Terence "Terry" Osborn Ranger (29 November 1929 – 3 January 2015) was a prominent British Africanist, best known as a historian 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 the University of Oxford and the first Africanist fellow of the British Academy.
Biography
Born in South Norwood, south-east London, then 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. 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. of which he was president (2006–14). During 1980–82 he was president of the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) and from 1981 to 1982 president of the Ecclesiastical History Society. During this time he also published his widely influential work The Invention of Tradition (1983) in collaboration with Eric Hobsbawm.
In retirement, Ranger was made a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. In 2013 he published his memoir, entitled Writing Revolt. He was the first Africanist fellow of the British Academy and the first historian of Africa to sit on the board of the historical journal Past & Present. He died at his home in Oxford on 3 January 2015 at the age of 85.
Selected bibliography
Complete bibliography in ACAS Review 89.