Terence Ranger
Biographic Data
| ID | 108437 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Terence Ranger |
| GIVEN NAMES | Terence |
| FAMILY NAME | Ranger |
| SIGNATURE | RANGER T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 138 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1173 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 136 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1957 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
The Local and the Global in Southern African Religious History
Funerals in Africa: Explorations of a Social Phenomenon
Across Africa, funerals and events remembering the dead have become larger and even more numerous over the years. Whereas in the West death is normally a private and family affair, in Africa funerals are often the central life cycle event, unparalleled in cost and importance, for which families harness vast amounts of resources to host lavish events for multitudes of people with ramifications well beyond the event. Though officials may try to reg…
Lidwien Kapteijns. Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991
Somalia is one of the most dangerous and disputed countries in the world, notorious for civil war, piracy, and terrorism. It also possesses, however, a glorious oral literature and a fascinating archaeology which makes it one of the most interesting countries in the world. This combination has produced profound and combative scholarship. It is impossible to be a calm and detached academic expert on Somalia. Somali specialists both love and loathe…
The Invention of Tradition
Many of the traditions which we think of as very ancient in their origins were not in fact sanctioned by long usage over the centuries, but were invented comparatively recently. This book explores examples of this process of invention – the creation of Welsh and Scottish 'national culture'; the elaboration of British royal rituals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the origins of imperial rituals in British India and Africa; and the attem…
The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa
The 1870s, 1880s and 1890s were the time of a great flowering of European invented tradition – ecclesiastical, educational, military, republican, monarchical. They were also the time of the European rush into Africa. There were many and complex connections between the two processes. The concept of Empire was central to the process of inventing tradition within Europe itself, but the African empires came so late in the day that they demonstrate th…
Ghosts of Kanungu: Fertility, Secrecy and Exchange in the Great Lakes of East Africa
Ghosts of Kanungu: Fertility, Secrecy and Exchange in the Great Lakes of East AfricaRICHARD VOKESOxford: James Currey, 2009 Last year I attended a conference in Oxford on Religion and Aids. Those w
Afterword
In this afterword Terence Ranger reflects on the debate and looks forward at what future histories of Zimbabwe might look like
Zimbabwean Diamonds
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Reclaiming The African City: The World And The Township
The twenty-first century has been hailed as the century of the Southern African city. Southern African cities are bursting through their colonial bonds; stimulated as well as distorted by neo-liberal globalisation. The African populations of colonial cities could never stabilise nor create local urban identities. But contemporary African cities are creating multiple urban cultures. By contrast to their regional predecessors they are simultaneousl…
Bulawayo Burning: The Social History of a Southern African City, 1893-1960
This book is designed as a tribute and response to Yvonne Vera's famous novel 'Butterfly Burning', which is set in the Bulawayo townships in 1946 and dedicated to the author. It is an attempt to explore what historical research and reconstruction can add to the literary imagination. Responding as it does to a novel, this history imitates some fictional modes. Two of its chapters are in effect 'scenes', dealing with brief periods of intense activi…
Translocality: The study of globalising processes from a southern perspective
Constructions of Zimbabwe
Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo (eds), Becoming Zimbabwe: A History From the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008 (Jacana, Johannesburg and Weaver, Harare, 2009), 260 pp., ISBN 978-1-77922-083-7 (availab
Frontiers: From the Intimate to the Expansive
Laura J. Mitchell, (New York, Columbia University Press, 2009), 252 pp, £43 hardback, ISBN 978-0-231-14252-6 Through a close examination of the Cedarberg region on the Olifants River, Laura J. Mitc
Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa
The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe , by Ranka Primorac
Reviewed by: The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe Terence Ranger The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe By Ranka Primorac. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006, vii + 241 pp. ISBN 978-1-84511-120-5 cloth. When Zimbabwe became independent in 1980 it had no internationally renowned novelists. Men deeply involved in black nationalist politics—Herbert Chitepo, Stanlake Samkange, Ndabaningi Sithole—had …
Myth and legend in urban oral memory: Bulawayo, 1930-60
Inspired in part by the fictional work of the Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, this article draws on oral interviews conducted with elderly residents of townships (former colonial ghettos) of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second‐largest city, in the early 2000s. The informants’ memories of life in the colonial city are configured by five intertwined sets of urban myths and legends, related to strangeness, panic, youth, resilience and heroism. Linked by re…
