Teaching history’s dark lessons

The ministerial task team, who had the tricky job of persuading apparatchiks that history should be a compulsory matric subject, certainly say the right things in their report to the parliamentary portfolio committee. “Good history education,” they write, “promotes sympathetic and informed understanding of humanity and the human condition ...”

All true, and especially so in the hands of teachers who can walk vulnerable minds through the blood, mayhem, treachery and despair of a half-millennium of South African history and still, somehow, keep sympathy from boiling over into rage and its cousin, feverish denial.

Regrettably, there is no shortage of examples of the uses and abuses of history in shaping our winters of discontent. But maybe the task team has offered the Lucky Country a way out of the darkness.

It will need velvet hands and courage.

Teach the children about the hilltop, gold-smelting city state of Mapungubwe — but also about the obscenity of the Greefswald “corrective training” camp, built deliberately in its shadow, where frightened conscripts were sent in the 1970s to have their “differences” beaten out of them by psychopaths.

Teach them hard on the 1913 Natives Land Act, the stench of which has seeped into every discussion we cannot have about land. But teach them too about Mbokodo and Camp 32 in Angola, carrying the same evil as Greefswald.

Maybe even teach them that the last thing the Dutch East India Company wanted was to set up a refreshment station on the shores of an unpleasant, storm-lashed, wind-scoured bay under a flat-topped mountain. What they really wanted was the kinder anchorage at Mozambique Island, a few thousand kilometres up the coast, but their ships and cannons couldn’t winkle 50 Portuguese defenders out of their fort.

Teach them that history is not only about what was but also about what if. And there they might find some sympathy for the Lucky Country.