Europeans in Black Africa*

terence ranger
Oxford University

I n 1971 Robert Collins published a little book entitled Europeans in

Africa.1 Though one of twelve “Studies in World Civilization,” it is
in effect a history of colonialism. The general editor of the series
depicts it as an analysis of enforced acculturation—“a study in the vio-
lent cultural collision between European and non-European culture.”
Thus while there are sixty-four pages on Africa before the Scramble,
these are a backdrop to the colonial intrusion. Throughout the book
Europeans are depicted as the bearers of power and agency. No pages
are devoted to Europeans in postcolonial Africa.
In the quarter of a century that has passed since the appearance of
Collins’s book, much of what he says about colonialism has been mod-
ified by later research. No doubt an appropriately selected scholar
could condense and update Collins to make today’s presentation. But I
am certainly not that appropriate scholar. The original guidelines for
my Rhodes Chair of Race Relations, laid down by the donors in 1953,
insist that the career of Cecil Rhodes and the achievements of whites
in Africa should be its focus. I did not discover these requirements
until this year, the end of my ten-year tenure of the chair. As it hap-
pens, I have observed them—but only by contraries. I have been the
historian of anticolonialism rather than of colonialism and the advo-
cate of African rather than European agency.2

* This is the text of a plenary lecture delivered to the Sixty-sixth Anglo-American

Conference of Historians, “Connexions: European Peoples and the Non-European World”
(London, 2–4 July 1997).
1 Robert Collins, Europeans in Africa (New York: Knopf, 1971).
2 Rhodes looms large in my Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896–7: A Study in African

Resistance (London: Heinemann, 1967, 1979); in “The Last Word on Rhodes?” Past and

Journal of World History, Vol. 9, No. 2

©1998 by University of Hawai‘i Press
Present

255
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So I do not wish to update Collins today.3 This is not so much

because I want any longer to be anticolonial and to portray whites in
Africa as villains rather than as heroes. African historiography has
gone beyond that. My desire is to see both whites and blacks in Africa
as human beings, each with a fully human capacity for heroism and
villainy and mediocrity. And one cannot see either whites or blacks as
fully human in the framework of conventional colonial historiography,
where white humanity is distorted by the burden of power, and black
humanity is distorted by the image of submission.

New Historiographies

To what historiographical developments can I turn? Most historians

are aware that since 1971 there has been a tremendous growth of studies
of colonialism, not in departments of history but in departments of lit-
erature and cultural studies. Perhaps I can find what I am looking for
in “colonial discourse theory.”
Indeed this already very large body of work fills in many of the gaps
of the old colonial historiography, supplementing its emphasis on guns
and capital with an insistence on ideas, imaginations, and perceptions.
Yet this literature does not really displace whites in Africa as preemi-
nently bearers of power or as monopolists of agency. What is does is to
redistribute power. Ideas become more empowering—more coercive—
than guns, culture more so than capital. Whites bring to Africa, it might
be said, not only landmines but landscape!4
Landscape is the topic of a recent remarkable collection, hailed as
“an unprecedented, landmark text in post-colonial criticism and
theory,” which explores “issues of claiming, naming and possessing
land.” This is Text, Theory and Space, a formidable title within which,

Present 28 (1964): 116–27; and in my inaugural lecture, published as Rhodes, Oxford and the
Study of Race Relations (London: Oxford University Press, 1989). His life and especially his
legend will also figure largely in my forthcoming study of the Matopos Mountains, Voices
from the Rocks: A Modern History of the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe (Oxford: James Currey,
1999)
3 In 1979 I edited a special number of the Journal of African History (20, no. 4) on

whites in Africa, contributing to it both an introduction, “White Presence and Power in

Africa,” and a biographical study, “The Mobilisation of Labour and the Production of
Knowledge: The Antiquarian Tradition in Rhodesia.”
4 An article of my own could be taken as partly prefiguring this shift in emphasis:

