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SADTU's proposed 'Nationalist history curriculum' dangerous given complexities in historiography

The nationalist history curriculum approach is always under scrutiny everywhere around the world and for a good reason. It is perfectly natural and sane to want the “best education” for children. When it starts to become a little more irrational, even potentially problematic, is when politicians begin associating the education of children with their own agenda.

This article seeks to respond to those who value nationalist history as the proper content of South African history curriculum drawing from Munslow (2002) who argues that “history and the past are substantially different”.

It is then fitting for this article to first start by defining the concept of nationalism, since the question it seeks to address is centered on this concept. According to Kohn (1994, pg.10), “nationalism is first and foremost a state of mind, an act of consciousness”. Expanding on this, nationalism can also be defined as being loyal to an ‘imagined community’; it creates a sense of common identity even among people who have never met one another and probably never will.

Drawing from those definitions of nationalism, surely to a certain extent those calling for a nationalist history curriculum in South Africa could be seen as advocating for ‘unity’ amongst South Africans. But whose histories will be used to unite this ‘imagined community’? From which perspective (or even school of history) would that history be written from? These are some of the questions that one prefigures in their mind when a nationalist approach to history is mentioned.*

And such questions come to mind simply because South Africa is a diverse society with diverse histories of its people and with that a shared ‘common identity’ amongst South Africans becomes problematic to establish. And one of the reasons as to why South Africans are not ‘united’ people yet, might be because of two dominate nationalisms (African nationalism and Afrikaner nationalism) that revolve around each-other like binary star and far outshines the weak light of a confused ‘South African nationalism’ that this nationalist view to history might envision.

Why then is it important for those who value a nationalist approach to history or anyone for that matter who proposes an alternative approach to history curriculum to consider Munslow’s (2002) argument that; “history and the past are substantially different?” What is proposed by this argument is that, the ‘past’ refers to historical events that took place and cannot be relived, whereas history is a construct of those historical events that takes the form of narratives written in present times by historians with their own view of the world informed by certain schools of history and the environment they live in. All of this challenges those who value a nationalist approach to history in South Africa to first explore how history is created before they can engage with the past (Munslow, 2012:10).

Exploring how history is constructed would entail getting to grips with aspects such as; interpretations, representations, who the author is (his/her influences and how s/he views the world) and so on which ultimately will result in a historical narrative.

For Munslow (2002:18) a historical narrative is “that written composition of historians that encompasses their source-based data founded on certain principles of selection and organization”. Carr (1987), Jenkins (1995) and White (1999) concur with the fact that history is a narrative discourse. However any narrated historical account would have an assembly consisting of series of historical events into a narrative with a plot, which for White et al this process is known as ‘emploment’.

Bearing that in mind, which historical events in a South African context would best fit and represent a nationalist view of history that is inclusive of every South African? Because if history is to be viewed as a narrative discourse of the now absent past, Munslow (2002:18) argues that it raises questions about objectivity and truth-acquiring character of history. Is there even objectivity in history since the historian is the one preselecting which evidence or ‘traces’ as White (1999) coins it, that will be interpreted and represented in a certain way and eventually produce a ‘grand narrative’?

This notion of history being a discipline informed by narrated discourse(s), rather than it being solely an empirical or analytical discipline as Carr (1987), Jenkins (1995), Munslow (2002) and White (1999)  argue expose one to a world of history that is complex, fascinating and exciting at the same time. And a nationalist history curriculum to a large extent would actually limit learners from exploring that world if it introduced as an approach to history that we ought to teach. The reason for this is that a nationalist history tends to only focus on political/elitist history (South Africa context heroes of the struggle) rather than other types of history such as; social history, labour history, economic history, feminist history, gender history, local (or micro-history), etc and this is not to say that an elitist approach to history is less important, there ought to be a balance to the histories that learners are taught.

Before the significance of all these histories that nationalist history curriculum might suppress if introduced are discussed, it is imperative for this article to discuss the pivotal role played by the Annales school established in France in the 1930s and how that movement contributed into making history a rich discipline that we know today. Peter Burke (cited in Iggers & Wang, 2008:257) praises the movement as having produced “a remarkable amount of the most innovative, the most memorable and the most significant historical writing of the twentieth century”. And the school achieved this by  studying or constructing history through learning from other (mostly) social science disciplines such as; economics, sociology, psychology, geography and so on” (Tosh, 2010:66). Why then would we want to teach our learners a history that is one sided when we can offer them the rich histories that schools like these contributed too?

