Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 4 | The History of South Africa: A Twice-Told Tale, page 5

Thandi Macgai is the head of the history department at Job Rathebe. She’s old enough to have taught the subject under the apartheid government. “During the years of apartheid education, it was quite difficult to teach history,” she says. “We were monitored by the principal, who would walk around to see what we were doing. I remember,” she continues, “using the book Animal Farm to talk about the liberation struggle. Then I was in trouble. I was warned on a very serious note.”

Despite the vastly improved academic environment today, many students just don’t care about history, Macgai says. “Our youth are into money and music,” she notes. “I observe it with my own children.” It’s a problem cited by many teachers and students themselves. But, in a strange dichotomy, the teaching of history in school also faces discrimination from the government even as it tries to reinvigorate the topic. One of the main educational tasks that the new government focused on after it took power 10 years ago was to reverse the decades of policy that prevented Africans from learning skills and trades, so much emphasis has now been placed on science and math courses designed to accelerate the development of workers.

The result has been that, even among many teachers, history has become a kind of dumping ground. Soweto high school history teacher Malopotsa Malepu says that when teachers advise students on what courses to take they send the “slow learners” to history classes.

Eighteen-year-old Tshepiso Kachelenga seems to understand why that is. “The other day I told my friend I was doing history,” Kachelenga says. “He laughed at me because he said history won’t help me get a job. He said history is about old people. They are dead.” Sixteen-year-old Penelope Moyila shares similar experiences. “Most students don’t like history,” she says. “My friends think I’m stupid for studying it.”

Despite this dim view, a visitor to the history class at Job Rathebe finds the students abuzz with excitement. Teacher Lucky Mabasa is passionately engaged with the subject of history as he divides the class into teams that compete for answers to historical questions concerning conflict, tolerance and globalization. The students say that they find Mabasa’s history classes exciting and stimulating, leading some of them to rush home to share the day’s lessons with often illiterate parents. However, when a visitor asked the students how many thought that studying history would help them get a job, only one raised a hand.

The Pretoria Boys School is about as far as you can get from Soweto’s Job Rathebe. It sits on many acres of well-tended gardens and fountains. John Illsley, the head of the history department, describes the school’s origins as “British colonial. Its traditions are very much English public school,” he says, adding, “In many ways, we’re more English public school now than English public schools back in Great Britain.” Illsley, like all teachers here, wears black lecturer’s robes during school hours. While the number of black students has risen in the 10 years of democracy, whites still represent more than 60 percent of students.

Illsley is strongly critical of the process of curriculum revision being directed by the Education Ministry, calling it “largely politically motivated. I think the present government is making the same mistake as the apartheid government in using history for a particular ideological purpose. There is definitely an agenda to push, an Africanist point of view—maybe even Marxist,” he says. “And I have been very critical of that.” Illsley also criticized “the hugely self-congratulatory theme the government is pushing in contemporary history, meaning the struggle against apartheid. It’s being overdone.”

Illsley says that process “doesn’t affect the history we teach here, because we won’t tackle it until we have prepared properly for it. If we go by the book, we’ll have to considerably revise what we teach. The year 2006 is the deadline.”

Even among these much more affluent students, Illsley says there is an aversion to studying history in favor of more commercial courses. “There’s a hugely vocational decision-making process that goes on here with students and parents in terms of what their kids should study,” he says. “Even boys who enjoy history ask, how is this going to help me?”

Illsley confirms the view of many other teachers and students that there is a particular aversion among white students to study contemporary—meaning apartheid—history. “There is an audible groan in the class when they hear we are about to deal with it,” he says. It’s a kind of sullen resentment, just below the surface, of having to go through all this. There’s not a helluva lot to be proud of in that period for white South Africans.”

On the other hand, according to Illsley, the black students, the children of the emerging business and government elite, seem very receptive to the subject. “Black pupils have always been more politically aware than white students, and they still are,” he says. “Under apartheid, whites were sheltered from information and knowledge about what their government was doing. So the problem is that black and white pupils view the issue totally differently. In some of my classes, that has become open in terms of the tensions you can see developing. That’s a major problem.”

Phillip Johnson seems an exception to the examples offered by Illsley. A white 17-year-old, Phillip expresses genuine appreciation at having studied apartheid history. “Since we studied it a few years ago,” he says, “I feel strongly against racism. It’s not until you study it that you really understand it. By raising the issue of mistakes made in the past, we get a chance to change the future. We are building tolerance, and I feel that I do need to help the country, and be a part of it. We have something special that not all countries have. Our country is more diverse than anywhere else,” he says, perhaps summing up many of South Africa’s challenges, as well as its most promising resources, in a few well-chosen words. “I definitely think we are on the right road.”

Kenneth Walker, who currently runs Lion House Productions, a South African strategic communications firm, has had a distinguished career as a journalist. In the U.S., he worked for ABC News, covering the White House as well as the U.S. Justice Department and also served as a foreign correspondent. Before that, for 13 years he reported for The Washington Star newspaper, which assigned him to South Africa in 1981 where his work earned several of the most prestigious awards in print journalism. In 1985 he won an Emmy for a series of reports he did on South Africa for the ABC news program Nightline.