ABSTRACT
Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe by Terence Ranger addresses recent research interests in informal, invisible, everyday resistance in the context of peasant colonial history. Terence Ranger's work will be of immense interest to those interested in rural class relations, national liberation movements, and Zimbabwean agrarian history. Ranger's treatment of peasant consciousness, on his understanding of the term, is skilful and makes prominent the neglected issue of invisible, informal everyday peasant resistance through Zimbabwean history. Ranger very clearly distinguishes peasants from teachers, storekeepers and other businesspeople whom he now refers to as 'petty bourgeois' or 'rural middle class'. Ranger is clearly aware of the value that migrant labour can have as a strategy for accumulating capital for investment in farming. Ranger accords primary explanatory power to the peasant-guerrilla ideology for effective peasant mobilisation in at least the two-thirds of Shona-speaking Zimbabwe. The importance of differentiating commitments to beliefs is underlined in Ranger's discussion of their relationship to nationalism.
