A flair for presciently publishing major works at the crest of historiographical waves has been a hallmark of Terence Ranger's long and distinguished career, and it is reconfirmed with the publication of this, his eighteenth book. For over fifty years, Ranger has explored the themes of indigenous religious, military and civil resistance to colonialism; the invention of tradition; the worldviews of African peasants; dance as a form of social communication; and the essential marriage of political and environmental history. Zimbabwean history has been particularly marked by his wide-ranging curiosity, love of archival material, meticulous attention to detail, magisterial command of the literature, and unerring commitment to critical emancipation as a central aspect of the historiographical mission.
Building on this tradition, Bulawayo Burning breaks new ground in Zimbabwean historiography (although Ranger modestly notes that in ‘taking to the streets’ of urban history he is following in the recent footsteps of other southern African historians). The book brackets the south-western Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo between the real and metaphorical fires of the razing of King Lobengula's town in 1881 and the violence of the proto-nationalist Zhii riots of 1960. In both cases and twice in between, Bulawayo burned. Throughout we see the town as a political crossroads where indigenous, royal, missionary, mercenary, settler, imperial, capitalist and nationalist ambitions so thickly overlaid each other that at times it must have been difficult to discern the very landscape beneath.
Like Ranger's other work, Bulawayo Burning is concerned with African agency and memory, the nature of colonial rule, the development of African nationalist opposition in home and workplace, and the particularities that make Zimbabwean history so much fun. For example, he engages decisively with the debate about the nature of the 1929 disturbances (‘faction fights’) in Makokoba, Bulawayo's Old Location, which in his hands become a complicated struggle over the meanings of modernity. As work patterns shifted, cultural symbolism and everyday fashion so angered some of Makokoba's residents that they attacked their neighbours and set their wardrobes alight. No one before Ranger has traced the documentary and oral narratives so closely that readers can feel the menace of ghost armies roaming the location.
Bulawayo Burning marks three important departures from Ranger's previous work. First, he ventures onto the tantalizing edge between history and fiction. Bulawayo Burning is a long, complex paean to the memory and oeuvre of his friend Dr. Yvonne Vera, writer and Director of the Bulawayo Museum, who passed away in 2005 after having written five novels. Ranger pays direct homage to Butterfly Burning, Vera's poetic novel set amongst the residents of colourful, teeming, festering Makokoba in the 1940s. Butterfly is dense, not an easy read; Ranger continually invokes it, seemingly having found it as clear as water in a glass. Declaring that Bulawayo is ‘mere prose’ to Vera's poetry, he covers the same terrain in history that she painted in fiction: complex Bulawayo lives and landscapes. Thus, Bulawayo Burning pays overt attention to character development and the structure of narrative. Ranger has rightly described himself as a relentlessly narrative historian and his previous books have certainly been social histories; but in them (with the exception of his political biography of the Samkange family) historical forces and themes were largely foregrounded, with memorable personages in the relative shadows. Not here. Following the lead of Vera and her fictional characters, Bulawayo Burning is thickly peopled with popular athletes; irritable politicians; ladies in beautiful dresses; and proud young men as spectacularly adorned as peacocks. The most memorable parts of the book resound with music, dances, immortal soccer matches and swirling petticoats. One wonders how multi-faceted men like Sipambaniso Manyoba and Jerry Vera (Yvonne's uncle) – true characters in every sense of the word – whose social and political trajectories comprise the lifeblood of the book could have been almost erased from the formal historiography of Zimbabwe.
The second departure is the sustained attention given to the white community of Bulawayo; as Ranger says in the book's introduction, this is his ‘whitest’ book. After settler histories, and the revisionist works devoted to African agency and resistance, we see here that histories of one community do actually require and enrich histories of the other. Bulawayo even has space for the town's small community of Indian traders. This symbiosis is symbolized by the tale of who could (whites), and who could not (Africans before 1934), walk on the town's pavements (the imaginations of all Bulawayans seem permanently fixated on this not-so-petty issue). On a larger scale, the fights within the Bulawayo City Council and between the Council and the national administration are examined, especially the epic battles between arch-enemies Donald McIntyre, long-winded bully-boy of the Bulawayo City Council and his brisk adversary, Prime Minister Godfrey Huggins. Nothing less than the administration of urban African aspiration and acculturation – with McIntyre for migrancy and Huggins for urban stabilization – was at stake in these invective-filled battles.
A third departure in Bulawayo Burning is the sustained attention paid to the agency and aspirations of African women. Once chastised for being insensitive to women's history, Ranger has built on his work of the 1980s and paid meticulous attention here to the rise and fall of the black Bulawayo landladies; to the eager young female migrants who suddenly became socially visible and desirable in 1940s Makokoba; to the redoubtable wives and mothers of the township. This is where his debt to Vera is most evident – in the telling of a story that has room for the swish of starched cotton as well as for the more familiar sweatiness of men at work and play.
The book would have benefitted from an eagle-eyed editor with a light touch. The name of Johannesburg's Alexandra Township is misspelled, and the bibliography does not list all the works cited in the footnotes. Paragraphs and pieces of evidence are occasionally repeated in separate chapters. In places one is reminded of a 1990s Robert Zemeckis film, photoshopping fictional characters into historical events – as, every so often, Vera's characters mingle quietly with Ranger's real people. The repeated invocation of men like Manyoba and Joshua Nkomo as heroes-in-the-making perhaps borrows overly from the conventions of fiction. Finally, although there are white men in the book there are no white women (other than the naming of the African women's hostel after McIntyre's wife Gertrude). But these aspects of the book throw its great strengths into sharp relief. It is a finely woven and beautifully calibrated portrait of urban struggles to make and remake lives and landscapes in tumultuous times. Ranger wrote that his great challenge was to make his historical mosaic move; he has succeeded.
As the publishing industry changes at the speed of light one final aspect of Bulawayo Burning bears mentioning. This is a book lover's book. It has footnotes which tease and delight and have not been cut to the cloth of financial expediency. It is printed on lovely, thick paper. It is therefore quite expensive. Lovers of as yet un-Kindled African history will have to ensure that the shrinking budgets of their nearest libraries are stretched to cover what is arguably Terence Ranger's pièce de résistance.
