Terence Ranger

Terence Osborn Ranger ( born 1929 ) is a British historian active social sciences with focus on colonial and post-colonial history of East Africa, particularly Zimbabwe.

Terence Osborn Ranger studied and graduated at the University of Oxford. In 1957 he went to the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now the University of Zimbabwe ), where he lectured on medieval and modern history. As a result, he specialized in African history, however. Due to its exposure in favor of the black African independence movement in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, he was in 1963 expelled from the self- proclaimed by the white minority government Rhodesia and took professorships at the University of Dar es Salaam, at UCLA and at Manchester and Oxford, where he remained until held to his retirement in 1997 the Rhodes Chair of Race Relations. He then took until 2001, a visiting professor at the University of Zimbabwe true.

Rangers academic work has contributed significantly to the deepened knowledge of the history and society of East Africa and especially Zimbabwe. Of great importance is also its contribution to the methodological renewal of African historiography in general. The best known and far beyond the African reaching out is his published together with Eric Hobsbawm essay collection The Invention of Tradition in 1983, which introduced the ideology-critical concept of invented tradition and helped to disseminate cultural research methods in historiography.

Ranger, who has dealt extensively with human rights issues, founded in 1981 together with Guy Clutton -Brock, the Britain Zimbabwe Society, which he is president since 2006. He is also the organization and Asylum Welcome has spoken out in view of the ongoing sovereign crisis in Zimbabwe publicly against the forced deportation of Zimbabwean asylum -seekers from the UK.