The Legacy of Terrence Ranger for Historians of African Christianity

Terence Ranger was a pioneer of the discipline of African history. He was most renowned as an historian of Zimbabwean nationalism. He also wrote on the history of disease, death, and the environment. His most prominent publication was his co-edited volume with Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition (1983), which explored issues of legitimacy, hegemony, and identity in relation to mass politics in the context of empire. Nevertheless, his work on religion was also enormously significant. He was interested in how Christianity related to the wider social and political field and he was fascinated by internal questions of liminality and religious experience. This chapter traces Ranger’s long scholarly trajectory from the 1950s to the 2000s. Beginning with his early work on Christian independency as a form of proto-nationalism, it moves to his interest in Christianity, as an expression of peasant consciousness that shaped mobilisation during Zimbabwe’s war of liberation. His research on popular Christianity led to an important series of articles on African seizures and adaptations of mission Christianity in both Tanzania and Zimbabwe. His later work explored how Christian ideas contributed to traditions of political pluralism and created an active Zimbabwean civil society that constrained an authoritarian post-colonial state.