Might it not be possible to enjoy our history and to celebrate at least some of the good that has come from it?

There are many beliefs about just what history is. JM Coetzee and many post-modernists argued that history, in many ways, is not unlike fiction. Their argument, if I can reduce it to a few words, is that history is a set of cosy stories we tell ourselves to justify current (normally pretty shoddy) behaviour. History, and the way it is told, is simply an ideological exercise. It is a narrative told by the winners.

Not far from this is what the philosopher RG Collingwood referred to as “magic”. That is a set of narratives or beliefs that give a society confidence about the present and the future.

The other side of the coin is that history is a story developed from a series of facts: Germany and Russia invaded Poland in 1939; atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the National Party won the 1948 South African election with only 37.7% of the vote, etc etc.

There is, no doubt, some truth to all of these arguments. But they all agree that history is about narratives. We now live in an age where history, constructed out of some facts, generally tells us that things in the past were bad. It tells us that this bad past is the main reason our current world is so stuffed.

Of course, one can’t deny that a lot of truly awful things happened in our past and that a great deal of this shoddy, genocidal and generally xenophobic, patriarchal behaviour is the reason for many of our current troubles.

However, what is truly strange about all of this, is that there are a group of people these days who see the past as entirely bad and themselves as entirely good. Can it really be that we live in an age of saints, while in the past there were only sinners?

The literary theorist Rita Felski has argued that we should be careful of falling into the trap of what she calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion”. That is, that works of literature are simply filled with a past that was generally bad, misogynistic, classist and racist. Is the task of theorists and honest readers simply to unravel just what a terrible person Jane Austen’s Lizzy Bennet really was? Bennet and Mr Darcy, after all, participated in an utterly awful colonial and patriarchal society which enabled them to live such a congenial and financially carefree life.

Read in Daily Maverick: “Why history matters: In which we break the first rule of modern journalism… and reply to the comments”

Felski cautiously notes that at least some of these concerns are true. But is this solely why we read literature? Do we also not read Pride and Prejudice because it is a cracking good read, written in jaunty style, with wit, humour and remarkable social awareness? Do we not read it because Lizzy Bennet is one of the most intelligent, single-minded women to haunt the pages of any book?

Yes, Felski suggests, literature is about understanding the questionable and bad social structures of the past. But it is also about that truly baffling mystery of aesthetics, about joy, heartache, love and its failure; the victory of the unlikely and marginalised, or conversely, the triumph of the wicked.

Visit Daily Maverick’s home page for more news, analysis and investigations

These days we have a very similar take on history to Felski’s “hermeneutics of suspicion”. Everybody in the past was bad. These days there are many prepared to write off even Nelson Mandela as a sellout. Personally, I think that not only is this kind of attitude untrue, it is also deeply damaging.

All our young hear these days is that things are bad: our government is corrupt, we have no water, no electricity, we are going into recession, the climate is broken, World War 3 is imminent, white people, who essentially run and own everything, are racist and Russia might well drop the bomb.

And we add to all of this that the past too was filled with a load of total swines, murderers and mountebanks. I should add that I too am part of the problem, having co-authored two books on just what a load of rogues, robbers and racists our country was filled with.

No single narrative

But this is not the whole story. History is not simply the repository of a terrible past. Just like today, there were decent people in the old South Africa. There were men and women who stood up for good, who suffered and triumphed and who made the world a better, more tolerable place.

Not only that, but history is a place where no single narrative can ever be sustained. Take the life of Henry Burton, a man who joined forces with the racist Afrikaner Bond in the 1898 election, the first minister of native affairs in South Africa and a man who voted for the Natives Land Act in 1913. He was a complete s**t, right? 

Well, no, he was also a friend of Sol Plaatje, a lawyer who took on the cases of black citizens who fell foul of colonial law, a thorn in the side of Cecil John Rhodes, and in later life he set up the Non-Racial Franchise Association.

The past, like the present, is a complicated place, and history contains within it many surprising twists and turns. It is a place filled with great joy and great sadness. It is not simply a place containing hatred, racism and misogyny. These things did certainly exist, as they do today, but good also came from the past.

Recently Fareed Zakaria discussed his seemingly confused attitude towards India’s colonial past. He wondered just how the incredibly repressive, racist and savage system that was colonialism could also contain within it liberal democratic values that he so admires. One of the mistakes that many people like Zakaria make is seeing colonialism as one system that contained one ideology, with one set of officials who enacted this oppression. This is simply not true.

Read in Daily Maverick: “What’s in a name? Twitter is an ideological battleground over the control of language”

The more one reads about colonialism, the more one finds just how there were deeply repressive, murderous right-wing men who dominated it. But on the other side there were passionate non-racists, passionate democrats and passionate peacemakers. Of course, these men and women rarely won the argument and were generally defeated by the forces of oppression and the robber barons like Rhodes.

But good people did exist and many of them did good things. We simply can’t continue talking of the past as a sinful and malicious place. It is really doing us and our young no good. To see history as simply a place filled with evil offers us no hope… And if ever there was a time when we needed hope, it is now.

We must fight against the words Shakespeare put into the mouth of Mark Antony: “The evil that men do lives on, the good is often interred with their bones.” We must begin to reawaken the memory of the good, while still being able to acknowledge the evil. DM