Abstract
Terence Ranger is best known as the co-editor, with Eric Hobsbawm, of the 1983 book, The Invention of Tradition. However, he has spent most of his career researching and publishing on the history of Zimbabwe. As an activist academic, he has spent almost six decades working for social justice in Africa and the UK, while publishing a series of books and articles that have inspired new ways of thinking – and of campaigning – about nationalism, ethnicity, gender, religion and peasant production. Based on two extensive interviews with Ranger, this article focuses on the theory and methodology in his work, asking what we can learn from his career about how to produce ‘relevant’ history. It concludes that Ranger’s insights into political and social transformation grew out of a robust empiricism, combined with a commitment to liberal values of progressive change and equal rights.
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There were various moments in social theory from the late 1970s through to the ’90s when ideas changed significantly; and the Zimbabweanist historian Terence Ranger always seemed to anticipate them. How did he do this? In this paper, I try to answer that question by highlighting the key elements in Ranger’s methodology and examining his underlying theory of history, actors and agency. The paper is based on four and a half hours of interview with Ranger, across two sessions, carried out for History Workshop Journal in late 2009. All quotations are from that interview unless otherwise indicated. A distinctive feature of Ranger’s style is the extensive use of direct quotation. I have followed that style here, hoping as far as possible to allow Ranger’s voice to dominate.
Professor Ranger with fellow historians Professor Gordon Chavunduka, head of ZINATHA (Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association), and Pathisa Nyathi of AmaGugu Publishers, at the Britain Zimbabwe Society conference on Religion in Zimbabwe, Oxford, June 2010.
What do I mean by saying that Ranger has always seemed to be anticipating historiographical moments? In 1976, Ranger published Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 1896-7.1 It offered a new approach to researching the African past, arguing that nationalism in Zimbabwe had very deep roots, going back to the first years of white occupation. It provided a foundation myth for the soon-to-be-empowered African nationalist organizations in Zimbabwe and a model for writing ‘useable’ African history. In 1981, just as women’s studies were beginning to emerge into academic respectability, Ranger produced a piece on women in the politics of Makoni district, in eastern Zimbabwe. It was the only work at the time that looked at the primacy of gender relations in understanding Zimbabwean history, and was ground-breaking even in wider African history. Meanwhile, with The Invention of Tradition and his subsequent work on ethnic identity, Ranger hit the zeitgeist of the post class-based, post-Marxist, identities debates.2 Yet Ranger has always claimed to be no more than a diligent empirical researcher. Was this man a well-disguised postmodernist, post-Marxist theoretician? Or was there perhaps something about his methodology that led him to produce such apparently prescient work? Is there something we can learn from his career, about how to produce ‘relevant’ history?
SOME BIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT
Ranger is best known as the co-editor, with Eric Hobsbawm, of The Invention of Tradition (1983). However, he has spent most of his career researching and publishing on the history of Zimbabwe (previously Southern Rhodesia and, in the 1960s and 1970s, simply called Rhodesia). In 1957, following doctoral work at Oxford, Ranger went to Southern Rhodesia, to the University College of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, to teach early modern and late medieval British and European history. It seems strange now to recall that, in the 1950s, there were many good employment opportunities for young British academics in the territories of the Empire. In Rhodesia, Ranger and his wife Shelagh became very active campaigners opposing the institutionalized discrimination against black Africans. Ranger was involved in campaigns against the colour bar as a member of the Citizens Against the Colour Bar Association established in 1961; became an active member of the National Democratic Party and the Salisbury Christian Action Group; and co-edited Dissent, a broadsheet established in March 1959 that supported African nationalist movements throughout the Central African Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland (now Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi). Both Terence and Shelagh Ranger were active in supporting political prisoners and exposing mistreatment of detainees. In January 1963, Ranger was deported from Rhodesia.3
Ranger went from Rhodesia to establish the History Department at the University of Dar es Salaam in newly-independent Tanzania. This was a period of revolution in African history, stimulated partly by the ‘second colonial occupation’ that allowed many brilliant young academics the opportunity to work in African universities, and partly by the demand for national histories in the newly independent nations as they engaged in the construction of imagined communities.4 Without access to archives about Britain, Europe, the US or Ireland, expat historians had been forced to start rootling around in the African archives instead, in order to maintain their careers as active researchers. The Journal of African History was founded in 1960, providing for the first time a platform for histories of Africa that were based on local, not imperial, actors. In West Africa, a pioneering generation that included Christopher Fyfe, Basil Davidson, Roland Oliver, John Fage, Robert Smith, Antony Atmore and, in political science, Thomas Hodgkin,5 entrenched the idea that African history might be worth studying. A string of books about African history – not imperial history, but the history of African states and societies – began to appear in the early 1960s.6
However, much of this work moulded the African past to suit a European sense of what history was about: diplomatic negotiations, nation-building and the consolidation of power. Admittedly, accounts of nation-building, great empires and military strategists of the past, great cities and thriving independent economies all fed into the burgeoning nationalist movements. Historical research provided African peoples with an alternative account of their past that connected back to national self-government before the subjugation to European imperialism. But at Dar es Salaam, something different was happening.
