Terrence Ranger
| Terence Ranger | |
|---|---|
| Born |
29 November 1929 South Norwood, London, UK |
| Died | 3 January 2015 (aged 85) |
| Occupation | Historian |
Terence Osborn Ranger (29 November 1929 – 3 January 2015) was a prominent African historian, focusing on the history of Zimbabwe. Part of the post-colonial generation of historians, his work spanned the pre- and post-Independence (1980) period in Zimbabwe, from the 1960s to the present. He published and edited dozens of books and wrote hundreds of articles and book chapters, including co-editing The Invention of Tradition (1983) with Eric Hobsbawm. He was the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at Oxford University and the first Africanist fellow of the British Academy.
Born in South Norwood, south-east London, Terence Ranger was educated at Highgate School in north London. As an undergraduate he studied History at Queen's College, Oxford University and went on to complete his PhD at St Antony's College, Oxford, focusing on 17th-century Ireland, under the supervision of Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper. In 1953 he married Shelagh Campbell Clarke, with whom he had three daughters.
In 1957 he moved to modern-day Zimbabwe, at the time Southern Rhodesia, to take up a lectureship at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now the University of Zimbabwe) after reading an article by Basil Fletcher, the vice-principal of the University, in The Times newspaper. He became interested in African history and developed views that were considered radical by the white government of the time, leading the Rhodesian authorities to restrict his movement to within a three-mile radius of his home. He was deported in 1963 and took up a lectureship at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where his colleagues included John Lonsdale, John Iliffe and John McCracken. During this time Ranger wrote Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97: A Study in African Resistance (1967), which showed how Africans lived before the arrival of Cecil Rhodes and his Pioneer Column in 1890 and attempted to explain why the country's two main tribes, the Shona and Matabele, rose up against the European settlers, and The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia (1970), both of which were influential in the development of African nationalism.
...
Wikipedia