History twisted in set books

THE recent announcement that our schools’ history curriculum is to be “reviewed” simply means that South African history will be further distorted by Education Department authors intent on convincing youngsters that the atrocities of the past were grossly exaggerated and that King Shaka was a lovely guy to invite for tea and cakes.

I paged through my Grade 10 grandson’s history set book before he wrote his exams at the end of the year and was horrified to find that what I had learnt in school

70 years ago had been deviously twisted around, or blatantly ignored.

The set book states: “European traders and settlers had an interest in describing the wars of Shaka as bloodthirsty because they believed that black people were savages and that Europeans had come to Africa on a civilising mission. They had to justify their presence as intruders and, later, as masters.”

British settlers such as Henry Francis Fynn and Nathaniel Isaacs, whose books described the events of the early 1800s in Zululand and Natal, are accused of being “deliberately sensational”, while Donald Morris’s Washing of the Spears

(the definitive history of the Zulu nation) is dismissed as “not being historically accurate”.

The revisionist authors state that “these writers used their own imagination to create dramatic stories” and they maintained that Shaka’s reputation for brutality “was concocted by biased colonial-era white historians and unreliable

Zulu storytellers who turned the man into a myth”.

In addition to re-writing history, ANC cadres are re-naming towns and cities to reflect tribal lexicology, and altering street names to acknowledge black politicians, obliterating the names of white settlers and founding fathers.

While preaching a multiracial South Africa, the ANC will continue to brainwash children into believing that our history is fiction and not fact.