At the History Department of Dar es Salaam, Ranger gathered around him a stellar coterie of Cambridge graduates named John: John Lonsdale, John Iliffe, John McCracken and the archaeologist John Sutton, all of whom went on to produce paradigm-breaking work of African social history. Ranger also brought in Walter Rodney (1942-1980), Guyanese radical and outstanding scholar of African-American history, and Ned Alpers, who was to play an important part in establishing African history in US universities. There was quickly talk of a ‘Dar es Salaam school’ of African nationalist history. This was in an environment where leftist analysis was dominated by a ‘radical Fanonesque pessimism’ that nationalism had changed nothing fundamental and that neo-colonialism had established itself as a more effective form of capitalist extraction. The Dar es Salaam historians were accused of a naïve readiness to celebrate nationalist governments and histories. Ranger rebutted these claims, arguing that, in so far as there was a ‘Dar es Salaam school’, it was defined not by nationalist prejudice, but by a commitment, firstly, to African agency in its historical analysis and, secondly, to the production of ‘useable’ history for the newly independent nations of Africa.7 That meant adopting, to some extent, African understandings of the past.
While in Tanzania, Ranger published Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, an account of the primary resistance to white occupation in newly-defined Southern Rhodesia in the 1890s. The book’s significance was political as much as, or more than, historical. It gave the nationalist movement in Rhodesia a historical heritage and a strong sense of identity; but it also situated religious/spiritual movements at the heart of nationalist struggle (or chimurenga).8 When Zimbabwe gained majority rule in 1980, the tropes of a national past were drawn from Ranger’s account of a long history of struggle and resistance, and Ambuya Nehanda, the 1890s spirit medium who emerged in the book as the heroine of that resistance, became a national icon.
From Tanzania Ranger went on Professorships at UCLA (African History, 1969-74), Manchester (Modern History, 1974-87) and Oxford (Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, 1987-97). During this period he published on religious movements in Africa and on peasant consciousness in nationalist movements, as well as producing a prosopography of the prominent nationalist Samkange family in Zimbabwe. It was during his time at Manchester that he worked on The Invention of Tradition: he continued to worry away at questions related to the construction of identity and the invention of tradition through much of the 1990s in Oxford. On his retirement in 1997 he returned to Zimbabwe to bolster the postgraduate provision in the History Department at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare. Meanwhile, he undertook a challenging project to examine indigenous African religious movements in the years of resistance to white rule in south-western Zimbabwe, while simultaneously working on a collaborative history of ‘violence and memory’ in north-western Zimbabwe. It was at this time, also, that it became clear that the nationalist government in independent Zimbabwe had carried out systematic atrocities against the citizens of western Zimbabwe. Once again, Ranger was aligned with the victims of the state.
By any measure, this has been an extraordinary career, combining intellectual rigour with political activism in an unusually coherent way. But what were the distinguishing features of Ranger’s work as a historian? In my interviews with him, I tried to get him to identify the methodological and theoretical approaches that characterized his work and to consider what produced the effective synergies between his history and his politics.
METHODOLOGY: ARCHIVES
In training and background, Ranger is fundamentally an archival historian. His doctoral thesis on Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, was a challenging grind through a complex paper trail of shady business deals:
Ranger learned his craft through trial and error, rather than through a systematic postgraduate training:what I did in the thesis was to show how he made and kept his fortune … unless you were as dogged as a doctoral student, you’d never find out. The Earl of Stafford tried very hard to find out, but he wasn’t as dogged as a doctoral student and he didn’t find out!
Arriving in Rhodesia in the late 1950s, Ranger soon found himself once more buried in archives – although in this case the position was forced upon him. In September 1962, he was served with a restriction order as a result of his political activism:It was something you had to do for yourself. And so I wouldn’t say I was ‘trained’ as an archival historian; I just got an awful lot of practice at being an archival historian. I had to work out for myself how I was going to do it, in every sort of way: how was I going to note it and refer to it, and in how much detail did one do it, and all those kinds of things. And I have continued to do it in that way, only now using a computer rather than a pen and pencil.
my intense periods of research in the archives in Salisbury were not unconnected from the moments when the Rhodesia Front were trying to stop me from doing anything. As I got these restriction orders, I wasn’t allowed, first of all, to enter any African area and then I wasn’t allowed to attend any meeting of more than ten people. But then finally I was restricted for three months to within a mile of my house – and the archives were within a mile of my house. That was lucky.
The product of those three months of intensive work was the important text Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, and simultaneously, although published subsequently, The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia.9I had to report to the police every day in Avondale in the afternoon, so I would spend every day, every hour of the day, in the archives; and then go to the police. That was the three months on which my academic career has rested!
