How do we move ahead if it’s always yesterday?

History, opined the automobile magnate Henry Ford, is more or less bunk. Just over a century later, many South Africans, and an increasing number of young people, would appear to agree.

If there’s one thing citizens of all hues might agree on it is that we are still unable to agree on almost anything.

Having debunked history, the inventor of the Model T Ford went on to tell the Chicago Tribune in 1916: "It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today." An echo of this desire to leap free from the chains of our past can be heard from angry youths today.

However, the peril of wilful amnesia and ignorance is personified by Henry Ford, an obsessive, myth-peddling anti-Semite, quoted admiringly by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. The trap set by dismissing history as bunk is to imagine that you can escape the tentacles of the past. No wonder several of our more ultra-radicals have recently cited Hitler as a role model.

Is there nothing, as South Africans, we can agree on? Fiercely differing ethnic reactions to the death of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the saga of Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille or the furore ignited by former Springbok Ashwin Willemse’s claim of being patronised on TV suggest that from politics to sport there’s little common ground.

Last month Kallie Kriel, the CEO of AfriForum, claimed that apartheid was an infringement of rights rather than a crime against humanity. The latter, he stated, required mass killings — citing as a yardstick Hitler. His remarks elicited irreconcilably clashing viewpoints. This showed, once again, that even before squaring off over more current battles such as expropriation of land, we’re still mired in fighting over the past.

This paralysing conundrum emerges clearly from writer Christopher Hope’s new book, The Café de Move-on Blues, an account of a trek around the country, after which he concludes, "A quarter of a century into the new democracy, I found race and colour to be more divisive than ever. The war of words had never felt more violent."

Hope begins by observing dryly, "It’s not often you watch an angry crowd lynching a statue." By chance he was present the morning that the statue of Cecil Rhodes was removed from its plinth at the University of Cape Town. Afterwards, Hope travelled the length of the country visiting other assaulted statues, from Paul Kruger to Mahatma Gandhi, while listening to the wildly opposing views of ordinary South Africans.

It is a bizarre and often darkly funny tale. Inevitably, although describing the present, what he actually records are the ghosts of the past that still haunt us. "South African history is difficult to explore as a chronicle of past events because it is more like analysing a crime scene," writes Hope. "There are cover-ups, frightened witnesses, tainted evidence, and testimonies are riddled with subterfuge and deception." Later he remarks that, "historical analysis is very often war by other means".

Into this volatile mix has been thrown the suggestion that history should be a compulsory subject from grades 10 to 12. Perhaps tomorrow’s youths will be more receptive than their parents to becoming better informed and open to differing opinions, so less fixated on their own prejudices.

Designing a history syllabus in our state of mutual incomprehension, however, seems like an incitement to war by other means. Years ago, I attended a conference where historians described the shenanigans in 1997 over drawing up school history content, with secret late-night factional meetings and occasional resort to SA’s abiding dependence on censorship. Will it be different this time?

Designing a history syllabus, however, seems like an incitement to war by other means

When Hope visited Kimberley he found a poem that he’d written long ago framed on the wall of the local Transport Museum. This poem, a lament by an old white railway worker, had been banned by the ancien regime broadcaster in 1974 because of what it revealed about naked racist attitudes. However, in 1994 it was banned again by the "new" SABC — because its language faithfully reflected the way many white South Africans once spoke. Where else might a poem, behind glass in a museum, obtain asylum from changing state authorities?

The approach that any new history curriculum will almost certainly not take is to give students a sense of changing attitudes over time. The opposing, deeply entrenched beliefs revealed by the #RhodesMustFall uproar show that we still mostly prefer our history in black and white, reluctant to concede to other viewpoints or new information.

Prof Christopher Saunders, in his seminal book The Making of the South African Past, charts the shifting interpretations and even conflicting reassessments of leading historians.

Saunders recalled: "In 1853, the missionary David Livingstone criticised what he called the ‘Van Riebeeck Principle’ — the idea that whites were always right and had the right to dominate and subjugate others."

Over 150 years later, during the impassioned debates over "colonialism", it seemed that quite a few white South Africans had not progressed much beyond Livingstone’s ‘Van Riebeeck Principle’.

At the end of his journey, Hope concluded that many whites were "reverting to type", displaying "self-righteousness mingled with self-pity that reminds me very much of how we were — and how we are, all over again".

At the same time he meets angry young "cadres", who display a baffling paranoia, as though they were in danger from the Special Branch of old. Trying to explain their aims, he finds that they mouth clichés and speak in "vaporous abstractions" — like "The West" or "Whiteness" rather than whites — as if unwilling to come right out and say who is the real enemy.

Instead statues became the target. Once more, the past, in the bronze likenesses of dead white men, became a battlefield for the present.

The iconoclasts, mostly black, wished to tear down such graven images while the inconophiles, mostly white, defensively vouched for — and even venerated — those images.

Three decades ago, Hope wrote White Boy Running, a classic account of life under the old regime, where he remarked: "It is always yesterday in South Africa." The grim National Party tried to control everything by what he called, "the sacred book of incantations".

Today on radio or TV you hear an eerily similar ritual mangling of words, merely with different incantations. Demands that Rhodes Must Fall are not original, Hope reminds us. In the 1950s Afrikaans students at UCT called for the removal of that bronze arch imperialist.

So can we finally move on? Not if we continue to deploy history as a cudgel to beat our fellow citizens, proving it’s still yesterday in SA.

• Rostron is a journalist and author.