Proposed school history syllabus focuses on Africa as the main story, not a sidebar to Western history

The new school history curriculum, which shifts to an Afrocentric focus and is still in draft form, has caused much media commentary. As history education specialists (we all work, or have worked, in history teacher training at various institutions), we want to look at the curriculum draft for the possibilities it offers: both in its current form and in the ways that it could grow and improve.

Global Africa

An Afrocentric curriculum, which will displace the Eurocentric curriculums generations of South Africans have been socialised into, will help learners understand that communities and kingdoms in Africa were sophisticated, innovative and had global connections long before the colonial era. This is fundamentally different from what any school history curriculum in South Africa has ever foregrounded.

The paradigm shift in the proposed Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS) history curriculum is contentious because it refutes the lingering ghosts of the 1963 statement by British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who argued, “There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness.” In this history, Africans often only appear as victims or on the margins of history as disrupters of white society. Being educationally socialised into such a way of thinking about Africa and its history makes it easy to dismiss the proposed Afrocentric curriculum as anti-intellectual.

But the proposed curriculum is the outcome of nearly a decade of work by a ministerial task team of seasoned and respected academic historians, an archaeologist and history education specialists, who consulted widely while keeping abreast of the recent historiography on Africa, as well as the latest research in history education.

In learning an Afrocentric history, learners and teachers will be expected to engage deeply with a range of historical evidence, including written and oral sources, and archaeological evidence, to answer key questions. In short, learners will leave school able to think historically using historical evidence in an Afrocentric manner, while understanding that history is a construction with which one can engage critically and analytically, and while developing a sense of dignity, pride and an appreciation of the resilience of historical figures.

Pedagogic possibilities

The document offers perhaps the most space and the least certainty in terms of the underlying teaching philosophy, or pedagogy, which asks of the African-centred curriculum: is this a shift only in what is taught or also a shift in how it is taught? The document provides long introductions to its framing using archaeology and oral histories to understand the histories in the curriculum. This allows the curriculum to focus on the long past in a meaningful way.

But it also opens opportunities not completely borne out in the curriculum document with regard to language, sourcing and pedagogy. Language emerges as an immediate opportunity and challenge: how are we to realise the ideals of the draft curriculums if only one language is spoken in the classroom? The curriculum indirectly offers some historical sourcing solutions to this: oral histories (defined as oral traditions and oral testimonies), in their various African languages, allow indigenous knowledges such as izibongo, maboko (poems), diane (proverbs), dipina (songs) and iziduko to be considered as historical sources within the actual curriculum.

This brings indigenous knowledges meaningfully into the curriculum, but indigenous knowledges are not extensively used in the content sections or in the suggestions for assessment for learning.

Sources in indigenous languages will be important in living the oral tradition idea of the curriculum in the classroom, but it will require resources from the Department of Basic Education to make these sources widely accessible to all schools and will require intensive teacher training. This resourcing and teacher training would also have to engage issues of language and translation. Would sources be translated?

Or would history classrooms be able to become language learning spaces as well, where learners and teachers also become language resources, inviting learning across languages, and allowing learners to encounter the histories in different languages, where they are found?

Assessment concerns

The document is much richer in the material it offers on assessment than the previous iteration. It includes assessment for learning, as well as assessment of learning. This differentiates between tasks that learners do in the classroom to improve their learning, versus tasks learners do to measure their learning.

But there is no fundamental shift in the assessment of history as a subject, and most weight is still put on exams, which will measure source-based questions and written essays. If pupils can learn essays by rote and regurgitate them in the exam, in only English or Afrikaans, then this is missing an opportunity to ask them to practise learning to argue; to evaluate evidence, cause and consequence; to think ethically; and to put all this thinking together in a form that communicates their ideas.

The assessment has not been shifted to an African-centred approach, but part of the reason for this is that this new curriculum is the first to do this African-centred shift, and it is hard to shift assessment policies just for one subject.

An overdue course correction

University of Pretoria professor Siona O’Connell writes: “The new cur­riculum starts with Africa. Chil­dren will learn about ancient African civil­isa­tions not as curi­os­it­ies but as the main story. They will learn to read oral tra­di­tions, praise poetry and clan his­tor­ies as legit­im­ate his­tor­ical sources along­side writ­ten doc­u­ments. They will be taught to ask hard ques­tions about the past rather than simply mem­or­ise a received account.”

This has been critiqued as an ideological move. And it is. It is ideological in the same way that the previous history curriculum was ideological, and any curriculum document is an ideological document.

This is because choosing what to leave in and what to take out are inherently ideological questions. Neutrality does not exist in history any more than it exists in history education. But the pretence at neutrality is alive and well, and this can be seen in some of the public discussion around this curriculum. The pretence at neutrality is more dangerous than a clearly visible ideology, as it promotes the idea that there is one objective history that exists, and to tell it any other way veers away from the “truth”. Histories are all constructions, and each construction has an ideological underpinning, whether the historian who built it realises it or not.

What is important in this curriculum is that the ideology is clear and does not pretend to be anything else: the curriculum is African-centred.

It also necessitates discussions about the construction of history itself, in the way sources are presented and discussed, in what is treated as a source in itself. This treatment of sources supports learners in investigating the construction of histories themselves, and arriving at their own conclusions. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.