Terence O. Ranger

"Violence has powerfully shaped the history and memory of the past in Matabeleland, from the wars of colonial conquest in the 1890s to the devastating post-colonial violence of the 1980s. The story told in this book concerns the remote, forested wilderness of the Shangani Reserve. It is the story of the settlement of a disease-ridden frontier and its transformation, first into the rural heartland of a nationalist movement, and later into a refuge for post-liberation 'dissidents'." "Silence has surrounded the history of this region of Zimbabwe, and this silence has produced a profound sense of exclusion from national memory. This book helps to break that silence and redress the imbalances of national history."--Back cover.

"From plague to AIDS, epidemics have been the most spectacular diseases to afflict human societies. This volume examines the ways in which these great crises have influenced ideas, how they have helped to shape theological, political and social thought, and how they have been interpreted and understood in the intellectual context of their time." "The first chapters look at classical Athens, early medieval Europe and the Islamic world, in order to establish the intellectual traditions which influenced later developments. Then there are contributions on responses to different epidemics in early modern and modern Europe, where western notions of 'public health' were defined: and chapters on the ways in which disease was perceived outside Europe, in India, Africa and the Pacific, where different intellectual traditions and different disease patterns came together. The final chapters brings us back home, looking at the ways in which policies towards AIDS have been formulated in the 1980s and drawing striking parallels as well as contrasts with the social construction of disease in the more remote past."--Jacket.

This memoir of the years between 1957, when he first went to Southern Rhodesia, and 1967 when he published his first book, is both an intimate record of the African awakening which Ranger witnessed during those ten years, and of the process which led him to write Revolt in Southern Rhodesia. Intended as both history and as historiography, Writing Revolt is also about the ways in which politics and history interacted. The men with whom Ranger discussed Zimbabwean history were the leaders of African nationalism; his seminar papers were sent to prisons and into restricted areas. Both they and he were making political as well as intellectual discoveries. The book also includes a brief account of Ranger's life before he went to Africa.

In this book, distinguished anthropologists, political scientists and social historians from Africa, Europe and America make a radical break with much conventional wisdom in postcolonial discourse to explore contemporary African identities in transition. Addressing fundamental issues of political violence, the negation of authority in public life, and peaceful change to multi-party politics, their analyses distinguish the varied impact of generational struggles, ethnicity and nationalism. Throughout, they shed new light on images, emblems of identity, social landscapes and boundaries of belonging. The book theorises the salience of the postmodern for the postcolonial and the postapartheid; and with actual case studies, explores why postcolonial studies has to enunciate and interpret the distinctive languages of identity politics in all the cultural richness of their specific metaphors. It asks whether the very idea of the postcolonial conceals the continued dependence of African countries. Is the postcolonial thus merely a neo-colonial mystification, a Eurocentric product of Western scholarship in collusion with Western imperialism?