“From Humanism to the Science of Man: Colonialism in Africa and the Understanding of
Alien Societies,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (1976): 115–41.
Ranger: Europeans in Black Africa 257

rather to my antiquated surprise, is contained a chapter by myself.5 But

my own chapter is very much an exception to the general rule of the
book, for reasons that I will explain.
The first essay in the book is a brilliant piece by the Australian
historian, Paul Carter. Entitled “Turning the Tables—Or, Grounding
Post-Colonialism,” it is a sustained comparison of the diplomatic tables
at which Africa was carved up and the tables at which Victorians dab-
bled with spiritualism. In both cases, Europeans had become “un-
grounded,” losing direct contact with environment or ancestors. In both
cases, efforts were made to reestablish contact by means of inquisition:
“Contact was, as in the colonial situation, one-sided. The medium and
her helpers put the questions, as conquistadors, missionaries and gov-
ernment officials did: spirits, like natives, were endlessly being asked
their names, as if their existence were in doubt.”6
For Carter, Europeans in Africa and in Australia were “ungrounded,”
and “to be ungrounded was to lose touch with one’s human and physi-
cal surroundings . . . to become an antenna eye” hovering above land.
This hovering antenna eye was able, indeed obliged, to turn land into
landscape, space into place. Hence, in this rather alarming way, whites
“possess” and “make” landscapes in Africa. “Grounded” Africans can-
not, need not, and do not.
The essays in Text, Theory and Space bring great insights to their
accounts of many different kinds of whites in Africa and Australia,
humanizing them to the extent of situating them in the specifics of
ethnicity, class, gender, and period. Yet it all leaves me uncomfortable.
For me neither Europeans, nor Africans, emerge as human enough.
I am well enough aware of the often casually authoritarian way in
which whites made African landscapes. Thus Lyn Shumaker tells us of
a trek by a Scottish ecologist, Frank Fraser Darling, and a colonial
officer, Eustace Poles, to the Muchinga escarpment in northern Rho-
desia. When they stopped for lunch, Poles decided to create a “view”
that they could enjoy before they moved on. So fifty African axemen
were set to work felling trees, and “after about two hours our felling
revealed a very fine view indeed.”7 Certainly, left to themselves the

5 Kate Darian-Smith, Text, Theory and Space: Land, Literature and History in South

Africa and Australia, ed. Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall (London: Routledge, 1996). My own
chapter is entitled “Great Spaces Washed with Sun: The Matopos and Uluru Compared.”
6 Carter, in Text, Theory and Space, p. 25.
7 Lyn Shumaker, “Constructing Racial Landscapes: Africans, Administrators and An-

thropologists in Late Colonial Northern Rhodesia,” in Colonial Subjects: Genealogies of

Practical Anthropology, ed. Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink (Ann Arbor: University of Mich-
igan Press, 1997).
258 journal of world history, fall 1998

fifty African axemen would not have sacrificed the trees to construct
so ephemeral a prospect. But I want Africans to be human—and that
means being able to create landscapes and to spoil environments just
like everybody else. My own chapter in Text, Theory and Space deals
with the indigenous history of two famous landscapes, the Matopos
Mountains in Zimbabwe and Uluru Rock in Australia. And I have since
confronted the question head-on in a paper presented at the Berlin
Conference on Africa and Modernity in February 1997. The organizers
of that conference invited me to talk about landscape as a product of
modernity, of that ungrounded antenna eye. Perverse as always, I
decided to do the opposite and to document African perceptions of
landscape.
In a paper entitled “New Approaches to African Landscape,” I sug-
gested that these African perceptions were often implicit, but that
explicit statements about landscape were made at particular historical
conjunctures: when African peoples were “making” a social and imagi-
native environment; when African peoples were moving out of one
such environment into another, especially when such a migration was
forced; when African evangelists either of “traditional” religion or of
Christianity were seeking to convert the landscape as well as the people;
and when possession and occupation of land was contested.8
All this satisfied me, at least, that one can humanize “grounded”
Africans. But what about those “ungrounded” Europeans? Much of the
colonial discourse literature seems amply to confirm the poetic in-
sights of the late Michael Kayoya:

Often we do not speak openly to the white man

Until we have discovered his human identity
We give him whatever satisfies his often tiresome curiosity

Enemies study a person to take him by surprise

We don’t study man
We try to draw near to communicate

8 Terence Ranger, “New Approaches to African Landscape,” paper presented at House

of World Culture, Berlin, February 1997. Among other things I aimed to demonstrate in
this paper the centrality of history. When I presented it in Oxford both geographers and
anthropologists claimed that their disciplines had already established its main argument.
On later reading, however, I found that the possibility of studying African perceptions of
landscape had been stated, but that hardly any particular studies had been made. A paper
that compares white makings of African landscape with black perceptions is Terence
Ranger, “Making Zimbabwean Landscapes: Painters, Projectors and Priests” Paideuma 43
(1997).
Ranger: Europeans in Black Africa 259

At home in Europe
The white man can be seen as a man
As soon as he leaves home he is frightful
He analyses, spies, classifies, defines, appropriates
Conquers and dominates

What? Everything9

Maybe it is impossible after all to discover that human identity.

