In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

61 5 from african history to african histories Teaching Interdisciplinary Method, Philosophy, and Ethics through the African History Survey Trevor r. getz introduction This chapter demonstrates that in the context of the end of apartheid, South african educators were pressed to critically examine how they taught history. in this historical moment, some South african educators adopted a methodology meant to move students away from the kinds of universal narratives about the past promoted by apartheid reasoning and into critical analyses that acknowledged multiple, coexisting perspectives of and from the past. They did so partly by bundling a toolbox of skills and ideas for students together with the content they expected them to learn and partly by featuring debates and participation as the means to explore these themes and skills. in particular, this chapter focuses on the introductory history course developed over the past two decades at the University of the Western cape (UWc) in cape Town, South africa. This course, and the process through which it was developed, can serve as a model that U.S. colleges and universities would do well to consider adopting on a more systematic level as part of the pedagogical repertoire. The emergence of the formal discipline and pedagogy of history in South africa parallels the overlapping development of British colonialism and afrikaner political supremacy in the 19th and 20th centuries, represented in turn by english -language British imperial histories and afrikaans-language volksgeskiedenis (people’s history). Outwardly antagonistic, but in many ways in agreement about the framing of both history as a discipline and the main narratives of the South african past, these two histories intellectually propped up decades of white rule 62 | Situating Africa (fuchs and Stuchtey 2002; grundlingh 1990; Saunders 1988). from the mid-20th century on, however, their consensus was challenged first by a liberal school of South african scholars and later by radical, Marxist scholars as well. Through their work—which attacked the historical arguments and narratives mobilized in support of white supremacy—these generations of historians played a valuable role in undermining apartheid’s founding myths. Yet despite the agitation of many antiapartheid historians, almost all South african students continued up until the 1990s to be exposed to blatantly eurocentric and white supremacist versions of the pasts in their primary and secondary school history classes. for black youths, specifically, these narratives were embedded in the schoolbooks of the hated Bantu education system. South african students remembered their teachers fighting back by having them cross out sections of their textbook and write replacement narratives in the margins and spaces between the lines. following the transition to multiparty democracy in the early 1990s, the newly elected african national congress (anc) administration and its supporters were frequently and deeply suspicious of the discipline of history and, consequently, professional historians (B. Magubane 2007). They also often perceived the liberal arts as less essential for the uplifting of the South african working class than “useful” disciplines such as engineering and commerce. When a committee to propose a transitional high school history curriculum was eventually constituted in 1994, it had no members who were either history teachers or professional historians (Lowry 1995). The interim curriculum they developed thus ironically continued a number of themes and approaches from the apartheid era. consequently, a new curriculum was proposed in 1996 that attempted to make a clean break from these themes. Yet once again, professional historians were underrepresented on its formulating committee, and as a result the new system abandoned the discipline of history entirely. instead, the past was to be understood largely through both “folk” and “national” heritage. The folk heritage strand was intended to promote indigenous african systems of understanding the past, especially those deemed “authentic” and those that focused on the antiapartheid struggle and its heroes. The national strand of heritage, meanwhile , was largely embodied in an official narrative of the “rainbow nation,” which emphasized the “miracle” of a new South africa by which nelson Mandela’s “special magic” fused together a society of “many cultures” (rassool 2000). at the same time, the broader national curriculum committee determined that South africa was to be depicted as a country reaching for the future rather than wallowing in the past. Both of these processes were aimed at steering away from critical confrontation with the country’s history rather than engaging it. This direction was only partly reversed by the minister of education, Kader asmal, who restored history as a high school elective in 2000 (South africa Department...

Share