Overview

Draws on a wide range of archival and oral sources to argue that the history of African peasants in Zimbabwe produced a specific consciousness which meant that peasant participation in the guerrilla war was different from the peasant role in Mau Mau or in the war in Mozambique. It also examines the changing relations between the peasantry and the Zimbabwean state after the 1980 elections. North America: U of California Press

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9780852550014

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'Terence Ranger's major new exploration of Zimbabwean peasant politics spans the ninety years from the early colonial period to the 1980s. While drawing heavily on his own extensive research in the Makoni district of Manicaland - virtually a scholarly fief of his - Ranger continually illuminates Rhodesia's tortuous passage to majority rule by comparison with two contrasting models of decolonisation: Kenya (conservative) and Mozambique (la luta continua).' - David Caute in The London Review of Books '... Ranger's present book has all the many-sidedness of a 25-year historiographical and political engagement... Oral historians are at home when listening to a voice directly or indirectly from the 1890s or 1940s. They are less used to treating as already historical a voice from the 1970s. But Ranger's book should be seen as a major event in contemporary oral history, i.e. of experiences which, while chronologically still in limbo between (for present-day Westerner) media-drenched present and a literarily-disciplined past, lie already on the far side of an allegedly or actually profound change... The oral-historical part of Ranger's bibliography is also a model.' - Logie Barrow, Professor of History, Hamburg in Oral History '... is undoubtedly much the most important book to be written on Zimbabwe for many years and it transforms our understanding of the whole colonial experience.' - Richard Brown, University of Sussex, in British Book News

Ranger continually illuminates Rhodesia's tortuous passage to majority rule by comparison with two contrasting models of decolonisation: Kenya (conservative) and Mozambique (la luta continua). - David Caute in THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS ... Ranger's present book has all the many-sidedness of a 25-year historiographical and political engagement... Oral historians are at home when listening to a voice directly or indirectly from the 1890s or 1940s. They are less used to treating as already historical a voice from the 1970s. But Ranger's book should be seen as a major event in contemporary oral history, i.e. of experiences which, while chronologically still in limbo between (for present-day Westerner) media-drenched present and a literarily-disciplined past, lie already on the far side of an allegedly or actually profound change... The oral-historical part of Ranger's bibliography is also a model. - Logie Barrow, Professor of History, Hamburg in ORAL HISTORY ... is undoubtedly much the most important book to be written on Zimbabwe for many years and it transforms our underst much the most important book to be written on Zimbabwe for many years and it transforms our understandi

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