History must be taught, but will it all be true?

IN HER announcement that history would become compulsory through to matric, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga made a revealing comment.

She inadvertently showed exactly why this should not happen, at least not under the control of apparatchiks masquerading as educationists.

“This is not a propaganda exercise destined to shore up and buttress support for the oldest liberation movement in Africa, the African National Congress,” Motshekga said. “As a principle, we are against the rewriting of history for the sole purpose of achieving short-term political expediency.”

But the Basic Education Department will make sure that our history books reflect correctly the “true story”. Motshekga said history has a number of positive effects, especially in a country like South Africa, by contributing to nation-building, social cohesion and cultural heritage.

Any good history teacher, especially those of liberal mindset and of which the task team is dismissive, would mark down Motshekga for such triteness.

Similarly, an English teacher would question the ambiguities exposed in her aim to rewrite history not for the “sole purpose” of benefiting the ANC.

It is also important to understand the rich tapestry of cultural heritage. Again, that is especially so in SA, where the primacy of one culture over all others was, and often continues to be, asserted.

But those are not the primary aims of studying history. On the contrary, those are the propagandistic objectives of politicians, priests and parents and have little to do establishing a factual understanding of people and processes in the past.

It is inherent to those who want us to be malleable – the ideologues, both secular and theological – to want to simplify our understanding of the world. By reducing the complexities of the past, they can proclaim that this story, their story, is the “true story” and that the solutions they proffer are the logical ones.

In contrast, an honest interrogation of the past will challenge the preconceptions we have of our world, and of why we are as we are today. It is only through this unflinching process that we can conceive how we are likely to be tomorrow.

Motshekga touches on this – history as a bridge to the future – in her speech, but as is the way of the politician, clothes it in feel-good cliché. She said the “recalibration” of the history curriculum “must include the last bid attempt at the decolonisation of the African mind… We must without any apology remove the vestiges of apartheid’s sanitised version of history.

“In this equation, the apartheid rulers will henceforth be presented as folk devils. We want a nuanced approach to both the writing and teaching of history.”

Apartheid rulers as folk devils? Is this history? Anthropology? Or political scapegoating?

Wikipedia explains it perfectly. Since “folk devils” is Motshekga’s and the task team’s concept of a “nuanced approach”, it merits quoting Wiki at length.

Folk devils are “people portrayed as outsiders and deviants, and are blamed for crimes or other social problems. The pursuit of folk devils frequently intensifies into a mass movement (during which) the folk devils are the subject of… pervasive campaigns of hostility through gossip and the spreading of urban legends”.

“The mass media sometimes get in on the act to promote controversy. Sometimes the campaign against the folk devil influences a nation’s politics and legislation.”

What Motshekga proposes would have made perfect sense to apartheid’s rulers. The use of history as a chisel to shape pupils into “ideal” citizens that understand the “true story” was integral to the Verwoerdians’ messianic duty to preserve Western civilisation.

Move on a few decades and we have new messiahs, but the same megalomania. Now the goal is the “decolonisation of the African mind”, no less.

That’s no surprise, given where the ANC finds inspiration. The task team considered, among others, Russia, China and Zimbabwe to be textbook examples of history teaching and worthy of emulation.

In the face of practical difficulties such as a lack of qualified history teachers, it is not a given that this bizarre proposal will be implemented. But if this happens, there is a consolation to be found from our own nation’s history.

Even badly taught, as it was in the apartheid years, history has a potential to grip the imagination of a young person that is like few school subjects.

Decolonisers will eventually face what the Verwoerdians had to deal with: the “true story” will be examined by young people and be found wanting.

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