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
But there were some areas of South Africa’s history that Burton acknowledges the commissioners knew nothing about and did not examine. These included agreements between the apartheid government and the ANC to keep certain matters secret. One of those agreements concerned the identities of spies in both camps; another closed the veil on highly classified apartheid government operations in biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.
Bernard Magubane, an emeritus professor of anthropology who returned to his native South Africa after 27 years of teaching at the University of Connecticut, heads two of the government’s most important history projects: a commission working on an official history of the fight against apartheid and the Classification and Reclassification Commission, which is charged with determining which documents from that era should be declassified. Magubane says, “There were many side deals about secrecy. We may never find out what some of them were.” Surprisingly, though, Magubane supports the idea of maintaining silence on some issues. Why? “As someone once wrote,” he says, “in order to build a nation, you have to have selective amnesia. If those agreements had not been reached, today, the different factions in South Africa would be like Israel and Palestine. We would still be at each other’s throats.”
Teaching the “New
History” in Schools
Keeping future generations at peace with one another is a principle objective
of the attempt to produce a new history curriculum in schools. In effect,
the battle over different interpretations of history is being fought,
to a large extent, in South Africa’s schools. “History is
one of the memory systems that shape our values and morality,” according
to a report by the South African History Project. The exercise to reshape
the school curriculum is nothing less than an effort to produce new unified
citizens from a still racially stratified society. Carnegie Corporation
of New York has provided assistance in this area through support aimed
at helping to strengthen the teaching of history in South Africa’s
schools and expanding teacher training in this field.
Dr. June Bam is the chief executive officer of the history
project, an initiative of the South African Ministry of Education. She
proudly points to accomplishments over the past few years, including the
approval of a new history curriculum and the establishment of programs
designed to assist in the professional development of history teachers.
A Writing and Oral History Project has also been launched. And History
Roundtables have been established in each of the country’s nine
provinces to constantly review and improve the teaching and learning of
history, as well as the production of new history textbooks. The roundtables
also serve as networks that help history teachers share new ideas
and materials.
Despite the achievements, Bam acknowledges that even 10 years after the establishment of a black majority government in South Africa, students are still being taught what is referred to as “Boer History.” She says, “The fact that apartheid history continues to be taught is one of our biggest challenges. We just don’t have the capacity or funding to make the changes as quickly as we’d like.” Bam points out that South Africa still has many schools where classes are held under trees and still others struggle to get pencils and paper; in such conditions, grand new schemes of history don’t get a high priority, especially when the pressure is to produce rising test results. Many teachers, says Bam, just teach what they were taught. “It’s in their comfort zone and the teachers do what is easy in order to obtain results.”
There
are other problems, too. Sighing in exasperation, Bam recalls the intense
battles that preceded the selection of a new history curriculum for South
Africa’s primary and secondary schools. “There were blacks,
whites, coloureds and Indians. Everybody wanted their own interpretation
of history. There was even a faction that didn’t even want any mention
of apartheid at all. It was a big fight, but that has been resolved.”
As Bam indicates, the battle over the new South African history is not only one between blacks and whites. Indians and so-called “coloureds,” or mixed-race persons, also have a stake. For example, there is a dispute about the role of Mahatma Gandhi, who began his career of nonviolent activism in South Africa. His granddaughter, Ela Gandhi, still lives in the South African city of Durban and publishes a monthly newspaper. “I am doing quite a lot of work trying to put grandfather into history here,” she said. “They don’t have enough information about Gandhi in South Africa, so they don’t know that he developed his nonviolent movement here.”
Clearly, in South Africa, even the subject of Mahatma Gandhi can lead to contentious debate. When a statue of Gandhi was unveiled in Johannesburg recently, it unleashed an angry outcry from Africanists and even some Indian scholars. According to critics, Gandhi’s 25 years of activism in South Africa were never on behalf of, or in cooperation with, African people. His exclusive aim, they say, was to ease the suffering of the people of India.
Sorting out such arguments would challenge even the best-equipped and staffed schools in the developed world. In South Africa, where many schools lack textbooks and qualified teachers, results of the new approach to history are, to put it mildly, uneven.
Job Rathebe Junior High School sits in one of the most impoverished sections of Soweto, the group of teeming black townships just outside Johannesburg that proved critical in the fight against apartheid. The school, a collection of rundown buildings, regularly struggles to keep basic supplies. According to the principal, Peter Nhlapo, “Most of the students are very poor. And most live with their grannies or with single parents because of the toll HIV/AIDS has taken on the community. Most parents have no jobs and the students are supported by their grannies’ pensions. The free lunch we give here is often the only meal many of these kids get every day.”