Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism, 1957-67

Writing revolt: an engagement with African nationalism, 1957-67, by Terence Ranger. Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013. xii, 206 pp. ISBN 9781847010711. £19.99.Shortly after I arrived at Rhodes House as Librarian in 1993 I was taken down into the basement stacks and shown a large number of boxes which contained the unsorted papers of a minor academic historian, whose name meant nothing to me then and little more to me now. It was pointed out that these were taking up a great deal of space and were unlikely ever to receive much interest from researchers. The message was clear - the Library should be focussing its efforts on collecting the papers of those who had played their part in African history, not those who had merely studied it. I tended then (and still tend) to agree with this view, yet when, some four years later, Terry Ranger, then soon to retire as Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at Oxford, approached the Library about taking his own even more voluminous collection, I had no hesitation in accepting. This book, which draws to a very large extent on the Ranger papers now at Rhodes House, shows why, for it is much more than the memoir of a pioneer in the history of African nationalism and resistance to colonial rule, it is also that of someone who witnessed and indeed participated in a key phase of that struggle. As Ranger's great friend Stanlake Samkange wrote in 1963 in a letter quoted in this book (p.153):If anybody deserves being a professor of history it is you - who have not only tried to unearth a good deal of it but have also lived it and contributed to it.Ranger himself emphasises this duality when he writes in the preface (p. xi) that this book is intended as both history and historiography. The constant interplay between these two strands runs through the entire book, and shows how his experiences in mid-twentieth century Southern Rhodesia (as it then was) helped create the scholar that he has become.At its heart, this book is the story of how a liberal humanist confronted the Southern Rhodesia of white minority rule and segregation and found the moral courage to oppose it and embrace the cause of African nationalism, a course which led eventually, as is well-known, to his expulsion from the country in 1963. In this, of course, he was not unique, but his academic training as an historian, allied to the fact that he was, in his own words, a "natural dissident" who opposed repression wherever it came from, including the "coerced unity" which became a feature of so many African nationalist movements (pp.181-2), means that he was always able to maintain a sense of independence as well as engagement. He quotes approvingly (p.148) from a letter of James Robert Chikerema: "If you want to have him [Ranger] as a member then you have to accept that he will speak his mind".As with all insiders' memoirs, the author does indeed "speak his mind" in this book, but he is also too good a historian to ignore the views of others (in a revealing phrase early on he tells us he was brought up to believe that the "worst civic crime possible [was] to jump a queue"), and the text is littered with often lengthy extracts from letters both to and from a wide variety of activists and observers of the time, as well as from the diaries of his friend and university colleague, John Reed. …