Don’t stop the process of Africanisation and decolonisation of South African school history

On 29 May 2024, South Africans cast their votes in the country’s general elections to elect a new National Assembly as well as provincial legislatures. The outcome of these elections resulted in the ANC losing its national majority for the first time in the country’s democratic history.

Because of this, the ANC was forced to engage in coalition talks with other political parties, including the DA, in order to remain in government. Out of this a new power-sharing government was formed consisting of 11 of the 18 parties represented in the National Assembly. This new coalition government has since been dubbed a government of national unity.

Of interest to us are the potential developments within the Ministry of Basic Education, which now has a new political leader, Siviwe Gwarube, of the DA. We are interested in this ministerial change because, for those of us in history education, we find ourselves in a fragile and crucial moment.

The South African CAPS school history curriculum remains under contestation, with some (us included) holding that while the school history curriculum has been reformed several times since the 1990s, it still holds a Eurocentric lens, and propagates a history where Europe still holds too much historical presence and power. 

This view led to an important development in history education back in June 2015, because the same Ministry of Basic Education, under the political leadership of former minister Angie Motshekga of the ANC, called for the establishment of a History Ministerial Task Team (HMTT). The team was tasked with reviewing the current CAPS school history curriculum, to make it more African-centred and to consider introducing history as a compulsory subject from grades 10 to 12.

While the debate about whether school history should be made compulsory remains unresolved, a new curriculum has been in development since 2015.

In a country where the emphasis in education has been and continues to be on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects, we were particularly optimistic when the ministry focused on school history, especially in relation to its proposed African-centeredness.

This approach would underpin the proposed compulsory school history curriculum. The HMTT report from 2018 strives to work towards an African-centred curriculum to locate us (pupils and teachers) in the African continent and push back against Eurocentric lenses.

However, with the DA-allied minister at the helm of the Ministry of Basic Education, we are particularly worried about the prospect of the HMTT work being derailed or frustrated, especially as the new minister identified the revision of the curriculum as an immediate issue.

Our concerns centre on the DA’s ideological and/or philosophical orientations and policies on basic education in general (with its promotion of pro-private American Charter Schools and the voucher system), and school history in particular, rather than on the new minister as an individual.

These are ideological and/or philosophical orientations and policies that are inconsistent with the viewpoint expressed in the HMTT Report of 2018. 

Without dragging ourselves into a political space, given that we are neither politicians nor political scientists, we would like to make an appeal to the new political leader of the Ministry of Basic Education not to let the moment of political change undo the important work of 10 years and counting by the HMTT.

The hope for the new curriculum is that history will be less alienating to all pupils, especially African pupils, and will allow us to identify ourselves within African geographies and knowledge structures.

Many South African scholars of history (of) education, especially those who identify themselves as decolonial scholars, such as Lindsay Wills, Paul Maluleka and Lesiba Tumishang Ledwaba, Sarah Godsell, Vuyisile Msila and many others, have continuously warned about the danger of leaving a Eurocentric curriculum in place.

They have also justified why there is a need to decolonise and Africanise education in South Africa, especially the school history curriculum. All their appeals and/or scholarly arguments have been consistent with the calls made by the students in 2015-16 during the #MustFall protests about the need to decolonise education in general in post-apartheid South Africa.

Failure to address continued Eurocentric curriculums runs the risk that African students continue to be dehumanised in the very classroom that has the potential to teach humanity, that they are removed from their contexts in the very space that offers potential to help us grapple with the relationship between past, present and future.

Read more: Clinging to monolingual education undermines SA’s rich linguistic diversity

Thus, we are of the view that it is important that an African-centred school history curriculum be realised in our lifetime to rehumanise those who have been dehumanised within the historical record, as well as to have a school history curriculum as a site where all pupils and teachers can see and feel themselves in the curriculum and in the work they are meant to do.

This focus on redress is long overdue. South Africa’s basic education system is still endeavouring to address the aftermath of a colonial and an apartheid-era curriculum and history syllabus in particular, which had deliberately and profoundly distorted our perception of Africa. This skewed view of our continent and her people persists and needs to be desperately and substantively corrected.

History is a conduit for a critically engaged and informed population – if it is openly engaged with as a subject that is decolonised and Africanised. If history remains a static, remote list of facts where even South African content is alienating because of the lens through which it is presented, we lose all the potential benefits from a subject that demands a nuanced combination of emotional and analytical engagement with what makes the world. DM

Dr Paul Maluleka is a lecturer at the School of Education, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). His activism, research, supervision and teaching are located along the fault lines of Africanisation, decolonisation and queer theorisations, especially where school history is a concern.

Dr Sarah Godsell is a senior lecturer at the Wits School of Education. Her research focus is on decolonising the history classroom, both in secondary school and in the university.

Paul Hendricks is a lecturer in history of education at the Wits School of Education. His research interests include teacher resistance, arts education and alternative pedagogies.