Children's Literature after Apartheid: Examining 'Hidden Histories' of South Africa's Past

Abstract

Jochen Petzold has studied English and German language and literature in Freiburg and Eugene (OR). He currently holds the position of ‘wissenschaftlicher Assistent’ (assistant professor) at the University of Freiburg (Germany) and teaches courses on English literature and cultural studies. His Ph.D. project on the use of history in contemporary South African fiction, Re-imagining White Identity by Exploring the Past, was published in 2002. He has published articles on South African writing, on Joseph Conrad, and on Victorian adventure novels. His current research projects focus on English poetry from the eighteenth century to the present.

During the apartheid years in South Africa, the country's history was highly contested ground, since it was one of the fields on which white minority rule could be either consolidated or contested. As the black activist Steve Biko—who died in police custody in 1977—pointed out, "colonialism is never satisfied with having the native in its grip but, by some strange logic, it must turn to his past and disfigure and distort it" (44). While in the 1970s South Africa was officially no longer a colony, the change in international legal status had not changed the quasi-colonialist subjugation and exploitation of non-white South Africans.¹ And the white apartheid system tried to maintain its power partly by controlling the discourse about the past.

The historian Leonard Thompson has coined the term 'political myth' to characterize a "tale told about the past to legitimize or discredit a regime" (1), and he identifies a number of such myths that were the basis of the official (i.e. white) version of South African history. For example, one of the most important myths of this kind was the myth of the 'empty land,' a myth that referred primarily to the Cape region at the time of the first white settlements in the seventeenth century, but also to the land the white trekboers claimed after their 'Great Trek' in the nineteenth century. It is obvious how this myth tries to establish a historical claim to the land by proposing that white settlers occupied 'empty land' when in fact neither the Cape region nor the 'Transvaal' were unpopulated when Europeans arrived (cf. Thornton 70 and Walker 301).

The official version of the past was clearly a form of 'intentional history' ("intentionale Geschichte," Gehrke 262), told specifically in order to highlight white bravery and ingenuity and to downplay the role of non-whites in South Africa's past: "Hence the history of the black man in this country is most disappointing to read. It is presented merely as a long succession of defeats" (Biko 44).² History was used to justify the roles assigned to blacks and whites in the apartheid system by making it seem 'natural' for the white minority to rule the country. Based on the insight that history is "the storehouse of experience through which people develop a sense of their social identity and their future prospects" (Tosh 1; see also Rüsen 6), the apartheid system tried to influence how whites and non-whites conceived of themselves and what possibilities they saw for their futures. It is hardly surprising that this attempt at controlling the future by manipulating the past began in schools, where South Africa's children were taught the official version of the country's history. In the early 1980s, Elizabeth Dean, Paul Hartmann, and May Katzen conducted a study of South African history textbooks, and they conclude that

on the whole the view of the past offered by the textbooks is consistent with, and frequently actively supportive of, the continuation of present racial policies. There is little doubt that the history syllabus is designed partly with the intention of cultivating attitudes favourable to the maintenance of the system of racial inequality.

(102)

Furthermore, they point out that in "all essentials, the texts for blacks offer no less ideological support for apartheid than those for whites" (104).

Clearly, then, history as a school subject was used to maintain the political status quo. But school textbooks were not the only medium that...