Ranger’s work was revolutionary: he was reading ‘colonial’ archives in a new way, trying to perceive the African reality behind the white misrepresentations and self-justifications:
Clearly this was enormously important: the Ground Zero for all archive-based work on Zimbabwean history that followed. But it was a practical solution to a practical constraint. Because of commitment to his friends in the nationalist struggle, Ranger was simply using the tools available to him to do his best to produce a ‘useable history’ for them. As local people in the region in the 1890s had not used writing, there was no local archive to set against the colonial record. Moreover, Ranger did not at that time think of using oral history (see below); and after his restriction order this would in any case have been impossible. Reading ‘against the grain’ was the only strategy possible. This pragmatic response to the colonial archives developed independently of the ‘history from below’ that was emerging in the UK at around the same time, in response to similar problems, among radical historians including some in the Communist Party Historians Group (notably E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill).I think what it showed was that you could read against the grain of colonial records and construct an African narrative from inside a colonial narrative.
Moreover, Ranger’s practice preceded by decades the discussion of subaltern voices and the reading of ‘silences’, often seen as the door that opened up the possibility of a post-colonial history. Of course, in the 1980s, subaltern studies in the work of theorists such as Spivak and Bhabha provided the underpinnings for significant new directions in Africanist history.10 And yet, perhaps surprisingly, Ranger’s empirical research from the early 1960s was as useful to me as any of the post-colonial theory when, in the 1980s, I was trying to work out how to reconstruct the experience of white settlement from the perspectives of African women, their husbands and fathers. Ranger may have lacked the theory and the vocabulary of subaltern studies, but his work provided practical illustration of the possibility of retrieving submerged voices.
In our interview I wondered whether we might argue that, necessity being the mother of invention, the Africanists were actually the innovators in the new historical methodologies of the late twentieth century? If the only sources we have are compromised, we are surely more likely to have led the field in new ways of reading? Alas, replied Ranger,
Let us hope for some revision to the standard historiographies, to recognize the contribution that Ranger and his colleagues made to the practice of ‘reading against the grain’, which has perhaps been seen for too long as solely the invention of the social historians working on British ‘history from below’.one would like to think that, Diana, but the problem is whether anybody in British history knows there’s been an input from Africanists. … It depends how much other historians are aware of that work. There was a long resistance in British historiographical circles, to the extent that you could have a book written about ‘British historical writing’ that just excluded people who were writing about Africa and India. Kenyon, for example, was determined to keep them down.11
Nonetheless, the subsequent controversy over the analysis in Revolt in Southern Rhodesia reveals the Achilles’ heel of depending upon ‘colonial’ archives to reconstruct a story of African agency and resistance. How far do we accept the worldview contained therein? Ranger was accused of accepting too much of what the archives told him. The white administration had blamed the resistance to white settlement and tribute-extraction on the influence of African religious leaders. Clearly, in part, this was an attempt to deny culpability by suggesting that the resistance had its roots in a superstitious irrationalism. But Ranger decided that the explanation, if not its interpretation by the administration, had an empirical basis: hence his account of spirit mediums, in partnership with the Mwari cult and its infrastructure of shrines, as the key players in the organization of the resistance. Was this, as South African-based historian Julian Cobbing argued, a step too far? Was the priesthood really absent from the planning and execution of the first chimurenga, as Cobbing said?12 In general, how can we interpret the archives when we don’t know how far its writers are, consciously or otherwise, misrepresenting the world around them?
Typically, Ranger’s response to this dilemma is fundamentally pragmatic. He urges us to get to know our archive intimately:
Ranger’s work illustrates the necessity of getting to know the archives’ writers and their foibles; the institutional infrastructures and their inherent prejudices; the modes of thinking imposed by the reporting structures themselves: ‘The whole problem with using colonial records is how much of what they assume, you can assume and then interpret differently’. Indeed, it was largely in response to this dilemma that I began my own research project on the worldviews that underpinned the mission and state archives generated in Zimbabwe in the early twentieth century.13 By insisting on the validity of archival research, despite the compromised nature of the material, Ranger has forced us to confront a complicated meta-world of settler epistemology.I love spending hour after hour after hour in the archive. I am firmly of the belief that you get compound, rather than simple, interest from doing that: that you get to understand how the archives work and why what is there is there, and so on. And if you come in with your photocopying machine or your digital camera, then you will drive away with great piles of archives, but they’re out of context. So I think you really have to work in the archive hour after hour.
METHODOLOGY: ORAL HISTORY
Nonetheless, Ranger came to use oral material heavily in his later work. Ironically, as he points out, he did not use it for Revolt or African Voice, although he had the opportunity to do so:
Despite this, following his deportation from Rhodesia in 1963 and his appointment as Professor of History at Dar es Salaam, Ranger began to review his attitude towards oral history:Working in the late 1950s, early 1960s, it would have been quite reasonable to imagine that one could interview people who had participated in 1896. But it just didn’t cross my mind. And that, if you like, is one of the legacies of my Oxford training as an historian.
