Past has a different future
Show up horrors of slave trade, says scholar on a new look at our history
● South African history textbooks downplay the barbarism of the slave trade during colonial times and glorify Charles Darwin, who was the “father of evolution” but also a racist.
And Nyakane Tsolo, who was at the forefront of the Sharpeville march in 1960, should be included in the history books.
These are the views of Thando Sipuye, a history master’s student at the University of Fort Hare, who has welcomed a decision by Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga to phase in a new history curriculum over seven years.
The Sunday Times has been told there is a strong possibility that history would be compulsory in Grades 10 to 12.
The report of a team appointed by Motshekga to investigate this possibility will be released on May 31 in Pretoria during a roundtable discussion on how the new history curriculum should look.
Sipuye said most of the theories of racism in the 19th and 20th centuries “were rooted in the ideas of Darwin”, who established that all species of life descended over time from common ancestors.
According to Sipuye, in the Grade 10 history textbook, Focus History, the inhumane brutality and outright barbarism of the slave trade is largely watered down in telling the story of the Maafa [the transatlantic slave trade].”
The destruction of ancient African civilisations, including Kemet (Egypt), Kush, Songhai and Timbuktu have been left out of the curriculum.
Sipuye, as well as writers of history textbooks, agreed that Robert Sobukwe, the founder of the PAC, rarely featured in the textbooks.
Said Sipuye: “The attempts to project the history of the country as largely an ANC history of struggle must be cautioned against. The process of rewriting the curriculum must have an inclusive African-centred approach.”
Gengs Pillay, a history textbook writer, said the old history curriculum in 2010 was written by “a group of white liberals in the Western Cape”.
He said: “In the Grade 10 curriculum they had only one line on the role of Indians — ‘indentured Indian sugar industry’, and I took offence to that.
“In Grade 10, the only reference made to Mahatma Gandhi is how he influenced Martin Luther King jnr in the civil rights movement in the US. Gandhi is recognised across the world as an international peace icon but in South Africa he’s absent in the curriculum.”
Pillay said there was an overemphasis on the Holocaust in the history curriculum.
“You are living in Africa, in South Africa, but you don’t know about the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906, the land act of 1913, segregation.
“You need a think tank of all races to come up with an inclusive curriculum.”
He said Sobukwe’s role and that of the PAC in the liberation struggle did not feature prominently, and neither did the coloured community.
“The role of Cissie Gool [a Cape Town political activist] is totally absent. In Grades 10 to 12 the history of the Khoisan should be elevated.”
Michelle Friedman, a history textbook writer and senior history teacher at Sacred Heart College in Johannesburg, said the Holocaust should not be excised from the curriculum because it was “seminal”.
She said that “quite a large section” on the role of the trade unions had been removed from the curriculum.
“There’s a small section on the role of Cosatu in the 1980s but trade unionism as such is no longer there. Even the history of Indian resistance in this country, which was quite large in 1995, is now almost a footnote.”
Friedman said it would be “a shame” if, in resistance history, the ANC was “glorified”.
Peter Kallaway, retired emeritus professor of the University of the Western Cape, said: “Essentially, I think [the proposed new curriculum] is about delivering on a ‘patriotic history’ that glorifies the ANC’s role in history, much the same as the apartheid history curriculum glorified the role of the NP [National Party] and Afrikaner nationalism.”
Karen Horn, a lecturer in the faculty of education at Stellenbosch University, said South Africa’s participation in World War 1 and 2 should be included in the new curriculum.
“South Africans from all spheres of society made huge sacrifices in these wars and most learners are not even aware that South Africa participated.”
Barry Firth, the president of the South African Society for History Teaching, said changing the curriculum was a “timeous intervention”.
“According to research, before 1994 textbooks were dominated by Afrikaner nationalism.
“Post-1995 textbooks reflected an African nationalism.”
He said a topic that could be explored in more detail was that of Mapungubwe.
147 668 the number of matric pupils who wrote history last year
84 the percentage of matric pupils who passed history last year
You are living in Africa, in South Africa, but you don’t know about the Bambatha Rebellion
Gengs Pillay