All too many Europeans in Africa have enthusiastically embraced
“frightfulness,” have arrogantly borne the distorting burden of power.
As Christopher Fyfe regularly insists, empires in Africa were based on
racial theory. Whiteness was inseparable from power. Nevertheless, I
shall persist in trying to see the white “as a man” not only at home but
also in Africa.
Maybe another tendency in colonial studies since Collins wrote in
1971 could be of use to me. There has grown up a literature on the
physical images—drawings, paintings, carvings—created not only of
blacks by whites but also of whites by blacks.10 Perhaps here one could
find African perceptions of whites as human.
A fascinating example of the genre is Fritz Kramer’s Red Fez.11
Kramer tells us that in Nazi Germany, African and other indigenous
representations of whites were held to be subversive; the Gestapo
sought to confiscate ethnographic collections or photographs. These
black representations dangerously humanized whites, it was thought,
by rendering them ridiculous rather than powerful. Depressingly,
Kramer himself reinterprets these images as “realistic” rather than as
satirical. They realistically depicted power. The red fez itself is a
symbol of authority and inquisition. There are no human beings, alas,
illustrated in his pages.
The same is disillusioningly true of the second part of Kramer’s
work. Here he contrasts white and black responses to strangeness.

9 Michael Kayoya, My Father’s Footsteps (Nairobi, 1973).

10 For white depictions see particularly Jan Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and
Blacks in Western Popular Culture (London: Yale University Press, 1992). For a fascinating
study of how European advertising images of Africans, used to market soap, were adapted in
order to sell soap to Africans, see Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women (London:
Leicester University Press, 1996). For a study of white use of African artifacts to create
images of Africa, see Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and
Popular Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
11 Fritz Kramer, The Red Fez (London: Verso, 1993).
260 journal of world history, fall 1998

Whites make strangers into “others” by putting the exotic colonized at

a great distance from themselves. Blacks deal with strangers, includ-
ing whites, by literally taking them in. Africans are possessed by
the spirits of strangers. Kramer reviews the extensive literature on
African possession cults in which people become hosts to the spirits of
animals, or migrants, or whites. But, alas, even this does not domesti-
cate or humanize Europeans. White spirits are the most troublesome,
rushing in powerfully, shaking their hosts and demanding expensive
gifts.
I have seen this for myself, two years ago on the banks of the Zam-
bezi in Mozambique. I was visiting a scheme in which game is
controlled by locals. Essential to this scheme was the approval of
the “owners” of the land, expressed through spirit mediums. The
local people are Chikunda, ex-slave mercenaries of the Portuguese,
who claim mythical Portuguese founding ancestors. So the spirit
mediums behave altogether differently from those I have seen among
the Shona of Zimbabwe, who incarnate African ancestors. Chikunda
mediums are loud and abusive; wear red, the ritually forbidden color
of blood; tote guns; and demand strong drink. (On this occasion
there was no rum; the mediums had to make do with vodka.) Some
years ago I sat on a veranda opposite Mount Mlanje in Malawi, listen-
ing to tapes made by the missionary-anthropologist Matthew Schoffe-
leers. He had recorded a virtuoso of alien spirit possession, a woman
possessed in turn by the spirits of dead migrant workers, African
soldiers, and a white. One heard on the tape the arrival of these spirits
—the steam train rushing into her hut to deliver the labor migrant,
the shouted drill commands to herald the African soldier. Then
came the white man—and a long silence. What noise could represent
him, I wondered. And then at last a great shout: “Boy, where’s my
bloody tea!”

