Corporation
of New York
Vol. 2/No. 4
Spring 2004
The History of South Africa: A Twice-Told Tale
Alternative Pathways to College
Centers of Education in Russia: The Case for CASEs
An Interview with Marta Tienda
Also in this issue:
Two Schools Collaborate and Students Succeed
Past Issues:
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The History of South Africa:
A Twice-Told Tale
“In order to understand South African history and culture,” Netonane says, “these kids have to understand what was hidden before. Previously when [Afrikaners] built this monument, they thought South Africa would stay like it was… But now they have lost power. We have taken over. And we are free also to know. This was for their children and their children’s children. Now it is also for us.”
A true test of the monument’s sustainability will begin in 2004, when black students and their teachers will have a new, nearby alternative. The government is building a vast new heritage site just next door to the Voortrekker Monument. Spanning 129 acres and expected to cost around $50 million, the high-tech heritage site is called Freedom Park. The ambitious project will cover more than three billion years of the country’s history—beginning with the genesis of early life forms and later hominids, some of which eventually evolved into modern homo sapiens, tracing evidence of humanity’s evolution found in South Africa. It will then focus on the presence of native ethnic groups as well as the arrival and consequences of European colonialism.
It is being built on the adjoining mountain approach to
Pretoria, juxtaposed, geographically and philosophically, to the Voortrekker
Monument. The first phase, celebrating anti-apartheid freedom fighters,
is due to open on the 10th anniversary of South Africa’s new democracy
in 2004, with completion due four years later. President Thabo Mbeki has
called Freedom Park the most important
project of his government.
Dr. Mongane Wally Serote, a former Deputy Minister for Arts and Culture, heads this project, and he is unapologetic about the role Freedom Park will play in reclaiming African history from what he calls “centuries of distortion.”
“The
African voice has been silenced and trampled upon,” he says, “For
much of the history that Europeans wrote, they said Africans were not
human. We have to accept as part of our history that we were a colonized
people. There is nowhere in the world where colonialism did not destroy
what it found when it arrived. On top of that, we had the apartheid system.
There’s a very deep desire in the nation for Freedom Park. I hear
that in the churches and other places. People pray about how they want
Freedom Park because it will reaffirm that they are human beings.”
Clearly, in a country stratified for centuries by strict gradations of ethnicity, this approach has sparked controversy— all of which surfaces in the many public hearings held across the country to solicit opinion about the park.
Serote has heard objections from groups ranging from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which objects to plans depicting traditional African slaughter of animals, to some church leaders who claim plans to portray ancient African spiritual practices are an endorsement of paganism.
By far, the loudest challenges being raised are to Freedom Park’s
unabashedly Africanist point of view, and leading that charge are Afrikaners.
As Opperman puts it, “There are many Afrikaners who feel marginalized,
who feel their heritage and culture is being neglected, vandalized, stolen.
And there is an outcry that something must be done about it. But we don’t
have a choice.”
Afrikaners will have a choice about whether or not to visit Freedom Park, and Serote isn’t optimistic about the prospects. “I am sure for some time there will be a serious problem with Afrikaner attendance,” he says. “It’s not nice to be told that you did terrible wrong. But I am more hopeful about their children.”
Serote has met with Opperman to discuss ways in which they can cooperate. So far, that has led to a decision to build a road linking the Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park. Serote adds that the meetings have also enlightened him about Afrikaner feelings. “I sat down with General Opperman and suddenly realized I had no inkling of the meaning of the Anglo-Boer war for Afrikaners,” he explains. “And the pain is very deep. I now have a personal understanding of that pain, because I want them to have a personal understanding of my pain.”
On the Wrong Side of History?
The opposition to Freedom Park’s African perspective isn’t
only voiced by Afrikaners, but also by leading intellectuals, both in
South Africa and internationally.
When he travels around the world for consultations, Serote says he’s surprised to find “strong opposition” from some of the leading white international academics and intellectuals, whom he declined to name. “They feel threatened by it. For many of them, the very phrase African history, or African historian, is a contradiction in terms,” he suggests. “Their view of the African role in history is as cargo. But we can’t go on being told that architecture was founded in the West and that we were living in trees and didn’t design any shelter. We can’t be told that we made no substantial contributions to science, medicine and the arts. We have to liberate ourselves from this thinking. The same kind of leading intellectuals and philosophers who distorted our history in the past are the very ones who are objecting to an African voice today.”
