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In all parts of the world, the teaching of history, because of its important ideological dimension, tends to be influenced by social and political changes. The recent upheavals in South Africa have confronted the nation with so many new tasks that it is difficult to decide which of them should have priority. These tasks include the establishing of a new educational curriculum which, paradoxically, no longer includes the subject of history as such. Instead, history is subsumed under the human and social sciences. This article analyses the content of history text books from the primary level upwards and from the 1980s to the most recent publications. On this basis it attempts to assess the extent and limits of the changes within a political setting marked by a tension between the historic struggle for equality and justice and the constraints imposed by the functioning of a liberal economy within the context of the globalization of modern capitalism. The considerable changes in the content of these books seem to be based on two different theoretical models: the multicultural model embodied in the idea of the "rainbow nation"; and the notion of the universality of humanity, transcending the diversity of cultures and confirmed by the findings of archaeology. While these two models can be a basis on which to refute racial inequality, they are not used to combat other forms of inequality, in particular social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]