Another school that played a major role in shaping historiography and needing to be acknowledged is the Subaltern school (1982) whose work is wildly known as the Subaltern studies. According to Iggers & Wang (2008:285), “the Subaltern studies were to concentrate on the subordinated parts of the population, the lower castes and primarily the peasants who had been generally ignored in the conventional elite historiography of the Indian nation”. Their focus to writing ‘history from below’ (social history) was their way of saying though an Indian nationalist history is admirable, it should however be an inclusive one and the same should be done or at least considered in a South African context.

Social history on the other hand is another area of historical study. It is a way of looking at how society organizes itself and how organizations changes overtime. It can also be seen as an approach to history, rather than a subject. Looking at Bozzoli & Nkotsoe (1991) and Harries’ (1994) introductions to their books respectively, both introductions seems to agree on the fact that the history or experiences of people on the ground (ordinary people) need to be documented if we want to understand the complexities that societies with particular reference to south Africa went through. History for them is not only about the elites. This kind of take to history can be deemed as a revisionist approach to history (Bundy, 1986). And Revisionist historians seek to rewrite history in order to include everyone in what will be the ‘grand narrative’.

Bozzoli & Nkotsoe (1991) for example, believe that the purpose for social history especially in South Africa is to understand the consciousness of the women of Phokeng (or poor people in general). And by this understanding it is then that we are able to deeply understand the struggles of these women, which informed their agency to challenge the structures imposed by the ruling minority class (Marx, cited in Bundy, 1896). This in turn also allows us to understand how these struggles actually shaped their own realities.

Harries (1994) study of the Mozambican migrant labourers could be viewed as a study of social, cultural and labour history. These histories and other histories are important in that they are a part of that absent and unknown past that we seek to reconstruct and understand. So it is very important for our history curriculum to reflect them. According to Tosh (2010:04), “all societies look to their collective memories for consolation or inspiration”. If this claim by Tosh (2010) is to be believed as a truth, surely a nationalist view of history in South Africa that only aims at documenting and producing histories of certain individuals (elites/struggle heroes) would be exclusive and sense of collectivism would be lost.

In terms of cultural history, Iggers & Wang (2008:274) claim that there was a shift in 1970s in historical studies from the analysis of institutions to spheres of cultures, often described as the ‘cultural turn’ which took different directions. Culture was now understood anthropologically in terms of the behavior of human subjects in a society. This could be seen as a postmodernist approach to history. The subaltern studies believed that “we must again respect cultures that have lived with open-ended concepts of the past or depended on myths, legends, and epics to define their cultural selves” (Iggers & Wang 2008). This call by the Subaltern studies was aimed at making historians to also consider and refer to pre-modern ways of thinking, away from modern rationalist and secular outlooks.

There is also feminist history that might be suppressed if a nationalist history curriculum is introduced. Feminist historians looked at or examined the role played by women through history and this could be seen as a revisionist or poststructuralist approach to history. The feminists’ ambition to see the role of women being integrated into academic and mainstream history however came with problems. Downs (2004:3) states that “the problem of integrating the ‘women’s story’ soon prompted feminist scholars to challenge the traditional contours of their discipline by posing new and difficult question: is women’s history merely an ‘innocuous supplement’ to existing narratives, or does the integration of these new stories and perspectives demand that the analytic structures themselves be reshaped?”. Like social historians or labour historians, feminist historians desired to highlight the agency that women had, which was informed by structures imposed and the consciousness they had towards the structures.

However this field of history then developed into a field that is known as gender history and the reason for this is that feminist scholars soon realized that women cannot be studied outside the structures that were imposed or in isolation to men. So gender history integrated both sexes and was a way to locate the experiences of women in a broader context, while arguing for the gendered nature of all human experience and not simply that of women (Downs, 2004:4). Iggers and Wang (2008:280) claim that this led to a distinction between a biological definition of woman in terms of her sex, and her place in a broader social and cultural framework.

Seixas (2004:111) argues that “the entire corpus of social history, ‘history from the bottom up’, women’s history, and labour history, which occupied the bulk of professional historians’ time and energy over the past thirty years, might be discounted as trivial”. This would be the case if we adopt a nationalist approach to history in South Africa that only focuses on the ‘heroes of the struggle’, because this approach does not recognize all other approaches to history as important.

The work of Edward Said on the other hand indicates that a nationalist history curriculum could be beneficial to a society if it aims to unite the historically oppressed groups. But how will this work in a democratic South Africa? Where the majority of the population was oppressed by the minority prior to democracy? Surely Said’s thinking if transported into the construction of a nationalist history curriculum in South Africa with its focus perhaps solely on heroes of the struggle (which are not representative of every South African) could lead to more divisions within a society that is already divided.