Indeed, Ranger became so convinced of the importance of oral history that he feels he overemphasized it, to the detriment of his own work. While at Dar es Salaam, he had access to the diaries of the Anglican mission in southern Tanzania – an extraordinary source of material, since keeping a diary was required of all its mission officers, not only its white priests and doctors but all the African teachers and evangelists. But because the mission was, at that time, in a war zone, it turned out to be impossible to do interviews with the missionaries. So Ranger’s intended book on Africans in the Anglican missions was abandoned – a decision that he now regrets, given the strength of the archival material: ‘So, having not realized that oral history was important in the first two books, I then fetishized it too much’.the Dar es Salaam archives are nothing like as full as the Salisbury ones, so if one was going to work in Tanzania, it looked clear that you were certainly going to have to use oral history … one of the things that I learnt in my first years in Dar es Salaam was that you certainly could do oral history and it could be wonderfully illuminating.
Oral history was enjoying a first flush of significance in African historical studies in the early 1960s. The ‘official’ birth of the use of oral history as a valuable resource in the study of African history can be dated as the publication of the English edition of Jan Vansina’s book, Oral Tradition, in 1961. (His original treatise appeared in Dutch in 1959.)14 However, what Vansina meant by ‘oral history’ was very different from the discipline that was to gain academic importance in British social history, not least through the pages of this journal. Rather than reminiscences about events in living memory, Vansina’s oral histories were accounts of the past, recounted by each generation and thereby preserved in the oral traditions of a people. These oral histories were characteristic of societies that had not widely embraced the use of writing. They tended to focus on political history, in particular the praise songs, which recounted the deeds of past rulers and others in authority. Vansina presented the task of the historian as fairly straightforward: Africans knew their own history, so the historian clearly had to ask them to recount it. Vansina added some pragmatic advice, influenced by social science research, about the need to ensure a full range of witnesses, to avoid leading questions, and to translate and transcribe materials before the end of the research trip, so that it would be possible to return and ask supplementary questions. In general, though, he suggested that a wide enough range of witnesses would uncover a true account of the histories of the royal families of the past.
Vansina’s book raised expectations of a brave new world of oral research. Africanist historians envisaged a massive archive of tape recordings and transcriptions of local accounts, comparable to the massive paper archives of European societies. These accounts could then be annotated and interpreted by historians, who would be able to construct detailed timelines and kinglines, building up detailed political and diplomatic/international histories for many African kingdoms. However, that vision was never realized: the oral histories contained inconsistencies that were difficult to resolve. Indeed, one of the useful results of the turn towards a study of African oral histories was a much more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of tradition, performance and the uses of the past in contemporary settings. Even so, in independent Zimbabwe, Professor David Beach made extensive use of indigenous oral histories to reconstruct an account of the politics and polities of the past.15
But this was not what Ranger meant by ‘oral history’: his definition came from the British tradition, of recovering reminiscences from living people. In 1978 he argued in ‘Growing from the Roots’ that this form of oral history was important in historical research because it adds local colour.16 Certainly, it is something he still believes in:
Although oral material was included in Ranger’s 1985 book, Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War, the interviews still only provided an adjunct to a fundamentally archive-based project, rather than being a necessary prop.18 The data gathered was additional empirical information, rather than an insight into alternative modes of thinking.you can see from some of the urban histories that have been published recently the difference between those who can get at the oral material and those that can’t. For example, Andrew Burton’s very interesting book about crime in Dar es Salaam is almost entirely based on archival record material; and yet you feel the whole time that he knows and wants to make use of a popular culture side of things.17
Ranger at that time did not privilege oral history. Moreover, stung by the criticisms of his reading of the archives in Revolt, he was aware of the need to develop a critical distance from your informant, even when the informant was a living interlocutor:
It was difficult to know how to negotiate the interactions between archival and oral research, which could pull the researcher in opposite directions and obscure important lines of enquiry.19Should you start off by working in the archives and then go to the field – and if you do that, it’s said that your mindset has already been fixed by the colonial archive and that the questions you ask in the field are determined by that? Or should you start in the field and only then go to the archives to pursue in the archives the questions that struck people in the field as being important? In practice, I’ve always done the archival work first and the oral work second. Anthropologists characteristically tend to do it the other way round; but many of them don’t give themselves long enough in the archives for it to be a useful interaction between the two sets of sources.
