Terence Ranger, 1929–2015

Terence Ranger is probably best known to readers of History Workshop Journal for the 1983 collection he edited with Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition.¹ However, he was first and foremost a historian of Africa, and specifically of Zimbabwe. His life is important partly because he made a significant difference to thinking about African history; but even more perhaps for what he taught us about the necessity, and also the pitfalls, of combining academic research and political engagement.

Terry was a lovely man: generous, dryly witty, self-deprecating, given to eccentric African dress, and with an appreciative eye for attractive women, which somehow only added to his charm. Everyone who witnessed it will attest to his genius for encapsulating what mattered in a paper, panel or conference and for bringing participants together in a sense of valued joint endeavour. He regarded his own work with pride, but also as work-in-progress, always willing to go back and revise his position in the light of new arguments from young researchers, or new evidence in the archives.

Terry lived through interesting times. His positioning as an academic and activist, involved in the transition from the colonial to the post-colonial, raises questions about the roles of researchers from the privileged institutions of the northern hemisphere. These were questions of which Terry himself was uneasily aware, and to which he never found easy answers. Terry was a white liberal to his core. With an Oxford doctorate in seventeenth-century Irish history, he was attracted to teach British history at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (UCRN) because it was, in theory, a ‘multiracial’ institution. Terry was appointed there in preference to the better qualified nationalist sympathizer Richard Gray, not least because he was thought less likely to make trouble. But in the institutionally racist conditions of Rhodesia when Terry and his wife Shelagh arrived in 1957, a liberal conscience could be very troubled and troublesome indeed.

In truth, Shelagh was always the real trouble-maker, throughout their long partnership. It was Shelagh who attended the sit-down demonstrations in Rhodesia in the face of police armed with whips and dogs; it was Shelagh who visited political prisoners in Rhodesia and wrote caringly and supportively to persecuted nationalists; and, many years later, it was Shelagh who demonstrated against the treatment of asylum seekers in Britain, organizing campaigns against Campsfield detention centre in Oxfordshire and helping to establish Asylum Welcome in Oxford. But in Rhodesia, as later in the UK, it was Terry who had the public profile, writing about and speaking against state injustice. In Rhodesia, with John Reed, a fellow lecturer in the English department, he produced the outspoken cyclostyled newssheet Disssent. With church-based opponents of the colour-bar, Terry and Shelagh participated in attempts by mixed-race groups to gain access to upmarket hotels and swimming pools. As arrests and detention took hold, they formed the Southern Rhodesia Legal Aid and Welfare Fund. These activities led, firstly, to white opponents very publicly throwing a fully-clothed Terry into a swimming pool, and subsequently to a restriction order and eventual deportation in 1963.²

By this time, Terry and Shelagh were friends with many leaders of the Zimbabwean nationalist movement, who subsequently became leaders of the independent nation. Terry remained proud of a photograph of the gathering of well-wishers at Salisbury airport at the time of his deportation, showing him surrounded by, among others, future government ministers Joshua Nkomo, Robert Mugabe and Maurice Nyagumbo. As more moderate organizations were consistently banned, Terry and Shelagh had come to align with the radical nationalist movements. Terry earned the vilification of white Rhodesians by becoming one of the few white office-holders in a nationalist organization. Nonetheless, he never abandoned his rights-based liberalism. As others have noted, it was perhaps fortunate for Terry that he was deported from Rhodesia before the bloody liberation war required those who stayed on to make hard decisions about the forms that their resistance could take. Meanwhile, however, the Cold War politics of the time meant that anyone...