Terence Osborn Ranger

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Terence Osborn Ranger (born November 29, 1929 - † January 3, 2015 ) was a British historian active in the social sciences with a research focus on the colonial and post-colonial history of East Africa , especially Zimbabwe .

Live and act

Terence Ranger studied at the University of Oxford . There he also received his doctorate. In 1957 he went to the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now the University of Zimbabwe ), where he lectured on medieval and modern history. However, he subsequently specialized in African history . Due to his commitment to the black African independence movement in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyassaland , he was expelled from Southern Rhodesia , which was proclaimed independently by the white minority government, in 1963 and took over chairs at the University of Dar es Salaam , at UCLA and in Manchester and Oxford, where he was up to on his retirement in 1997 held the Rhodes Chair of Race Relations . He then held a visiting professorship at the University of Zimbabwe until 2001.

Ranger's academic work has contributed significantly to deepening knowledge of the history and society of East Africa, and in particular Zimbabwe. His contribution to the methodological renewal of African history in general is also of great importance. The best known and far reaching beyond African studies is his collection of essays The Invention of Tradition from 1983, which he published together with Eric Hobsbawm and which introduced the ideology-critical concept of the invented tradition and contributed to the dissemination of cultural studies methods in historiography.

In this sense, Terence Ranger assessed the influenza pandemic in southern Rhodesia after the First World War in 1918/1819 as a “crisis of comprehension” in which the Africans found solutions to the terrible crisis by turning away from Western medicine and in the “African Spirit of Churches ”. These intentions, which, without wanting to evaluate them, at least represented a productive way of dealing with the crisis, strengthened their own traditional medicine.

Ranger, who worked intensively on human rights issues, founded the Britain Zimbabwe Society together with Guy Clutton-Brock in 1981 , of which he was president since 2006. It also belonged to the Asylum Welcome organization and, in view of the ongoing state crisis in Zimbabwe, spoke out publicly against the forced deportation of Zimbabwean asylum seekers from Great Britain.

In 1988 he was elected a member of the British Academy .

Fonts (selection)

Monographs

Editorships

  • with Eric Hobsbawm: The Invention of Tradition , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1992, ISBN 0521437733 .
  • Postcolonial Identities in Africa , Zed Books, 1996, ISBN 1856494160 .
  • with Ngwabi Bhebe (Ed.): Society in Zimbabwe's Liberation War , Heinemann, London 1996, ISBN 0-435-07411-3 .
  • with Edward A. Alpers: Aspects of Central African History , Heinemann, London 1968.

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Wilfried Witte: Explanation emergency. The flu epidemic 1918–1920 in Germany with special emphasis on Baden , dissertation Institute for the History of Medicine, Chair Wolfgang U. Eckart , Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg 2003, p. 331.
personal data
SURNAME Ranger, Terence Osborn
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 29, 1929
DATE OF DEATH January 3, 2015