Nonetheless, during the 1980s and 1990s, Ranger’s approach to oral history changed significantly. Initially he was reluctant to embrace the method:
But it was clear that a project such as Voices from the Rocks, Ranger’s 1999 account of indigenous religious institutions in the politics of twentieth-century Zimbabwe, could not be achieved without oral interviewing.20 Much of the information being vouchsafed was occult and not written down. Moreover, the ways in which accounts of the shrines were repeated and reconstructed in new contexts was also an essential element in the project:unlike other people who really enjoy oral interviewing, I find it a very intimidating process. I find it exhausting: I can’t do more than three interviews a day, because interviews obviously involve establishing a rapport, interacting with the person … I always had to gear myself up to do it. Sometimes they were wonderful: you did manage to engage with people and they were very ready to talk and the interview was hilarious and moving and so on. But I do find it much, much more exhausting than anything else. And one’s aware of the provisionality: that somebody will come next month and they’ll say something quite different.
This was a fundamental shift towards oral history as a form of discourse analysis: a new departure in Ranger’s work that gave it additional depth and subtlety of analysis. That approach was also implicit in the new analysis of ethnicity, identity and remembrance of war that appeared in the co-authored 2000 text, Violence and Memory: assisted, no doubt, by JoAnn McGregor’s already highly nuanced use of oral material.21it’s a question of finding out things, though at the same time also discovering what the idioms of discussion and the idioms of discourse are. Because, as you’re talking to people connected with the shrines, the claims that they are making about [Joshua] Nkomo, or the claims that they’re making for themselves, are cast in a particular language, a particular symbolic language.
CONCLUSIONS ON METHODOLOGY
What strikes me, in this survey of how Ranger’s methodology developed, is its underlying pragmatism, coupled with an enormous capacity for dedicated research. As we trace his movement from dogged empirical doctoral researcher, via a reliance on reading against the grain, towards the growing awareness of the importance of oral material and accompanying discourse analysis, we see a man who is dealing with the practical problems of ‘how to find stuff out’. How, then, did he end up involved at the cutting edge of so much rethinking about the motors of change and the nature of knowledge?
Ranger modestly claims that the answer is, again, purely pragmatic. He wrote about women in politics, or the invention of tradition, or burials, or photography, or boxing, simply because someone asked him to; and because he had the material that enabled him to do it. And that, it seems, was the product of a kind of promiscuity, a very wide focus, when carrying out research:
This is, of course, quite the opposite of the tight focus that we exhort our students to maintain when training them for the profession in their undergraduate dissertations. Ranger’s great strength lies in being able to use his huge quantities of material effectively in multiple ways. He picks up on the background noise in historiographical theory and turns these ideas back into finely-crafted empirical studies. It is pragmatism, yes, but it also requires an unusually lively mind, capable of seeing the past clearly and concretely, from many angles.it’s partly that when I research a project, I over-research it. Most people do, no doubt; but I over-research a project and I always have a tremendous amount of material left over, which I don’t make use of in the first putting together and to which one can return … So, in a way, one collects tremendous amounts of material and then one’s attention is diverted to questions which are interesting.
THEORIES OF HISTORY: MARXISM
With such an eclectic range of subject-matter and such a determinedly empirical approach to the past, it is not easy to see what Ranger conceptualizes as the primary motor of historical change. There was a period in the mid 1980s when he was widely considered to have a Marxist bent. Had he not just edited a book with the great English Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm, and published a book, Peasant Consciousness, that clearly dealt with modes of production? But a closer examination of The Invention of Tradition revealed that the decidedly un-Marxist Hugh Trevor-Roper was a contributor; while Peasant Consciousness was in some ways a consciously anti-Marxist book, arguing as it did that the peasantry constituted a distinctive class with a distinctive mode of production. Marx, of course, famously compared the peasantry’s role in the class structure to that of potatoes in a sack – having no specific class role of their own, being defined and carried along entirely by the large sack of political-economic power structures that enclosed them.22
This was not the first time that Ranger had been put in the Marxist camp. In the 1960s, his critical views on nationalism led others to assume that he privileged class over state as the target of revolutionary change. In his struggles with the Rhodesian state, Ranger had endorsed civil rights and liberalism rather than nationalism. Despite working in alliance with the nationalist movements, he had maintained a critical distance from the proposition that national independence would, in itself, lead to a fairer society. Meanwhile, the majority of white supporters of the nationalist movement came from a South African Communist Party background. They considered struggles against imperial power to be merely the handmaidens of a wider class struggle. National independence was not seen as a good in itself in South African Marxist circles, but a precondition for the struggle against capitalism. It is not surprising, in these Cold War years, that Ranger was assumed to be ‘one of them’ by the establishment and ‘one of us’ by the Marxists. ‘In fact,’ admits Ranger, ‘I was being a smug English liberal, not thinking that nationalism was something that we needed to worry about.’
