Abstract
Terence Osborn Ranger, MA, DPhil (Oxon), FBA, Emeritus Rhodes Professor of Race Relations in the University of Oxford, died at home on 3 January 2015 at the age of 85.
Ranger was most famous, or notorious as British settlers saw it, for being deported in 1963 from Southern Rhodesia by the Federation of Central Africa and for co-editing The Invention of Tradition by the Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm. Neither of these could have been predicted by his English upbringing nor by Ranger himself. He was born in London on 29 November 1929, to parents whose main enduring achievement was to have him and his brother Jim educated at High Wycombe Grammar School, Highgate School, and Queen’s College, Oxford. Although an academic future in history was clearly visible, Ranger took a roundabout Oxford route to it, not attending course lectures and only one supervision for his doctorate at St Antony’s, with Hugh Trevor-Roper. Since Ranger only had his boyhood reading of Kipling, Rider Haggard, and Buchan to counter his supervisor’s assertion of the impossibility of African history, he did not move towards his future, but writing critically from vast amounts of reading committed to memory became his forte. His radical Fabian teacher of history and economics had no political effect on Ranger. Despite researching the richest man in the seventeenth-century kingdom, the First Earl of Cork, four of whose sons were also elevated to the peerage, Ranger was not moved to right any injustice, until he was incensed by the official ‘lies’ broadcast in the Suez Crisis in 1956. Thus, from teaching in Dartmouth Royal Naval College, he went to Africa the following year with minimal knowledge of it and less political consciousness. Africa, as is its wont, very quickly changed that.
Observing the scandals of apartheid en route through South Africa with his secretary-wife from St Antony’s College, Shelagh, they arrived in Salisbury determined to work for multiracial partnership in support of the former missionary, Garfield Todd. Although that drive never left them, in a few years they had made the turn to becoming members of black-nationalist parties, forming an amazing network of African intellectuals and politicians. Ranger’s leadership of the Citizens Against the Colour Bar Association brought ‘that awful man’ wide opprobrium, not least for its effect against segregation. In June 1962, Ranger was elected district Vice-Chair of the Zimbabwean African People’s Union, but three months later it was declared an unlawful organization and he and a friend, John Reed, were restricted in their movements. In the New Year, Ranger became a prohibited immigrant, and, after his appeal failed, was deported with Shelagh amid the congratulations of Joshua Nkomo and the nationalists.
Similarly, Ranger moved from only being a dedicated archival researcher to being an oral historian as well, collecting memories and narratives of Africans, and encouraging his student to do so. Thus he refuted Trevor-Roper decisively by becoming the pioneer of African social history, using the voices of Africans themselves as well as documents. Thus the father of African Studies in the UK, Roland Oliver, credited Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-7 (1967) as one of the very few books to give the African reaction to European colonization. He taught at the University College of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland in what is now Harare and after deportation was offered the Chair of History at the University of Dar es Salaam, from which two Cambridge professors would bloom. In 1969, he moved his study of Africa to UCLA, and in 1974, at the cost of a lower salary, to the University of Manchester, where he helped open up the Manchester School of anthropology to the study of religion in history. It is interesting that while disparate ideas were coagulating, he published no monograph between 1970 and 1985, but Dance and Society in Eastern Africa (1975). Ranger invested the historically trivial, invented traditions of dance in the colonial era with the significance of widespread African agency and autonomy.
Back in Oxford, where he was Rhodes Professor (1987–1997), taking the task of race relations seriously, he initiated a weekly African Studies Seminar, which was to be the core of the later African Studies Centre. His research students have risen to the fore. He was co-founder of the Britain-Zimbabwe Society with its annual study day in June in Oxford. In the early 2000s, worried young white Zimbabweans came to listen to ‘that awful man’ to learn what was happening to their world, and found no succour for Mugabe. Ranger’s lifelong commitment to freedom of thought enslaved him neither to iconoclasm nor academic fashion.
From empirical research, his view consolidated that religion was not a face of society, but that the route for social change was in religion: religious movements could produce history, not just the reverse. If African religion could not be understood without history, the movement of the Spirit could never be discounted. Thus he initiated a series of seminars on history and Christian mission in the Oxford Centre of Mission Studies to the effect that seminars have been run every week since for 20 years. Promoting the study of Christian mission and any study from mission archives, Ranger lectured on researching Africa, supervised, and examined. He edited the volume on Africa in the Pew-funded project on Evangelical Christianity and Democracy. His inner motivation was the grace that he experienced in 1996 on the Matopos Hills, Zimbabwe, where he had an unexpected heart attack in the company of a cardiologist. The voice of God was interpreted for him in hospital, ‘He is telling you that you can do even great things with Him than you have done without.’ Since then he was dependent on a defibrillator, but was determined that the site where his life was saved should be memorialized for something other than the grave of Cecil Rhodes by Voices from the Rocks (1999). That was not the end.
Apparently without the strength to give another paper in the packed Oxford seminar for his introduction of Bulawayo Burning (2010), no one present will forget a virtuoso performance. A subject of that penultimate book, Stanley Samkange, had told Ranger in 1962, ‘If anybody deserved being a professor of history it is you—who have not only tried to unearth a great deal of it but have also lived it and contributed to it.’
Describing himself as a ‘cathedral Anglican’, Terry Ranger was memorialized on Saturday 28 February 2015 in Christ Church Cathedral among august company. He is survived by Shelagh and two daughters, Frances and Malaika.