Terence Ranger

The Narratives and Counter-narratives of Zimbabwean Asylum: female voices

Social historians of Africa in general, and of Zimbabwe in particular, have learnt how to make use of colonial criminal court records by reading them both with and against the grain. Now historians of Zimbabwe are being presented with another sort of court record. Many of them are on the Britain Zimbabwe Society panel of ‘expert’ assessors of Zimbabwean asylum appeals. They see the narrative statements of asylum-seekers and the counter-narratives of the Home Office refusal letters. This paper argues that read both with and against the grain these case records offer a revealing way into postcolonial interactions. For the Home Office, as for the British Government in general, we live in a postcolonial world in which memories, legacies and responsibilities of colonialism have become redundant. Meanwhile asylum-seekers reassert the image of imperial Britain as a country of justice and fairplay. Taking the cases of Zimbabwean women asylum-seekers the paper reveals the dialogue between these two perceptions of the world and the callous injustice which it produces.

City Versus State in Zimbabwe: Colonial Antecedents of the Current Crisis

Abstract There is currently a major urban crisis in Zimbabwe. This expresses itself in failures of provision of water, electricity, medicines, transport, housing etc. Descriptions of conditions in the high density townships of Harare and Bulawayo today are strikingly reminiscent of the last great urban crisis – in the late 1940s of colonial Rhodesia. Two other features are common to both crises. One is the problem of governance. The other is the relation between the city and the state. In both periods there was a great debate about what consituted urban ‘citizenship’, with the great majority of African residents in the cities believing themselves to be unrepresented by illegimitate institutions of local government. In both periods, too, there was deep tension between the city and the state. In the Rhodesian as well as in the Zimbabwean period there was debate between the two over who was responsible for the urban crisis and over who should take what steps to resolve it. To many Zimbabweans the present crisis, and the contemporary clashes between the government and the cities, seem unprecedented. This article seeks to explore its colonial antecedents.

Ghosts of Kanungu: Fertility, Secrecy and Exchange in the Great Lakes of East Africa

Last year I attended a conference in Oxford on Religion and Aids. Those who attended had much to say about Aids but little to say about religion. The only church to merit comment was the Roman Catholic and even here comment was limited to its position on condoms. Distinctions were made between the total prohibition of condom use in formal Catholic teaching and the more flexible realities of practical counselling. But these papers were presented from the perspective of Catholic agencies dealing with Aids and did not reflect parish life and, in particular, the activities of Catholic lay guilds and societies. Professor Tim Allen insisted from the floor that at least in Uganda Catholicism was seriously strange. But neither of the scholars who have convincingly demonstrated this were at the conference. So we did not hear from Heike Behrend, whose book, Resurrecting Cannibals: The Catholic Church, Witch-Hunts and the Production of Pagans in Western Uganda (2011) is explicitly set in the context of the Aids crisis in Tooro. Nor didwe hear of Behrend’s chapter inAids andReligious Practice inAfrica (2009). Behrend’s book deals with a Catholic lay movement, The Uganda Martyrs Guild, which organized witch-hunts to cleanse the country and which revived notions of cannibalism. Matt Heaton’sH-Africa review of theAids and Religious Practice in Africa collectionwrites that