Ranger is clear that, ‘I certainly never have been a Marxist. I’ve never read Das Kapital, for example’. He observed that ‘The closest I ever came to being – or trying to write like – a Marxist was in the “mode-of-production” period’. This was, presumably, the period in the early 1980s that gave rise to Peasant Consciousness and was dominated in African studies by Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst’s Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (1975).23 Ranger’s research on peasant production could broadly fit into this ‘mode-of-production’ analysis, but overall it did not work well for Africanists – at least, not until people such as Patrick Harries, Jeff Guy, Belinda Bozzoli and myself began to incorporate gender and generation into the definition of the relations of production. As Robin Law noted, ‘Marx’s texts do not in fact provide aspirant Marxist historians with a clear conceptual framework for the analysis of African societies’.24
I would argue, however, that one of the great contributions of Africanists has been to show how gender and generation are inherent in relations of production. Our analyses of household labour, bridewealth and the generation of surplus value in African agriculture, developed during the 1980s, enhanced both Marxist and Africanist studies. Although Ranger was not part of that moment, his interest in all aspects of peasant production, including labour migrancy and women’s work, provided an empirical foundation for such research.
Interestingly, Ranger says that he was ‘attracted by the mode-of-production idea because it seemed to give an active role to ideology and belief’. As mode-of-production analysis usually focuses on the interaction between means of production and relations of production, it is difficult to see where ideology and belief play a causative role in such analysis. But Ranger considered that mode-of-production analysis did, at least, help to account for the formation of African religious systems, taking them out of the realm of ideas and rooting them in material interests and opportunities. Fundamentally, however, in common with many on the left of the English empirical tradition, Ranger felt that the focus on basal economic structures, which had dominated continental Marxist history for much of the twentieth century, was too blunt an instrument to explain the rich and varied responses to the exercise of power at the grassroots: ‘in the end it didn’t work because it was too static; you can’t make things move’.25
THEORIES OF HISTORY: WEBER, POST-MODERNISM AND THE NOTION OF CHANGE
If not Marx, then did Weber perhaps provide Ranger with the lens through which he measured historical change? After all, he has had a long-standing interest in religious institutions and charismatic leaders. Indeed, as we have seen, one of his first responses mode-of-production theory was an attempt to use it for analysing African churches and religious beliefs. Moreover, the account in Voices from the Rocks clearly shows how charismatic movements alternated with institutionalization of shrines; and it argues that belief systems were causative factors in forming the communities at the heart of the resistance to white occupation of the Matopos hills. However, Ranger seemed even less interested in Weber than in Marx: ‘I haven’t thought about this philosophically, I must say’.
I pressed him, then, on his relationship to post-modernism and discourse theory. I had noted that Ranger’s work on institutions often exposed fault-lines, where ideology conflicted with reality. In particular, he has exposed the dynamism in institutions that presented themselves as timeless, impregnable, or rooted irrevocably in a specific historic moment or founding myth: for example, in ‘tradition’; in Beni dances; in settler societies; in ethnic identity; and, of course, in ‘patriotic history’. Ranger’s work consistently exposes that there’s much more change and transformation in those institutions than their own discourses would allow. The stories construct a reality that is fundamentally ideological. But, once again, Ranger did not want to situate this work in a paradigm of discourse analysis.
Perhaps such resistance to historiographic theory should come as no surprise, from this fundamentally pragmatic and empirical researcher. Interestingly, however, when I pressed him on what he did see as a motor of history, and what did ‘make things move’, Ranger produced a very lucid account of his theory of history:
It’s a sort of long dureé/short dureé question, isn’t it? I’m not really a long dureé man. … I like my movements a bit quicker than that.
An insistence upon change underpinned Ranger’s work on the Beni dances, in which he wanted to inscribe historical transformation into accounts of East African cultural forms:26I suppose, as an historian, I’ve always assumed that what we’re studying is change and for me, changes are good.
I was reminded of E. P. Thompson’s comment that, ‘If we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences. But if we watch these men over an adequate period of social change, we observe patterns in their relationships, their ideas, and their institutions’.27 For Thompson, of course, it was these patterns – specifically, the pattern of class construction – that mattered. For Ranger, however, patterns were associated with the static functionalist analyses of anthropology. So, for him, the patterns were less significant than the change itself. This is evident in the way that his attention to change is accompanied by a commitment to form as well as function:The anthropology that I was aiming at was good old classic functionalist anthropology, which was the least historical kind of anthropology you could get. I wanted to show that things look very different if you see them in terms of a historical sequence. So I think that’s what Dance and Society does to Clyde Mitchell’s The Kalela Dance, and shows the Kalela dances as one situation in a multiple series of situations.
This theory of history – that the best way to present and explain the past is through narrative – simply leaves open the question of underlying causation. Stuff happens.Certainly what I like to do goes with change. For example, I like narrative: one of the reasons why I wrote Revolt in Southern Rhodesia before I wrote The African Voice is that Revolt in Southern Rhodesia is a narrative, a cracking good story … I need narratives and narrative needs movement. A narrative is essential to understanding: hence the indignation with which I greeted the Comaroffs and their denial of narrative to African society.
