historiography.

Bare Life in the Bantustans (of the Eastern Cape): Re-membering the. Centennial South African Nation-State

by Ashley Westaway, 2008

This thesis argues that 1994 did not mark a point of absolute discontinuity in the history of South Africa. More specifically, it asserts that 1994 did not signal the end of segregationism; instead of democracy leading to national integration, the Bantustans are still governed and managed differently from the rest of the country. Consequently, it is no surprise that they remain mired in pervasive, debilitating poverty fifteen years after 1994. In insisting that contemporary South Africa is old (rather than new), the thesis seeks to make a contribution to political struggles that aim to bring to an end the segregationist past-in-the-present.

Susan Buck-Morss: Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History

Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation through a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Historicizing the thought of Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination.

Click here to download this book in pdf.

Africa's Pasts and Africa's Historians

by Frederick Cooper, 2002

This article....brings out the possibilities and difficulties of writing histories that neither impose a singular model of progress nor posit a kaleidoscopic world of disparate and fragmentary communities, whether fluid or rigid. It takes seriously critiques of a universality that turns out to be western, or of a
nationalism that replicates imperialist categories, but it argues that that engagement and struggle have shaped what citizenship, the nation-state, and human rights actually mean. This article does not seek to wall off an objective history from political argumentation; instead, it emphasizes the importance of historical analysis in countering other historical visions on which particular images of Africa are based.

Reclaiming African History by Jacques Depelechin

reviewed by Peter Limb, Pambazuka

The need to distill complex history into an easily digestible form suitable for policy action has never been more apparent than in today’s confusing global situation with its information overload. Jacques Depelchin, committed and radical Congolese historian and director of the Ota Benga International Alliance for Peace in the Congo in his earlier book, ‘Silences in African History’ (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2004), gave a detailed re-think of African historiography - urging scholars to be guided by social relevance. In this new book of eight short but pithy chapters - ranging from ‘Taking African history seriously as a pre-condition to healing humanity’ and solidarity with Haiti, to possibilities of a ‘South–South subversive globalization’ between Africa and Brazil, and commentaries on South Africa, the DRC, the food crisis, Gaza, and genocide - he makes the mosaic of African events understandable.