Reconstructing Zimbabwe's Past: The Professional Historians Return
Scotland Yard in the Bush: Medicine Murders, Child Witches and the Construction of the Occult: A Literature Review
In the Sherlock Holmes stories Scotland Yard famously does not deploy science or make use of all those studies of blood and ash and bone which Holmes himself had pioneered. But the Yard is never so clumsy as when the occult seems to be involved – with suspected vampires, spectral dogs, tribal fetishes. The Yard's combination of ignorance, scepticism and credulity is shown to be the very worst of all attitudes to adopt. How much things have change…
African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam
City Versus State in Zimbabwe: Colonial Antecedents of the Current Crisis
There is currently a major urban crisis in Zimbabwe. This expresses itself in failures of provision of water, electricity, medicines, transport, housing etc. Descriptions of conditions in the high density townships of Harare and Bulawayo today are strikingly reminiscent of the last great urban crisis – in the late 1940s of colonial Rhodesia. Two other features are common to both crises. One is the problem of governance. The other is the relation …
Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa
The Meaning of Urban Violence in Africa: Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1960
Until recently the abundant literature on South African urban history has seen violence in towns and cities in terms either of anti-colonial protest or of labour consciousness. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission defined the urban violence with which it was concerned as exclusively political. More recently, however, questions of spatiality, township culture, generation, and gender have offered alternative or supplementary explanations.This ar…
Suffering for Territory: Race, place and power in Zimbabwe (review)
Donald S. Moore, Suffering for Territory: race, place and power in Zimbabwe. Durham and London: Duke University Press (pb £15.95 pb – 0 223 3570 0; hb £64.00 – 0 8223 3582 4); Harare: Weaver Press (price not stated – 1 77922 037 5). 2005, 416 pp. - Volume 76 Issue 3
Medicine Murder in Colonial Lesotho: The Anatomy of a Moral Crisis (review)
Colin Murray and Peter Sanders, Medicine Murder in Colonial Lesotho: the anatomy of a moral crisis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International Africa Institute, London (hb £50.00 – 0 7486 2285 4). 2005, 512 pp. - Volume 76 Issue 2
Writing African History
FORTY years ago Daniel McCall published a book about the sources for African history—Africa in Time Perspective: A Discussion of Historical Reconstruction from Unwritten Sources (Oxford, 1964). It was a brisk, no-nonsense little book, a mere 175 pages long. Now John Phillips has edited a huge book as a tribute to McCall which runs to over five hundred pages. The book maintains the spirit of the original. It, too, is no-nonsense. Phillips tells us…
The Invention of Tradition
Many of the traditions which we think of as very ancient in their origins were not in fact sanctioned by long usage over the centuries, but were invented comparative recently. This book explores examples of this process of invention - the creation of Welsh Scottish 'national culture'; the elaboration of British royal rituals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the origins of imperial ritual in British India and Africa; and the attempts by …
Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe
Over the past two or three years there has emerged in Zimbabwe a sustained attempt by the Mugabe regime to propagate what is called ‘patriotic history’. ‘Patriotic history’ is intended to proclaim the continuity of the Zimbabwean revolutionary tradition. It is an attempt to reach out to ‘youth’ over the heads of their parents and teachers, all of whom are said to have forgotten or betrayed revolutionary values. It repudiates academic historiograp…
Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa
It is important to make clear from the beginning what this review will cover and what it will not. Its focus will be on “traditional” and Christian religious movements in the last hundred years. By movements are meant widespread and grassroots adherence to religious ideas, symbols and rituals, sometimes brief in duration, sometimes long-lasting; sometimes lacking and sometimes acquiring formal organizational structures. The review will deal, ther…
Connexions between ‘Primary Resistance’ Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism In East and Central Africa. Part I
A recent authoritative review of developments in African historiography pointed to one 'kind of synthesis which has always seemed worthwhile undertaking’, the attempt to trace ‘an historic connexion between the last-ditch resisters, the earliest organisers of armed risings, the messianic prophets and preachers, the first strike-leaders, the promoters of the first cautious and respectful associations of the intelligentsia, and the modern political…
Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa
This book takes as its theme the ways in which governments legitimate their rule, both to themselves and to their subjects. Its introduction explores legitimacy and pre-colonial states, but the three
Dance and Society in Eastern Africa 1890-1970: The Beni Ngoma
Translocality: The study of globalising processes from a southern perspective
Writing African History