A Historical Strategy

So if I am to find white humanity in Africa I shall have to forsake all

these literatures on colonialism and fend for myself.
Perhaps one can go about it historically, seeking times and places
when whites were conspicuously not powerful, or where they let down
the colonial side by being all too human. Suppose we start in the
precolonial nineteenth century and look at isolated hunters, traders,
missionaries, overwhelmingly outnumbered and dependent within func-
Ranger: Europeans in Black Africa 261

tioning African polities?12 Suppose we look at whites “gone native”

during colonialism? And suppose we look at whites in postcolonial
Africa—a period, in most of Africa, of thirty-five years or more? Whites
in these three categories come close to outnumbering white colonial
bearers of power; in other words, there could be a history of whites in
Africa that is not also a history of colonialism.
This sounds an obvious strategy, but even here we encounter diffi-
culties. The new literature on colonial discourse throws back a retro-
spective light on those precolonial isolated whites. Since ideas are now
stronger than guns—or spears—those isolated missionaries no longer
seem so powerless. Thus Jean and John Comaroff, whose two-volume
work Of Revelation and Revolution has set new standards for the study of
nineteenth-century missions, set out their basic argument in an earlier
article.13 Writing in the first issue of the Journal of Historical Sociology,
they insisted that “European colonialism was a cultural project. In
Southern Africa, nonconformist missions, the vanguards of empire,
conjured up new maps, new systems of relations, new notions of time,
production and personhood. From their very first encounters with
native communities . . . they sowed the state of colonialism on which
the colonial state was founded.”14 Yet the Comaroffs’ missionaries were
totally dependent on the surrounding southern Tswana for supplies
and protection.
Even though the Comaroffs did write of “the brief moment that
allowed European and African to confront each other in frank fascina-
tion,” they stated that this “soon passed.” After that the cultural initia-
tive lay squarely with the whites. “The terms of colonization were laid
out in microcosm at the moments of the first sustained encounter
between Europe and its future subjects.”15

12 I am aware that one can start much earlier than the nineteenth century. Ashgate is

publishing a multivolume series under the general title, “An Expanding World: The Euro-
pean Impact on World History, 1450–1800.” Despite its subtitle this series seems likely to
contain material about the impact of the world on Europeans. I look forward particularly
to two volumes in the series, European and Non-European Societies, 1450–1800, edited by
Robert Forster (Brookfield, Ver.: Ashgate, 1997), even though each volume will contain
only one chapter on Africa. I look forward also to the forthcoming European Intruders and
Changes in Behaviour and Customs in Africa, America and Asia before 1800, edited by Murdo
McLeod and Evelyn Rawski. One hopes that some at least of the changes in behavior and
customs will concern “European intruders” themselves.
13 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colo-

nialism and Consciousness in South Africa (London: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 1997).
14 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Through the Looking-Glass: Colonial Encoun-

ters of the First Kind,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988): 6.

15 Ibid., p. 29.
262 journal of world history, fall 1998

As for whites who behaved “humanly” under colonialism—like the

missionary John Read with his Khoisan wife—the Comaroffs remarked
that they were written out of the white and colonial narrative, Read
becoming a mere “recluse in the desert.” And our image of whites after
colonialism is still one of power. We are used to the television pictures
of British public-school boys and golden Scandinavian girls running
refugee camps in Africa, and used to the idea of white tourists being
offered palatable “reconstructions” of an African past, in “Shaka’s
Village” or the mock-voodoo shrines of Benin.16

Discovering White Humanity

So far I have been discussing the difficulties of doing what I want to

do. But now I shall assert that something after all can be done.
I seem to spend too much of my time in debating with the
Comaroffs, whose comradeship was so important to me during our days
at the University of Manchester and whose work I much admire.17 Still,
one cannot really accept their argument about sowing the state of
colonialism and at the same time restore Africans and Europeans to
some sort of equality of interaction. Fortunately, debate on white mis-
sionaries in the nineteenth century has rapidly developed into one
of the liveliest areas of African historiography. Ornulf Gulbrandsen has
directly confronted the Comaroffs in a series of articles that seek to
show that the cultural initiative lay with Tswana chiefs and elders
rather than with missionaries.18 Paul Landau has written a brilliant
study of the emergence of a Tswana Christianity, whose leaders made
use of evangelical Protestantism to create a state church and to “mod-
ernize” the economy. The great Christian king, Khama I, towered over
“his” missionaries like a rather more moral Henry VIII; he kept all

16 A more academic discussion of the interaction between the “postcolonial” and the

“postmodern” is Robert Thornton, “The Potential of Boundaries in South Africa: Steps

Towards a Theory of the Social Edge,” in Postcolonial Identities in Africa, ed. Richard Wert-
ner and Terence Ranger (London: Zed, 1996).
17 I criticized the Comaroffs’ theory of narrative in “No Missionary: No Exchange; No

