1. Historical Amnesia? The Politics of Textbooks in Post-Apartheid South Africa.
- Author
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Polakow-Suransky, Sasha S.
- Abstract
The issue of history, specifically history textbooks, has been at the center of South Africa's educational reform debates for years. One of the consequences of South Africa's delayed curricular reform is the continued use of apartheid-era history textbooks, which, among other things, deny European colonization and conquest and claim that whites and blacks arrived in uninhabited South Africa simultaneously. This study comparatively analyzes the content of old and new South African textbooks, emphasizing master symbols, number of pages devoted to certain historical events, and ideological implications of asserted facts. It also includes interviews with teachers at an all-white Afrikaans-language school, private and public integrated schools, and two public all-black schools. Students, professors, publishers, government officials, and journalists are also consulted. This paper explains that new textbooks have attempted to challenge the old apartheid narratives, highlighting migrations of blacks as well as whites. The most significant difference is in the treatment of separate development policy. Very little within these new history texts is written in Afrikaans. Though these new texts are a dramatic step forward, they are not available in many schools nationwide, highlighting the necessity of a more fundamental change in the curriculum. (Contains 24 references.) (SM)
- Published
- 2002