It was a classic image of apartheid: the black-and-white photo of a grim-faced, square-shaped Afrikaner vrouw glowering down at two small black kids at a protest demo in 1956. As I walked into the lecture hall, late, the historian blocked out half the photo on her overhead projector and explained how her publisher demanded that the white woman be cut out.
I was attending a conference at the University of the Western Cape, “Not Telling: secrecy, lies and history”. The academic inserted another photo: a black township. In the foreground, three white policemen were trying to restrain snarling Alsatian dogs. Here, the publisher of the school textbook ordered that the police and their dogs be exorcised.
June Bam, a University of Stellenbosch historian, resisted the demands for cropping. “Things gradually turned nasty,” she said. “Our intellectual work invested in three manuscripts over a period of 12 months suddenly disappeared.” When it was finally returned, after five months of wildly differing excuses, the authors discovered that “text had been rewritten to make conflict stories consensus stories”.
Such censorship was familiar in the bad old pre-liberation days. Yet this battle over school history content took place in 1997, three years after the first democratic elections, during what is now called “the new dispensation”.
History, in both schools and universities, is not only being glossed, it is being sidelined. Academics estimate that enrolments in history departments have dropped by as much as 60 per cent in the past two years. This can be seen as part of a global market-related trend: what is the profit margin in studying history? But several leading historians in South Africa think it is a deliberate political ploy by the ruling regime. Social harmony, sometimes at the expense of “not telling” or downright fibs, is the new orthodoxy; nation building comes before truth. It is usually said that history is written by the winners; however, in our case, for fear of upsetting our largely peaceful transition to democracy, it seems the government is prepared to live with some old untruths in order to let sleeping (apartheid) dogs lie.
Many schools, particularly poorer black ones, still rely on apartheid-era textbooks. For example, Active History, still in use for nine year olds, states: “The Hottentots also moved south into Africa when the Blacks and the Whites came to Africa.” This “empty land” lie, that blacks and whites arrived at the same time and therefore had an equal claim to settle, was one of the core justifications for apartheid. As for the 20th century, most old textbooks simply blank out black political movements or aspirations. History in Action, for 16 year olds, introduces apartheid only in the final paragraph, blandly concluding: “By 1948, the question of relations between White and Black dominated the political scene in South Africa. The Afrikaners in the National Party revived . . . segregation as an election issue under the new slogan of ‘apartheid’. This policy proved to be attractive to the electorate.”
We are, argues June Bam, undergoing a “process of collective amnesia”. In the proposed new school curriculum – “Curriculum 2005” – history will disappear as a separate subject for ages seven to 15, swallowed up by geography and “civic education”. The danger is that we are being asked not just to forgive, as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu urge; but also to forget, as the white old guard and ambitious new black elite wish.
There are a host of reasons for what one historian called “not just an aversion, but a positive allergy” to looking too closely at our recent past. The most obvious is that despite our momentous 1994 democratic election, the economic status quo remains largely intact. The whites have retained their financial clout and, despite apartheid being declared “a crime against humanity”, only a few foot soldiers have been put in the dock. The whites, in short, have got away with it (so far), and a black elite is now doing business with the former bad guys, some of them very, very bad. Memories suddenly become dramatically short. John Wright of the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, suggests that, while the apartheid regime had an interest in holding on to the past as a form of legitimation, the African National Congress is embarrassed by it, because of the potential for contrasting the ANC’s radicalism of the 1980s with its conservatism in the 1990s. He adds that, for now, the ANC prefers to “decommission” history and promote “heritage”.
In place of critical evaluation, heritage usually presents a fuzzy, unchallenging gloss; nostalgia packaged as spectacle and entertainment. Thus we have Shakaland, an “authentic” Zulu village, one of the most popular tourist destinations in KwaZulu-Natal. There is also Sol Kerzner’s hugely profitable Lost City – complementing his gambling complex, Sun City – a supposedly exotic and forgotten civilisation found deep in the jungle. Most recently, just opened in Cape Town, there is Ratanga Junction (“the most dangerous place in Africa”), an Indiana Jones-style colonial fantasy.
The viciousness of the apartheid regime is being played down in favour of a story about “the triumph of the human spirit”. This gloss allows South African whites, even those who supported apartheid, to bask in that glow of triumph. But June Bam sees only “a betrayal of democracy and transparency through conspiracies of silence, collective lies, denial of conflict and the promotion of tunnel-vision consensus”.
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