Perhaps surprisingly, some of the objections to the Africanist interpretation come from some black South Africans. It is not at all unusual for many South Africans of all races, including blacks, to ask visiting foreigners, “Have you been to Africa?”
This tendency on the part of many blacks in South Africa to refer to Africa as someplace else, and Africans as somebody else, is not surprising to Serote. “This results from 360 years of isolation,” he says. “Under apartheid, blacks were not permitted to travel, or even read about the rest of Africa. Nelson Mandela’s first arrest was for going to Algeria. If I had been caught with a copy of [late Ghanian President Kwame] Nkrumah’s book, Africa Must Unite, I would have been imprisoned by law.” Serote is referring to the fact that Nkrumah’s PanAfricanist clarion call for the liberation and unification of the African continent was among the most suppressed of books in apartheid-era South Africa, but any political book even vaguely thought to contain themes of African empowerment also qualified for banning.
Nowhere is this Africanist/European divide over historical interpretation more sharply contested than in academia, which is struggling under the direction of the government to come up with a new history to teach in the schools and universities.
The fissures were evident at a meeting of the South African Society for History Teaching (SASHT), an organization of university history professors. Out of about 50 participants, five were black, a proportion reflected nationally in the numbers of white versus black university historians.
Rands Afrikaans University professor Martin Templeman was the founding chairman of the organization. “We are definitely the losers in this process of historical reinterpretation,” he says. “At the moment, I give history lectures in the Afrikaans language in only about 10 percent of my courses, at a university created for Afrikaners. I have no shadow of a doubt that within 10 years, there will be no Afrikaans lectures whatsoever at this university.”
Templeman acknowledges that he first got his appointment at the university because he was a supporter of the National Party, which created apartheid. “It was preordained that white Afrikaners should get jobs at this particular institution. If I applied now,” he says, “I wouldn’t get a job, even if I was the best, because I’m white and Afrikaans. We’re on the wrong side of history and there’s not much I can do about it.”
Professor Johann Tempelhoff is the director of Potchefstrom University’s School of Social Sciences. A longtime member of the Society of History Teaching, Tempelhoff shares the Afrikaner angst about the “new” history. “What gives offense,” he says, “is the fact there are frequent derogatory references to Afrikaners in many of the texts now being produced.”
Tempelhoff sees a connection between the Afrikaner “marginalization and demonization” and the apparent growth of armed right-wing activity among whites. In October 2002, several bombs exploded in Soweto and a nearby village. Within weeks, two dozen members of a right-wing Afrikaner organization called Boeremag were arrested for the bombings, which destroyed several buildings and killed three people. Prosecutor Pieter Luyt contended that there was “considerable” support for the Boeremag among Afrikaners in the country. According to witness statements, there were people nationwide who hid and supported some of the alleged terrorists when they were still wanted by the police.
While critics like Tempelhoff think the revision of history is going too far in the wrong direction, black historians are certain the process is too slow in reclaiming African history.
Chitja Twala, a professor of history at the University of the Free State, is one of those who expressed impatience at the SASHT conference. “We don’t have a balanced history, even today,” he says. “The basic problem is the very same people who distorted our history are now trying to rewrite it.”
Nonetheless, Twala is optimistic that eventually, what he calls a proper balance will be achieved. “We must mix the old and the new,” he says. “We must have a starting point. We cannot expect this to be done in three years. The history project will take us somewhere. And other people will take it from there.”
Dr. Mgwebi Snail, the head of Vista University’s History Department, disagrees. “Africans are just shadows under the table of history written by Europeans,” he said. “It’s still the same so-called white liberals who are rewriting our history. It’s like making a cat the head of the university of mice. The type of history being taught in South African schools today—that is being hammered into the minds of black children—is meant to instill feelings of inferiority. At conferences like the SASHT meeting, black historians are the smallest minority—hardly 5 percent. Whites also control academic journals. There are cliques and they are closed to black historians.”