Bulawayo Burning: The Social History of a Southern African City, 1893-1960

Ranger exploits the techniques of a novelist. While sticking hard to the facts, he seeks to bring the city’s history alive by telling it through the eyes and ears of those who lived it. He succeeds magnificently and so consolidates his reputation as Zimbabwe’s foremost living historian. ― CONTEMPORARY REVIEW

A unique and stylish contribution to the social history of African cities and Zimbabwean cultural life. […] It is as vivid and dramatic as only Ranger can make it. ― BRITAIN ZIMBABWE SOCIETY NEWSLETTER

For scholars examining trade union politics and grassroots politics in other African cities, these monographs serve as models to follow in their use of primary sources and interviews. Scholarship on southern African cities has long led the way in developing the historiography of urban Africa as a whole, and these works show this is still the case in the early twenty-first century. ― H-NET (reviewed with URP’s The Urban Roots of Democracy and Political Violence in Zimbabwe Harare and Highfield, 1940-1964)