Failure to teach SA’s history cripples nation

About 10 years ago, a high school teacher made a throwaway remark that has stuck to this day: doing away with South African history from the syllabus was a mistake.

The tall, imposing man — one of the most respected (read, feared) teachers at our high school — looked pained when he made the comment. He taught us English and Afrikaans, but class discussions would on occasion veer into the political state of the country. At least that’s how I remember it.

The school in question, Port Alfred High, a former model C school, was relatively integrated at the time and it was not uncommon for our teachers to make fluid observations and statements.

We were the somewhat “fortunate” cohort who went to former model C schools after the first and second waves of black pupils had paved the way for us. So we were not treated like curious oddities who had to conform to a specific way of being to fit in.

In fact, I don’t recall being admonished for speaking Xhosa in class or being told that I had to wear my natural hair a specific way. Our teachers were more concerned with the immediate task of getting us ready for life after school.

The teacher who made the comment about history was a well-travelled, multilingual man who often took us into his confidence and related lessons to what was happening beyond the school’s four walls.

He was frank about the Nats’ political reign of terror within SA’s borders, their misguided aggression on the continent and the perils of conscription.

He would often drop a line or two about forays into South West Africa (Namibia) and Angola and regale us with short tales of how the South Africans had their backsides handed to them by Cuban forces in Angola.

He rued the fact that, as a former history teacher, he could not take us through the country’s immediate past to provide context about how it had arrived where it was. He lamented that he could not take us through the Codesa 1 and 2 negotiations, the unbanning of political parties and events that had unfolded before that in SA.

The teacher reckoned that scrapping South African history from the curriculum was one way to erase the sins of the immediate past and make our generation “forget” who had been the architects of the skewed socioeconomic nature of the republic.

We were taught history up to standard 7 (grade 9 these days). It was the standard bland fare of the Great Trek and the First World War and Second World War. We were taught how Israel came to be, for example, without it being spelt out how its establishment had affected Palestinians. It was the good guys versus bad guys narrative that is devoid of nuance and imagination. It was not thought-provoking stuff that we could relate to our reality.

Crucially, it taught us nothing about ourselves — we were edited out and rendered persona non grata.

HE RUED THE FACT THAT, AS A FORMER HISTORY TEACHER, HE COULD NOT TAKE US THROUGH THE COUNTRY’S IMMEDIATE PAST TO PROVIDE CONTEXT

The history we learnt taught us nothing about how it came to be that, in the same classroom, some pupils hopped into a warm shower or bath before coming to school, studied in well-lit rooms and came to school with full bellies.

That brand of history taught us nothing of how other pupils in the same classroom had to boil their bath water on paraffin stoves, washed in tiny basins, lived in leaky shacks and were not guaranteed three meals a day.

Historical context was the missing element and “elephant” in our classroom.

My teacher was right. Now we are left with the burden of having to explain to our former classmates why redress is a necessity.