FORTY years ago Daniel McCall published a book about the sources for African history—Africa in Time Perspective: A Discussion of Historical Reconstruction from Unwritten Sources (Oxford, 1964). It was a brisk, no-nonsense little book, a mere 175 pages long. Now John Phillips has edited a huge book as a tribute to McCall which runs to over five hundred pages. The book maintains the spirit of the original. It, too, is no-nonsense. Phillips tells us…
Growing from the roots: Reflections on peasant research in central and Southern Africa
(1978). Growing from the roots: reflections on peasant research in central and Southern Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 5, Themes in Agrarian History and Society, pp. 99-133
Scotland Yard in the Bush: Medicine Murders, Child Witches and the Construction of the Occult: A Literature Review
In the Sherlock Holmes stories Scotland Yard famously does not deploy science or make use of all those studies of blood and ash and bone which Holmes himself had pioneered. But the Yard is never so clumsy as when the occult seems to be involved – with suspected vampires, spectral dogs, tribal fetishes. The Yard's combination of ignorance, scepticism and credulity is shown to be the very worst of all attitudes to adopt. How much things have change…
African Attempts to Control Education in East and Central Africa, 1900-1939
Journal Article AFRICAN ATTEMPTS TO CONTROL EDUCATION IN EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA, 1900–1939 Get access Terence Ranger Terence Ranger The University CollegeDar es Salaam Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 32, Issue 1, December 1965, Pages 57–85, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/32.1.57 Published: 01 December 1965
Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the "Dark Forests" of Matabeleland
African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam
Taking Hold of the Land: Holy Places and Pilgrimages in Twentieth-century Zimbabwe
TAKING HOLD OF THE LAND: HOLY PLACES AND PILGRIMAGES IN TWENTIETH–CENTURY ZIMBABWE Get access Terence Ranger Terence Ranger St. Antony's CollegeOxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 117, Issue 1, November 1987, Pages 158–194, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/117.1.158 Published: 01 November 1987
Territorial Cults in the history of Central Africa
Recent research on the territorial cults of Central Africa allows us to arrive at some tentative general patterns. The historical development of territorial cults has been worked out most fully for Malawi. Here it seems to be agreed that there was an essentially similar early cultic pattern among the proto-Chewa, the proto-Mang'anja and the proto-Tumbuka. Cults dedicated to the High God and tended by spirit wives were widely diffused. Much of the…
Whose heritage? The case of the Matobo National Park
(1989). Whose heritage? The case of the Matobo National Park. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 15, Politics of Conservation in Southern Africa, pp. 217-249
Tradition and Travesty: Chiefs and the Administration in Makoni District, Zimbabwe, 1960-1980
INTRODUCTIONDuring the first months of 19811 was in Makoni district, Zimbabwe, carrying out research on its twentieth-century history. I arrived there bearing a powerful letter of credit from the Minister of Local Government and, as a result, the District Commissioner allowed me to see his current files on chiefs and headmen. These files - far fatter than any that had survived from an earlier period in the National Archives - covered the period 1…
Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa
City Versus State in Zimbabwe: Colonial Antecedents of the Current Crisis
There is currently a major urban crisis in Zimbabwe. This expresses itself in failures of provision of water, electricity, medicines, transport, housing etc. Descriptions of conditions in the high density townships of Harare and Bulawayo today are strikingly reminiscent of the last great urban crisis – in the late 1940s of colonial Rhodesia. Two other features are common to both crises. One is the problem of governance. The other is the relation …
Dignifying Death: The Politics of Burial in Bulawayo
There has recently been much more recognition of the African role in the making of the colonial cities of southern Africa. Nevertheless, many kinds of action have still seemed to be impossible for Africans living in tightly controlled municipal townships. Among these is the political and symbolic management of death. While literature on West African towns celebrates 'mausoleum politics' and the struggle over the burial of dead men under the floor…
Colonial Lessons: Africans' Education in Southern Rhodesia, 1918-1940
Carol Summers, Colonial Lessons: Africans' education in Southern Rhodesia, 1918–1940. Oxford: James Currey, 2002, 212 pp., £45.00, ISBN 0 85255 953 4 (hard covers), £16.95, ISBN 0 85255 952 6 (paperback). - Michael O. West, The Rise of an African Middle Class: colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, 324 pp., US22.95, ISBN 0 253 21524 2 (paperback). - Volume 73 Issue 4
Colonialism, Consciousness and the Camera
An Africanist comment
The Mobilization of Labour and the Production of Knowledge: The Antiquarian Tradition in Rhodesia
One of the advantages of looking at white society in Southern Rhodesia is that it was a very simple society by contrast to South Africa and that its essential structures show up very clearly. This was certainly true of the business of producing models of African societies, customs and conduct. In South Africa there grew up a cluster of intellectual 'experts' on Africans - including a distinguished group of anthropologists. In South Africa, theref…
