At a dinner party in Salisbury (Harare) in the late1950s when white rule in Rhodesia was at its height, Terence Ranger, who has died at his home in Oxford at the age of 85, told the left-wing academic John Reed that he wished he'd been born black. "Terry," Reed wrote years later, "began a debate on what it means to be African by saying how much he wishes he was black because for the black man everything is still open, everything is still to do - a new state and a new culture to build up."
In early 1968 - soon after the publication of his greatest work "Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 1896-7" (Heinemann, London, 1967) the still young Terence Ranger sat in a lecture room at Dar es Salaam. Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael was thumping the rostrum telling black students that they must learn to hate whites.
Ranger later recalled - "A history student sitting next to me was shouting ‘I do hate the whites. I do hate the whites,' pausing to whisper to me, ‘I don't mean you Professor Ranger.'"
Terence Ranger was always the exception.
At Highgate School exceptionally mediocre. At Oxford University, exceptionally curious about little known incidents in English and Irish history. In Southern Rhodesia, exceptionally brave as well as provocative.
Although in Southern Rhodesia for less than six years -from 1957-1963- he managed to get up the collective noses of most whites. He was hurled fully clothed into a swimming pool after telling a group of rugger-bugger Europeans that blacks should be allowed to swim in it.