Story? Narrative in Southern Africa,” paper presented at All Souls, Oxford, June 1992. A
wider discussion is “Africa in the Age of Extremes: The Irrelevance of African History,” in
Rethinking African History (Edinburgh: African Studies Centre, 1997).
18 Ørnulf Gulbrandsen, “Missionaries and the Northern Tswana Rulers: Who Used

Whom?” Journal of Religion in Africa 13 (1993): 44–83; “Living Their Lives in Courts: The
Counter-hegemonic Force of the Tswana Kgotla in a Colonial Context,” in Inside and Out-
side the Law: Anthropological Studies of Authority and Ambiguity, ed. Olivia Harris (London:
Routledge, 1996).
Ranger: Europeans in Black Africa 263

other denominations out but also sent overly ambitious London

Missionary Society missionaries packing.19 Outside Tswana country,
other students of nineteenth-century missions have engaged with the
Comaroffs. A formidable anthropologist, John Peel, has embarked on
another multivolume publication based on missionary sources, this
time the archives of the Church Missionary Society. His volumes will
give a very different account of the balance between white and black
power.20
In “Through the Looking-Glass” the Comaroffs extended their idea
of cultural power to precolonial white hunters and traders as well as to
missionaries. But there has been plenty of other work that shows such
men as willingly submissive to black state power and often as scandal-
ously prepared to “go native.” Many of them were certainly seen as
human.
At the very beginning of The Red Fez, Kramer admits that there
was a time when whites were regarded in African societies not as
bearers of unprecedented power but as “familiar” strangers: “The first
Europeans in Africa were by no means ‘discovered’ to be unique,
incomparable beings.” Rather they were placed in one or another of the
existing categories for strangers, “one further sort of barbarians among
other barbarians.” Kramer describes Asante categories of strangerhood
—ohoho (free Akan strangers), ntafo (non-Akan traders), and odonko
(slaves)—and shows how European identities were negotiated between
these categories. This happened everywhere in Africa, says Kramer,
until industrialization turned whites from “strangers” into “estrangers.”21
So we can carry out research on whites as “familiar” strangers in
many precolonial contexts, whether we are dealing with shipwrecked
sailors in southeast Africa, or Portuguese creole prazeros in the Zam-
bezi Valley, or even discomforted concession seekers. (I watched epi-
sodes of the BBC’s costume drama, Rhodes, with Professor Ngwabe
Bhebe of the University of Zimbabwe. He was irritated by the fact that
King Lobengula and all his court were acted by Zulu-speaking Zulu
rather than Sindebele—one noble savage evidently being as good as
another so far as the BBC is concerned. But he was delighted with the
scenes in which Rhodes’s envoys crawled on their bellies before the
great Ndebele king.)

19 P. S. Landau, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender and Christianity in a Southern

African Kingdom (London: James Currey, 1995).

20 J. D. Y. Peel, “For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narra-

tives and Historical Anthropology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (July
1995): 581–608.
21 Kramer, The Red Fez, pp. x, 2, 17.
264 journal of world history, fall 1998

As this last example suggests, we can go on with this sort of

research even after early colonialism has been established. As the fron-
tiers of colonial states moved forward, so in advance of them moved
the white traders and adventurers, still submissive to black power and
still taking black wives or concubines. A few years after Zimbabwean
independence, one of my black Zimbabwean “sons,” who had been
appointed as personal assistant to a white tycoon, engineered an invi-
tation to me to make the after-dinner speech to the annual banquet of
the Mashonaland Chamber of Commerce, still largely made up of
whites. He erroneously assured them that I was a renowned after-
dinner speaker, while in fact I can never remember those handy anec-
dotes. I was partly saved by finding in the cottage where I was staying
Dale Carnegie’s little book on public speaking, which advised anyone
in my predicament to look each member of the audience firmly in the
eye and to believe that they owed me money. But gradually, I became
more serious and my audience more restive. I told them that historians
needed to look much more to traders. We had all too many records
produced by missionaries—who needed to appeal to their donating
constituencies—or by administrators. Traders tended to lie low. They
covered up their transactions. Hence they were written out of colonial
history, which quickly tidied away their unrespectability. Nevertheless,
I congratulated my by now alienated audience on descending from
such unrespectables, with their splendidly relevant example of work-
ing under black power and their readiness to go native.
But how to get at the experience of such men? Fortunately there
has recently been published a marvelous book, a biography of “Trader
Horn.”22 Older readers may remember either the Trader Horn books or
the Hollywood versions of them. They were the product of the oral
reminiscences of an old “tramp” confided to and edited by a South
African writer, Ethelreda Lewis. The old man died in South Africa.
Tim Couzens decided to track him down and to discover how far his
apparent fantasies represented reality. His first discovery, that the real
name of “Trader Horn” was Smith, might have put off a less deter-
mined man. But Couzens persisted and found his own particular Smith
as a schoolboy in Lancashire, as a very young trader up the Ogowe
River in Nigeria, as an adventurer in the Wild West.
So far from being an exotic, Smith turned out to be representative
of a whole group of whites who receive virtually no mention in histo-
ries of empire. These were born of artisan or small farmer stock, with