The Narratives and Counter-narratives of Zimbabwean Asylum: Female voices
Social historians of Africa in general, and of Zimbabwe in particular, have learnt how to make use of colonial criminal court records by reading them both with and against the grain. Now historians of Zimbabwe are being presented with another sort of court record. Many of them are on the Britain Zimbabwe Society panel of ‘expert’ assessors of Zimbabwean asylum appeals. They see the narrative statements of asylum-seekers and the counter-narratives…
Richard Boyle and the making of an Irish fortune, 1588—1614
This paper deals with the obscure adventures of a minor official and petty landowner of unremarkable birth and little influence. The details of these adventures, which have for so long been forgotten, and which were once so assiduously concealed, may seem hardly worth the labour of investigation. And yet many statesmen of the seventeenth century attempted such an investigation, including Wentworth himself. Indeed it is no overstatement to say tha…
Strafford in Ireland: A Revaluation
Journal Article STRAFFORD IN IRELAND: A REVALUATION Get access Terence Ranger Terence Ranger University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 19, Issue 1, April 1961, Pages 26–45, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/19.1.26 Published: 01 April 1961
The Politics of the Irrational in Central Africa
The Last Word on Rhodes
The recent history of central Africa
(1965). The recent history of central Africa. Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 148-152
African Attempts to Control Education in East and Central Africa, 1900-1939
Journal Article AFRICAN ATTEMPTS TO CONTROL EDUCATION IN EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA, 1900–1939 Get access Terence Ranger Terence Ranger The University CollegeDar es Salaam Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 32, Issue 1, December 1965, Pages 57–85, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/32.1.57 Published: 01 December 1965
Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97: A Study in African Resistance
Connexions between ‘Primary Resistance’ Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism In East and Central Africa. Part I
A recent authoritative review of developments in African historiography pointed to one 'kind of synthesis which has always seemed worthwhile undertaking’, the attempt to trace ‘an historic connexion between the last-ditch resisters, the earliest organisers of armed risings, the messianic prophets and preachers, the first strike-leaders, the promoters of the first cautious and respectful associations of the intelligentsia, and the modern political…
Aspects of Central African History
The ‘New Historiography’ in Dar Es Salaam: An Answer
Journal Article THE 'NEW HISTORIOGRAPHY' IN DAR ES SALAAM: AN ANSWER Get access TERENCE RANGER TERENCE RANGER University of CaliforniaLos Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 70, Issue 278, January 1971, Pages 50–61, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a096084 Published: 01 January 1971
New Periodical on African Religion
African Religious and Cultural History and the Historiography of the Diaspora
No abstract
Territorial Cults in the history of Central Africa
Recent research on the territorial cults of Central Africa allows us to arrive at some tentative general patterns. The historical development of territorial cults has been worked out most fully for Malawi. Here it seems to be agreed that there was an essentially similar early cultic pattern among the proto-Chewa, the proto-Mang'anja and the proto-Tumbuka. Cults dedicated to the High God and tended by spirit wives were widely diffused. Much of the…
Dar es Salaam Conference Papers on Religion
The African Churches of Tanzania
The Historical Study of African Religion with Reference to East and Central Africa
Agricultural Change in Modern Tanganyika: An Outline History
The Historical Study of African Religions
The Mwana Lesa Movement of 1925
Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890-1970: The Beni Ngoma
Dance and Society in Eastern Africa 1890-1970: The Beni Ngoma
The Sacred Meadows. A Structural Analysis of Religious Symbolism in an East African Town
Choice and Constraint in a Swahili Community. Property, Hierarchy, and Cognatic Descent on the East African Coast
Originally published in 1975, this book examines property and power relations in a Swahili village on Mafia Island off Tanzania. It focuses on the cognatic descent groups which are important in many areas of village life such as land-holding, marriage, residence, Islamic activities and spirit possession cults. Some anthropologists have contended that groups with multiple membership cannot be viable social units, but this book shows that such a sy…
Dance and Society in Eastern Africa 1890-1970: The Beni Ngoma
The Fight for Rhodesia: The armed conflict in Southern Rhodesia since UDI
Journal Article The Fight for Rhodesia: the armed conflict in Southern Rhodesia since UDI Get access The Fight for Rhodesia: the armed conflict in Southern Rhodesia since UDI, by Kees Maxey. Rex Collings, 1975. 195pp. Maps, tables. Paperback 95p. TERENCE RANGER TERENCE RANGER University of Manchester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 75, Issue 298, January 1976, Pages 117–119, https:/…
Political science (96 works) · History (89 works) · Sociology (76 works) · African history and culture studies (66 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (56 works) · Law (54 works) · History (49 works) · Geography (38 works) · Archaeology (36 works) · Philosophy (36 works)