AGENCY, ACTORS AND NARRATIVE
Nonetheless, it is clear that Ranger sees narrative form as more than simply a literary convenience. Change is fundamental to narrative, and agency is fundamental to change. In its broadest interpretation, this is simply human agency. And, when he discusses this, Ranger comes remarkably close to the theory of history expounded in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that
The tradition of dead generations is, of course, reflected in Ranger’s interest in the institutions of religion, and in the ‘invention of tradition’ itself. Citing John Lonsdale’s discussion of ‘agency in tight corners’,28 he noted:Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
Indeed, Ranger noted that this has been a continuing theme in his work, as evidenced in his 1969 professorial lecture at Dar es Salaam, ‘The Recovery of African Initiative in Tanzanian History’.29 He also linked it to his rejection of the grand narratives of nationalism and patriotic history: ‘If in Africa the grand narratives of nationalism etc. are in disarray, what you start with is agency under stress.’Everything else is moving around you, against you, under your feet. You certainly don’t have freedom of action, because much of what you can do has already been cancelled out or whatever. But you are acting within those constraints and in terms of human society, that’s what produces change. It can be repetitive change, of course.
If agency is at the core of Ranger’s narratives of change, then what defines the agents? Again, it is noticeable that Ranger depends upon empirical, rather than theoretical, constructs. His analytical categories are defined by description, rather than by a theoretical/structural positioning. Perhaps this, too, helps to explain why (at a time when many of us were tying ourselves in knots trying to theorize the connection between capitalism and patriarchy), Ranger could move, apparently without difficulty, from analysing class to analysing gender.30
This is not to say that analytical categories have no place in Ranger’s work. His analysis in Peasant Consciousness, after all, depends entirely upon constructing ‘peasantry’ as a category of analysis; ‘missionaries’ are a frequent category for explanation and analysis in his work; and his most recent book argues that ‘urban citizenship’ is a definite category encompassing specific interests vis-à-vis the state, the economy and culture. As he notes, ‘clearly individuals move across categories all the time. But that doesn’t mean to say that the categories are not useful’.
Fundamentally, however, Ranger finds analytical categories are restrictive, rather than enabling. He finds a much greater freedom in describing individual instances rather than seeking material to support broader explanations. (Of course, this also goes some way to account for the heavy reliance upon extensive quotation and almost anecdotal evidence in much of his work.) As he noted, ‘if you’re approaching the past through individuals, you’re constantly crossing categories’. Moreover, even where he notices and uses categories to define agency, Ranger is consistently drawn back to the narrative qualities of the individual story:
For Ranger, history is about narrative and change. It is for this reason that he was particularly attracted to the genres of biography and urban history, both of which offered opportunities to tell a good story. The first was his family biography of the Samkanges, a chamber piece with a small cast; the other is his just-published study of the city of Bulawayo, a grand symphony with all of human life on display.32 The precise nature of the actors and agency involved in the first was simply defined; in the second it was constantly fluid. There is an extraordinary charm in this Bulawayo history from the twilight of Ranger’s career: written for its own sake, partly to rescue its subjects from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’, partly to honour a dead friend, but largely to tell a cracking good story.One can make collective patterns from those interviews, as I’ve done in my piece in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, but each also has to be read as autobiographical statements, as personal narratives.31
Narrative, then, seems to be at the heart of Ranger’s understanding of the past. Stuff happens; people make it happen. It is remarkable, and salutary, how his use of this simple proposition has given rise to such a range of politically-engaged and theoretically challenging accounts of the past.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
This paper was written as the keynote address for a conference at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign entitled ‘Making History: Terence Ranger and African Studies’, October 2010, which was an explicit celebration of the man and his work. I have attempted to avoid hagiography in what follows, however. The transcript of the interview is available at www.historyworkshop.org.uk.
1 T. O. Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 1896-7: a Study in African Resistance, London, 1976.
2 The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, Cambridge, 1983; ‘The Invention of Tradition Revisited: the Case of Colonial Africa’, in Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth Century Africa, ed. Terence Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan, London, 1993.
3 Timothy Scarnecchia, The Urban Roots of Democracy and Political Violence in Zimbabwe, Harare and Highfield, 1940-1964, Rochester NY, 2008; Tapiwa B. Zimudzi, ‘Spies and Informers on Campus: Vetting, Surveillance and Deportation of Expatriate University Lecturers in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1954–1963’, Journal of Southern African Studies 33: 1, 2007, pp. 193-208; John McCracken, ‘Terry Ranger: a personal appreciation’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 23: 2, 1997.
4 It was John Lonsdale, of the Dar es Salaam History Department, who subsequently coined the term ‘second colonial occupation’: the influx of technicians and professionals from Europe into Africa to assist in ‘modernization’ projects.
5 Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa, London, 1956; African Political Parties, London, 1961.