22 Tim Couzens, Tramp Royal (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1992).

Ranger: Europeans in Black Africa 265

no pretensions as bearers of imperial authority or exponents of a supe-

rior white morality. Nevertheless, they had a strong notion of “gentle-
manly” behavior—keeping an agreement, sticking up for a friend. They
roamed around the wild places of both formal and informal empire,
rarely receiving a wage but living off their craft skills or through their
wits. Smith was contemptuous of South African whites who depended
merely on race status: “These poor whites . . . the shavings of human-
ity . . . lying about in all corners of Africa. . . . It would be better to see
a man mate with a healthy native woman than some o’ these pale sluts
too white to do any work.”23
Smith certainly lived as a human being in Africa and was accepted
as such. He ate African foods and used African medicines and slept
with African women. He was content to accept the stereotype that the
peoples of the Ogowe were cannibals, but said that these cannibals
were the best gentlemen he had ever encountered. He had African
blood brothers. His ally and friend, Apekwe, shared with him “the
kind of love that only two men surrounded continually by danger
night and day can understand.”24 There were many more Smiths who
never found their Ethelreda Lewises.
But even within the power relations of colonialism, some relation-
ships of humanity could emerge. Colonial conquest changed the posi-
tion of missionaries very greatly. They no longer depended on Africans
for supplies and protection; they were allies, even if uneasy ones, of
the colonial state. Nevertheless, many early colonial missionaries are
remembered as human, and some of them as superhuman in an Afri-
can rather than a European way. Some dead missionaries are venerated
as founding heroes of ethnicities or as healing saints. Canon Porter of
Masasi in southeast Tanzania used to console himself in his diaries that
even Livingstone had sometimes found Africans intolerable. After his
death, his tomb in Masasi Cathedral became the focus of popular
Christian unorthodoxy, where African Anglicans came to make offer-
ings for healing.
Even white settlers could sometimes appear human. Another mar-
velous book, from the same research institute as that of Couzens, is
Charles Van Onselen’s The Seed Is Mine, an extraordinarily exhaustive
biography of an African sharecropper.25 Kaas Maine was always at the
wrong end of relations of power, always working on someone else’s
land. Yet he was, as he called himself, “a chameleon among Afrikaners,”

23 Ibid., p. 439.
24 Ibid., p. 175.
25 Charles Van Onselen, The Seed Is Mine (Oxford: James Currey, 1997).
266 journal of world history, fall 1998