Said’s Orientalism exerted an immense influence on postcolonial discussions of the 1980s. And according to Iggers and Wang (2008) “he recognized the role of capitalist imperialism in the treatment of the non-Western world, but assigned a much greater role to ideas and particularly to scholarship, than Marxists did”. His conceptions were informed by Nietzsche and Foucault. He saw language (or knowledge) as something that is never neutral but an instrument of power.

Transporting the notion of language (or knowledge) as being an instrument of power into the South African context raises serious questions about what exactly the nationalist history curriculum does seek to achieve. Does it seek to unite South Africans or just mainly divide them even further? The orient in how Said sees it appears to be an ‘other’. Relating that to a nationalist history curriculum in a South African context ‘othering’ and divisions is what we shall achieve as a country if such a curriculum is imposed.

Post-colonialist historiography that Said can also be categorized needs to be taken into account before proposing and any approach that a history curriculum should take. Iggers and Wang (2008:281) claim that “the Western progressive idea of history was seen as part of an ideology which viewed the societies and the cultures of the non-Western world as inferior and thus provided an ideological legitimization for colonialism and imperialism”. This kind of notion is a product Said’s Orientalism. What this means is that, there no return to pre-colonial political structures especially in Africa and the educational system followed Western models. So a history curriculum in South Africa should seek to include pre-colonial histories of its people and the nationalist history curriculum which is being proposed seems like its intended at ignoring these histories.

With all that said, how then do we teach history that is inclusive of everyone? Seixas (2002) suggests three approaches that we can use to teach history that inclusive and balanced. Those approaches are; enhancing collective memory, disciplinary and the post-modern approach. Enhancing collective memory proposes that we teach history that is the ‘best story’ in that it inclusive in its approach. Disciplinary on the other hand, seeks to teach learners the core historical skills that will result in learners being critical thinkers and people who tend to ask thought-provoking questions a lot. And the last approach which is post-modern, would then allow learners to think critically about how fields of history have been created by historians themselves and what purposes do these fields actually serve. It looks at interactions between power and knowledge which could be related to Said (1978), Nietzsche and Foucault.

Seixas (2004:111) clearly states that “we can’t teach everything that happened in the past, nor can a historian write about everything that happened in the past”. This is true however it does not mean that we should have a history curriculum that is not balanced in terms of the histories we desire to teacher to our learners. Inclusivity and multi-perspectivism in our history curriculum is what we ought to strive for rather than a curriculum that seeks to marginalize and ‘other’ others in the process.

To reiterate what this paper tried to discuss and explain, there are problems with a nationalist history curriculum being introduced in schools and there are some things that are not included or overlooked that should be….or shouldn’t be. If we deny the wider and rich view of the world to our learners, we run the risk of producing a generation completely lacking in understanding and tolerance of one another and the world at large. Surely this is not what we are aspiring too as a nation.

In concluding it is safe to state that though all approaches to history curriculum are problematic in their own way, a nationalist history curriculum should not be something we aspire to introduce to our schools as it will lead to more harm rather than good. This article has presented the complexities that come with the history discipline that ought to be taken into account when drafting any history curriculum, especially one that is nationalist its approach 

Reference list

Bozzoli, B. (1991) Women of Phokeng: consciousness, life strategy and migrancy in South Africa, 1900-1983. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemaan; London: James Currey.

Bundy, C. (1986). ‘New directions in South African History.’ Remaking the Past. Cape Town: UCT department of Adult Education & Extra-Mural Studies.

Carr, E. H. (1987). What is history? 2nd ed. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin

Downs, L.L. (2004). Writing gender history 2 ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic

Harries, P. (1994). Work, culture and identity: migrant labourers in mozambique and  South Africa, c.1860-1910. .Portsmouth, NH: Heinneman

Iggers, G.  and Wang , E, (2008). A global History of the  modern historiography. Harlow, England: Pearson Longman

Jenkins. K. (1995). On “What is History”. London and New York: Routledge

Munger. E, S. (1967), Afrikaner and African nationalism. London: Oxford University Press

Munslow, A. (2012). A history of history. London & New York: Routledge

Munslow, A. (2002) Where does History Come from? History Today. 52, 3:18-20 ProQuest Central

Seixas, P. (2000). “Schweigen! Die Kinder! Or, Does Postmodern History Have a Place in the schools?” In Sterns, Seixas and Wineburg (Eds.). knowing, teaching and learning history. (Pp. 19-37) New York and London. New York University press.

Seixas , P. and Peck, C. (2004). “Teaching Historical Thinking”. In A .Sears & I. Writght (Eds.), Challenges and prospects for Canadian social studies (109-117). Vancouver. Pacific Educational press

Tosh. J. (2010) The Pursuit of History: aims, methods and new directions in the study of modern history. 5ed. Harlow: Longman

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