Everyone stands to benefit from learning history. It’s hard to imagine any objections to this statement. What follows is not a refutation of the government’s objective to make history a compulsive subject at schools.
It is more like a caution or a reflection on states of affairs across the country.
It is a consideration of where we have been, where we are and where we want to be in the future.
These should not come as a surprise to anyone.
Let us dispense, first, with the crude binary of whether we should either teach history or emphasise vocational training, science and technology.
Nobody will dispute the fact that a knowledge of history cannot fix a broken lintel, build a bridge or a road, fly a plane, develop new medical technologies or repair a computer.
Actually, we should probably not assume that there are people who would imagine that we have the ability to produce shoes, clothes, homes and food through poetry recitals, brilliant oratory skills, mystic incantation or balletic brilliance.
There are delusions great and small that run through society.
We have to face up to the fact that as a county, our past (our history) has a very powerful influence on the present and the future depends heavily on the decisions we make in the present.
Viewed this way, we can trace a direct line from the past to the future.
It should come to no surprise that we have to understand where we come from to know where we may be heading.
This brings us to the first of very many problems with the teaching of history.
Where and when does history start? Whose history do we teach? Which aspects of history should we focus on? Is there more than one history? It is no great revelation to state that because of our iniquitous past we are a terribly fractured society.
This is something that everyone over the age of 25 should know, by now.
It is also common currency that most adults over the age of, say, 30 or 35, probably learnt different histories at school.
Some people may remember a glorious past of military might, national pride and power – and are quite unable to see the history of people they dispossessed or vanquished.The best example of this blindness (and self-righteousness) was evident in Barack Obama’s first inaugural address as US president.
Drawing a direct line from the European settlers who colonised north America to himself, as present day leader, Obama said of settler colonists: “They packed up their few worldly possessions and travelled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops, and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip, and ploughed the hard earth.
“For us, they fought and died in places like Concord and Gettysburg, Normandy and Khe Sanh.”
And to present day citizens he said: “Let us mark this day with remembrance of who we are and how far we have travelled.
“In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river.
“The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood.”
Full of pith and with flourishes of drama (“snow was stained with blood”), Obama erased the history of indigenous Americans.
Here was someone whom people would describe as the most powerful man on earth, hailed a saviour before he saved anyone, but who would deny the history of everyone who was around before the arrival of settler colonialists.
He would, unwittingly, we should assume, echo the sentiments of the British historian, Hugh Trevor Roper, who in 1963 proclaimed that Africans had no history.
“Perhaps in the future,” he said, “there will be some history to teach. But at the present, there is none; there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa.
“The rest is darkness . . . and darkness is not the subject of history.”
For Roper and Obama, there is in Africa and in North America, only European history.
Then there are Europe’s “others” whose own history was denied and supplanted by the history of the more powerful.
If, indeed, the spoils go to the victor, then the victor has power over the writing of history.
We now have the power to write our own history.
It is our duty to include, for coming generations, the history of all South Africans.
It is an unenviable task to weave together the histories of 55 million people, who all live within territorial boundaries voluntarily or involuntarily, yet share histories separated by conquest, division, exclusion, pride and prejudice into 10 to 12 language and cultural groups. A good starting point would be to avoid making the same mistakes as those who previously wrote our histories, who believed that theirs was the only history that mattered, and left the rest of us on desolation row.