or as I described him in a review of the book, “an Afrikanerised Afri-

can on the land of Africanised whites.” Van Onselen shows the net-
work of relationships that could grow up in the era of rural paternalism
before they were all betrayed by the rise of apartheid with its ethnic
and racial classifications. Some of Maine’s best friends were whites; his
most demanding landlord was black.
Van Onselen risks the prediction that if some sort of “authentic
South African identity” is to emerge, it will arise “from painful shared
experiences on the high veld.” Certainly it is time to explore further
the complex identity of Afrikaners. Their self-definition as “Africans”
has not in the past prevented them from committing the worst ex-
cesses of racial power, but possibly it allows them now to work out how
to live as humans in postcolonial South Africa—or to spread out to
live and work in the rest of Africa, as so many are doing. It may not be
so easy for English-speaking whites, still mental citizens of a lost empire.
These reflections bring me to whites in postcolonial Africa. As I
have said already, postcoloniality now covers a long period of time. In
many parts of Africa, effective colonial rule lasted no longer than post-
colonial systems have now done. But it is a reflection of the deficien-
cies of the scholarly literature, as well as of the limited space at my
command, that I am going to cover those thirty-five years in just a few
paragraphs.
There are today at least as many whites in Africa as there have ever
been. In addition to postsettler communities in South Africa and Zim-
babwe, there are more missionaries than ever before, mostly North
American. There are still white tramps and other “poor whites”; the
most aggressive beggars on the streets of Bulawayo are white. There are
white hippies and eco-tourists and would-be white hunters. There are
short-term white schoolteachers. There are hundreds, probably thou-
sands, of workers for international nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs). Some among all these postcolonial whites splendidly let
down “white standards” and “go native.” Very many are taken into the
great flexible network of African kinship, becoming sons and daugh-
ters to black families, just as a venerable elder like myself is father to so
many young Africans. My own research students are caught up in
these webs of human relationships, even if as academic historians and
political scientists and geographers they are still classifying and defin-
ing. One of my colleagues has become name-giver to a baby in north-
ern Matabeleland by dint of giving a very pregnant woman a lift in her
pickup truck; the child was named “History.”
Very many of these postcolonial whites report back on their Afri-
can experiences—in letters home or in reports to NGOs and home
Ranger: Europeans in Black Africa 267

churches.26 Little has been done to collate this vast archive or even to
appreciate its importance as a source. One of the difficulties for a his-
torical enterprise like mine is that history tends to be a camp follower
of power. Precisely when whites in Africa become powerless, human,
they seem to fade into insignificance.
So I shall follow, in concluding this rapid review, the strategy of
looking at African literature and film so as to discover whether whites
have yet been able to shake off the burden of power. Two recent Zim-
babwean productions encourage me to suppose that they are beginning
to do so, even in a country that until so recently experienced the horrors
of a guerrilla war against racism. A couple of weeks ago I saw the new
Zimbabwean film, Everyone’s Child, directed by Tsitsi Dangaremba.
Dangaremba’s novel, Nervous Conditions, is famously revealing of the
distorting pressures of white historiographies of power. But whites
figure only marginally in her film. When the country boy goes off to
Harare in search of work and becomes a member of a street gang,
whites figure only as people to rob, and even then the old white woman
whom the gang intimidates is an impoverished pensioner rather than a
multinational fat cat. All the holders of power in the film are black—
prison warders and governors, dangerously well-qualified black women
counselors or personal assistants to employers. It made me think that
more or less despite themselves, whites in Zimbabwe are being given
the gift of powerlessness.
And I share the sense of relief expressed by the Dutch editor of
Chenjerai Hove’s Shebeen Tales.27 In his prologue Jan Kees van der
Werk describes encounters in two different bars in Harare in 1991. At
the luxury Sheraton Hotel “two whites in short trousers that are too
long ask me whether I am enjoying Rhodesia and whether I think
Salisbury is a beautiful city.” But at the populist Terreskane Bar he
meets an ex-guerrilla, trained by Yugoslavs and Russians; bar girls; boys
in pretend karate combat. At last he is approached by a drunk. “Don’t

26 An engaging example of a postcolonial white diary of a trip in Africa is Carlotta

Johnson, Endesha Polepole: Drive Slow Slow (Newcastle: Roger Booth, 1994). Johnson and
her husband returned to East Africa for a six-month sabbatical. She says that she “feels
abused” by being called mzungu, “white.” It is “a way of being categorised, of being fit into a
box by race, by colour. Mzungu was a way of naming the stranger, the outsider. It is as limit-
ing as the use of black as a way of defining an individual in our countries. I feel the term
carries so many values, so many events of history, of inhumanity and horror. I can’t escape
this reality” (p. 62). After meeting “so many good people along the way,” she is learning to
“keep things in proportion. Black and white. I hope I can erase the fictions—unreal
abstractions, useless indicators. I have new ways of classifying. 13,000 miles in all, slept in
about 63 different beds, and how to name all the people we met along the way” (p. 91).
27 Chenjerai Hove, Shebeen Tales (London: Serif, 1997).
268 journal of world history, fall 1998

let nobody ever give you shit, man,” the drunk tells him. “You are a
Zimbabwean. You are a man.” Van der Werk tells us that “suddenly I
felt a lot less tired.” All of us white Africanists who have been strug-
gling to lay down the burden of power will know exactly what he
means.