Five funerals, no weddings, a couple of birthdays: Terry Ranger, his contemporaries, and the end of Zimbabwean nationalism – 24 October 2013–3 January 2015

Abstract

Lionel Cliffe – 11 August 1936 to 24 October 2013; Wilfred Mhanda aka Dzinashe ‘Dzino’ Machingura – May 26 1950 toMay282014;NathanShamuyarira – 29 September 1928 to 4 June 2014; Paul Brickhill – 8 July 1958 to 3 October 2014; Terence Ranger – 29 November 1929 to 3 January 2015: they have to be considered together in what could be called a ‘collective epitaphic’ in a journal such as this, emphasising socio-political history and agency within the context of political economy’s constraints and cracks. This is especially so given that all of these important and interesting men were so actively engaged in Zimbabwe’s – and Africa’s – nationalist conjuncture. Their passing may indicate the death of not only what Ranger called ‘liberal nationalism’ in his autobiography, Writing revolt (2013), his last and for those interested in Zimbabwean political history and historiography most interesting book, but something more. That would not by any means be nationalism as a whole, but nationalism as a contested mode of politics and ideology, blending liberalism, various socialisms, traditions and new idioms of ‘Africanism’ born of the apostles and disciples of all of these and more from around the world and the new ruling classes inheriting their states. In the current conjuncture, that once exciting and pregnant political lexicon may be simply monolithic. It could be resting at an impasse, waiting for a new generation and global shift to infuse it with the content that might awaken it from its exhaustion (Zeilig 2008). It is certainly stuck within what Ranger famously – and perhaps with the slightest bit of regret, remembering vaguely the last refuge of scoundrels and his formative role within it – called ‘patriotic history’ (2004). Maybe this political ideology as it appears now should just be called ‘paranoid’: but that was certainly not the feeling as Africa was swept under the waves of those seeking political kingdoms, as Kwame Nkrumah put it, or in the words of another politician the ‘winds of change’, in the 1960s. The coming and going of Ranger and his peers and younger cohorts above mark this era as no other. Ranger must be foremost among them not only because this essay was commissioned with him in mind, but because his presence and his absence pervade – indeed nearly polarise! – the public/academic/activist invention and reception of the rise and falling of Zimbabwean nationalism’s history, politics, and culture. In the case at hand, it should be remembered that when Terry Ranger arrived in Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia until the prefix was dropped in 1964) as a history lecturer with almost no knowledge of the continent at the ‘multi-racial’ University