Bulawayo Burning

by

Terence Ranger

This book sis designed as a tribute and response to Yvonne Vera’s novel, Butterfly Burning, which is set in a Bulawayo township in 1946. A unique and stylish contribution to the social history of African cities and Zimbabwean cultural life, Bulawayo Burning is an attempt to explore what historical research and reconstruction can add to the literary imagination. Responding as it does to a novel, this history imitates some fictional modes. Two of its chapters are in effect ‘scenes’ dealing with brief periods of intense activity. Others are in effict biographies of ‘characters’. The book draws upon and quotes from a rich body of urban oral memory.

I addition to this historical/literary interaction, this books is a contribution the historiography of southern African cities, brining out the experiential and cultural dimensions, and combining black and white urban social history. It is as vivid and dramatic as only Ranger can make it.

Terence Ranger is Emeritus Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, University of Oxford.

Contents: Introduction – Prelude: Bulawayo 1893-1930 – The Landscapes of Bulawayo – The First Fires, December 1929 – city versus State: 1930-1946 – Mr Black Bulawayo: 1930-1948 – The Feminisation of Black Bulawayo: 1948-1960 –Black Bulawayo Transformed – black Bulawayo Burns: 1960s – Poslude: Bulawayo after 1960 – Selected bibliography.

ISBN 978-1-77922-108-7

(Also published by James Currey, Oxford)

‘This is a history which carries within it the poetry of fiction, Yvonne Vera’s fiction, and in particular her Butterfly Burning, which with Ranger’s study of Bulawayo seems to be constantly in conversation.’ Liz Gunner, WISER, University of Witswatersrand.

‘In this latest study, Ranger has produced a remarkable history of Bulawayo, eloquently written and teeming with the exhilaration and tragedy that constituted the making of a colonial urban landscape.’ Brian Raftopoulos, University of the Western Cape.