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Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The struggle over the past in Zimbabwe
Terence Ranger, St Antony's College,Oxford
May 28, 2004

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Over the past two or three years there has emerged in Zimbabwe a sustained attempt by the Mugabe regime to propagate what is called 'patriotic history'. 'Patriotic history' is intended to proclaim the continuity of the Zimbabwean revolutionary tradition. It is an attempt to reach out to 'youth' over the heads of their parents and teachers, all of whom are said to have forgotten or betrayed revolutionary values. It repudiates academic historiography with its attempts to complicate and question. At the same time it confronts Western 'bogus universalism' which it depicts as a denial of the concrete history of global oppression.

'Patriotic history' is propagated at many levels - on television and in the state-controlled press; in youth militia camps; in new school history courses and text-books; in books written by cabinet ministers; in speeches by Robert Mugabe and in philosophical eulogies and glosses of those speeches by Zimbabwe's media controller, Tafataona Mahoso. It is a coherent but complex doctrine. This article explores the intellectual and practical implications of 'patriotic history'. It contrasts it with an older 'nationalist historiography', a newer 'history of the nation', and with attempts at the University of Zimbabwe to move on to pluralist analyses and multiple questions. The current historiographical debate is seen through the eyes and in the light of the experience of its author, a long-term practitioner of both nationalist historiography and the history of the Zimbabwean nation.

Introduction
When I retired from my Oxford Chair in 1997 I went to the University of Zimbabwe for four years as a Visiting Professor. In the first year I was asked to second mark final examination papers in African Historiography and in the modern history of Zimbabwe. It was a chastening and illuminating experience. In the historiography paper every student denounced 'nationalist historiography' - history in the service of nationalism - and instanced me as its prime practitioner. Fortunately, they all said, the sun of political economy had risen and made the past scientifically clear. In the modern Zimbabwe history paper, however, students without exception wrote intensely nationalistic answers with barely a trace of political economy.

In the next three years I was myself generously allocated by the History Department the task of teaching both African historiography and the modern history of Zimbabwe. I tried to complicate things in both courses. In the historiography course I tried to explain that political economy in its turn had come under very heavy criticism and the students and I struggled with post-modernity and post-coloniality. I also tried to explain the difference between writing 'nationalist historiography' and the 'history of nationalism'. In my own case, I maintained, my first two books about Zimbabwe - Revolt in Southern Rhodesia and The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia - had been 'nationalist historiography' in the sense that they attempted to trace the roots of nationalism. They were historicist in so far as they presented narratives leading to its triumphant emergence. But my more recent books, particularly those on Matabeleland, had been histories of nationalism as well as histories of religion and landscape and violence. Nationalism as a movement, or set of movements, and as an ideology, remains central to contemporary Zimbabwe and still requires a great deal of rigorous historical questioning.

When it came to teaching the modern history of Zimbabwe, therefore, I tried to complicate things by asking a series of questions which opened up the apparently closed issues in the ZANU/PF narrative of the past. I tried to show that Rhodesian colonialism had been more various - and often more internally contradictory - than the nationalist narrative allowed. I drew upon the work of Brian Raftopolous to explore the tensions between nationalism and trade unionism. I sought to re-open many of the 'contradictions' within liberation history - the so-called Nhari rising, the assassination of Herbert Chitepo, etc. I argued that Robert Mugabe's dominance of ZANU/PF, complete though it has seemed since 1980, could not be dated back earlier than 1977. I spent a good deal of lecture time on the events in Matabeleland in the 1980s - on which I had been researching and writing. More generally I explored the many and varied sources of the authoritarianism of the nationalist state in post-independence Zimbabwe. In seminar presentations I raised questions about topics outside conventional political history - on landscape and religion and urban culture.

Meanwhile, as I was exploring with the students the history of nationalism and proposing other topics of study, I was enormously impressed with the vitality of historians, economic historians and archaeologists at the University of Zimbabwe. A generation of scholars had arisen which did not envy their fellows who had gone into business or politics. They wanted nothing more than to be successful researchers and publishers, respected by their peers and by Africanists inter-nationally. These young Zimababwean scholars were able to go beyond the agendas of nationalism. The archaeologist, Innocent Pikarayi, for example, in his splendid The Zimbabwe Culture. Origins and Decline in Southern Zambezian States, declared that there was now no need to combat colonial myths about Great Zimbabwe or to write of African 'empires' where none had existed.

The time had come to ask new questions about environment and landscape and symbol. A new school of Zimbabwean urban historians was emerging. One of them, Ennie Chipembere, took the complexities and contradictions of white Rhodesian politics seriously for the first time since 1980. Gerald Mazarire, given the responsibility to develop oral history after the death of Professor David Beach, argued that the political focus on empires, states and chieftancies had distorted interpretation of oral tradition and suggested instead an approach based on historical geography. Sabelo Ndlovu began to apply Gramscian theories of hegemony to the Ndebele State; Enocent Msindo took up issues of ethnicity and particularly of Kalanga identity.

Senior scholars, like Professor Alois Mlambo and Professor Brian Raftopolous, gave an intellectual lead through their own research and writings, particularly through their explorations or urban and labour history and of political economy. The University of Zimbabwe has some twenty scholarly manuscripts, including an important collection on Zimbabwean political economy, ready for publication. When I made my second retirement in June 2001 a research seminar was organised as a farewell gift at which some thirty scholarly papers were presented by historians, archaeologists, students of religion, members of the departments of literature and languages.

So when I came to reflect on my return to the University of Zimbabwe thirty five years after I had first taught there it seemed to me that if one of my hopes in the early 1960s had been dashed, the other had been exceeded. The emancipatory potential of Zimbabwean nationalism, in which I had so confidently believed, had been very imperfectly fulfilled. But I could not have foreseen in 1963, when I was removed from Rhodesia and from the University College, a future in which there would be over ten thousand African students at the University of Zimbabwe, all with high A level entry qualifications, and in which research and scholarship would be so thriving. As I thought that I might perhaps venture upon an academic autobiography it seemed to me that I would not locate the golden age of African historiography in the past, as other pioneers have done. For me it seemed that the golden age was here and now, at the University of Zimbabwe in the opening years of the twenty-first century.

When I came to deliver my valedictory lecture at the University of Zimbabwe on 31 May 2001 under the title 'History Matters', I proclaimed the potential of this emerging Zimbabwean scholarship. I also located two circumstances under which historical scholarship was crucially important. The first - which I had myself encountered in Rhodesia in the 1950s and 60s and in Matabeleland in the 80s and 90s - was when people had been denied a history. But you could have too much history as well as too little. You could have too much history if a single, narrow historical narrative gained a monopoly and was endlessly repeated. In Rhodesia in the 1950s and in Matabeleland in the 1990s it had been necessary to remedy a deficiency. Now it had become necessary to complicate over-simplifications; to offer a plural history. Academic history was in difficulty in South Africa, I said, because it did not seem important enough. In Zimbabwe, by contrast, history seemed enormously important. The question was - which history for what Zimbabwe.

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