6 For example, Thomas Hodgkin, Nigerian Perspectives: an Historical Anthology, London, 1960; John Donnelly Fage, Ghana: a Historical Interpretation, Madison, 1961; J. D. Fage, An Introduction to the History of West Africa, Cambridge, 1962; Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, Oxford, 1962; Roland Oliver and J. D. Fage, A Short History of Africa, New York, 1964; J. F. Ade Ajayi and Robert Sydney Smith, Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, 1964; R. A. Oliver, Africa in the Days of Exploration, Saddle River NJ, 1965; Basil Davidson and F. K. Buah, with the advice of J. F. Ade Ajayi, A History of West Africa to the Nineteenth Century, New York, 1966; Davidson and J. E. F. Mhina, East and Central Africa to the late Nineteenth Century, London, 1967; Davidson, A History of East and Central Africa to the late Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, New York, 1969; Davidson, The Africans, London, 1969; Robert Sydney Smith, Kingdoms of the Yoruba, London, 1969; J. D. Fage and R. A. Oliver, Papers in African Prehistory, Cambridge, 1970. See also Stephen Howe's obituary of Davidson, below (History Workshop Journal 73).
7 Donald Denoon and Adam Kuper, ‘Nationalist Historians in Search of a Nation: the “New Historiography” in Dar es Salaam’, African Affairs 69: 277, 1970; Terence Ranger, ‘The “New Historiography” in Dar es Salaam: an Answer’, African Affairs 70: 278, 1971; Donald Denoon and Adam Kuper, ‘The “New Historiography” in Dar es Salaam: a Rejoinder’, African Affairs 70: 280, 1971; T. O. Ranger, ‘Towards a Usable African Past’, in African Studies since 1945, a Tribute to Basil Davidson, ed. Christopher Fyfe, London, 1976, pp. 17-30; Bogumil Jewsiewicki, ‘African Historical Studies: Academic Knowledge as “Usable Past” and Radical Scholarship’, African Studies Review 32: 3, 1989; Toyin Falola, Nationalism and African Intellectuals, Rochester, 2004, chap. 6.
8 The word ‘chimurenga’ has come to mean ‘revolutionary struggle’ in Zimbabwe, and is applied to the primary resistance of the 1890s, the armed struggle of the nationalists in the 1970s and, most recently, to the land seizures of the 2000s.
9 T. O. Ranger, The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia, 1898-1930, London, 1970.
10 See, for example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, London, 1987; Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817’, in Critical Inquiry 12: 1. 1985 (special issue, reprinted as ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Chicago, 1985).
11 John Phillipps Kenyon, The History Men: the Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance, London, 1983.
12 Julian Cobbing, ‘The Absent Priesthood’, Journal of African History 18: 1, 1977; David N. Beach, ‘Chimurenga: the Shona rising of 1896-7’, Journal of African History 20: 3, 1979.
13 Diana Jeater, Law, Language, and Science: the Invention of the ‘Native Mind’ in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1930, Portsmouth, 2007.
14 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: a Study in Historical Methodology, transl. H. M. Wright, Chicago, 1965.
15 David N. Beach, A Zimbabwean Past: Shona Dynastic Histories and Oral Traditions, Gweru, Zimbabwe, 1994.
16 ‘Growing from the Roots: Reflections on Peasant Research in Central and Southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 5: 1, Special Issue ‘Themes in Agrarian History and Society’, 1978.
17 Andrew Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam, London, Oxford and Dar es Salaam, 2005.
18 Terence O. Ranger, Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe: a comparative study, London, 1985.
19 See, for example, Indrani Chatterjee, ‘Testing the Local against the Colonial Archive’, History Workshop Journal 44, autumn 1997.
20 Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe, Oxford, 1999.
21 Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor, and Terence Ranger, Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests of Matabeleland, Oxford, 2000.
22 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852.
23 Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, Pre-capitalist Modes of Production, London, 1975.
24 Robin Law, ‘How Not to be a Marxist Historian: the Althusserian Threat to African History’, in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel, London, 1981.
25 See also, of course, E. P. Thompson’s magisterial riposte to Althusser, The Poverty of Theory, London, 1978.
26 Terence O. Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890-1970: the Beni Ngoma, London, 1975.
27 E. P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, London, 1963, Preface.
28 John Lonsdale, ‘Agency in Tight Corners: Narrative and Initiative in African History’, Special issue for Terence Ranger, Journal of African Cultural Studies 13: 1, June 2000.
29 ‘The Recovery of African Initiative in Tanzanian History’, University College, Dar es Salaam, 1969.
30 See, for example, Sheila Rowbotham, ‘The Trouble with “Patriarchy” ’; Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor, ‘In Defence of “Patriarchy” ’, both in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel, London, 1981.
31 ‘Myth and Legend in Urban Oral Memory: Bulawayo 1930-1960’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44: 1, 2008.
32 Are We Not Also Men?: the Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920-64, Oxford, 2003; Bulawayo Burning: the Social History of a Southern African City, 1893-1960, Oxford, 2010.
