SA schools ignore the enduring legacies of apartheid in their history curricula, creating an illusion of racial harmony, an academic from the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics (LSE) says.
Chana Teeger, a top academic at the International Inequalities Institute, who is the associate professor in the department of methodology, said history taught students lessons that undermined political action aimed at undoing the legacies of the past.
“But erasure and denial of the past are not the only ways to suppress historical claims and reproduce privilege. In fact, such overt strategies are often easy to identify and critique. In contrast, my research in two racially diverse SA schools shows how the past can be recalled while its legacies are ignored,” she said in thoughts first published by the LSE this week.
“Apartheid is very much on the curriculum in SA. Across the country, grade 9 students (aged 14-15) confront their country’s history of legalised racism in a mandatory high school module. But, as I sat in on hundreds of hours of classes and spoke with 170 students and teachers, I learnt that the past was taught in ways that distanced it from young people’s everyday lives.”
News24 reported in December that white pupils were more unlikely to study history in the senior grades than their black African counterparts, with a recently released report by the department of basic education (DBE) showing that only 11% of white candidates chose the subject in grade 12, compared with 32% of black African learners.
In the short run, teachers can create an illusion of racial harmony... but, in the long run, these lessons reproduce unequal power relations and block efforts at real equality
— Chana Teeger, London School of Economics academic
Work is under way to make history a compulsory subject. The department appointed a ministerial task team (MTT) in 2015 to advise the minister on the possibility of offering history as a compulsory subject in the further education and training (FET) band.
The department in November told legislators that there would be an introduction to archaeology, which would provide an introduction to the development of pre-colonial African society as well as an introduction to world history.
The draft FET curriculum for grades 10-12 would reintroduce pre-colonial epochs with a “greater depth and complexity”.
According to the DBE, the curriculum would include archaeology and palaeontology, with “a focus on global history moving away from the parochial, Eurocentric and Cape-centric history of SA”.
Teeger said learning about apartheid in school did not help students make connections between the racist past and present and that instead, history lessons taught them that the past was over and that the present was all about equality of opportunity.
“Much has changed since the days of apartheid. Yet, even as a democracy, SA is one of the most unequal countries in the world. And that inequality remains highly racialised — so much so that whites’ average earnings are more than three times those of black Africans,” she said.
“This is why so much is at stake in teaching about histories of oppression. In the short run, teachers can create an illusion of racial harmony, as students learn not to talk about racism in the present. But, in the long run, these lessons reproduce unequal power relations and block efforts at real equality.
“Righting historical wrongs means looking squarely at past injustices — including how these continue into the present. Erasure and denial will not make inequality disappear. Indeed, they will allow it to continue without challenge. For the past to truly become history, we must first recognise all the ways that it is still present.”
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