Look to art to find the truth of our hijacked history

The question, when it came, was unexpected, especially since it was asked by a five-year-old between sips of a lime milk shake on a peaceful, sunny autumn day in the magnificent Company's Garden in Cape Town.

Her question was a version of the quote taken from a World War One recruiting poster that shows a young girl sitting on the lap of her uncomfortable-looking father and asking: "Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?"

The slogan has been recycled to suit the various conflicts that have plagued the 20th and 21st centuries and is one that forces those who have survived the currents of history to account for themselves, their actions or perhaps their inaction.

You may wonder what it was that provoked such weighty thoughts in the mind of a little girl.

It was art.

We had visited the exhibition 1910-2010: From Pierneef to Gugulective, which is on show at the Iziko South African National Gallery. It had been a spontaneous decision on my part.

Raised in a Philistine home, I have always found a sense of balance and tranquillity in museums and galleries, and wanted to share this feeling with my seven- and five-year-old daughters.

And while I have always felt and understood the capacity of art to confront, provoke and offend, I had forgotten its powerful ability to disrupt and offer a space for reflection.

For how else do we tell children about the past?

Where does the opportunity - free of the demagoguery of politics - present itself?

And there they were, David Goldblatt's photograph of a row of stoney-faced, tight-lipped senior members of the National Party and their grim-looking wives at the party's 50th anniversary celebrations in 1964, Jane Alexander's nightmarish 1986 sculpture The Butcher Boys - which represents the dehumanising effect of state-sanctioned brutality - and Alf Kumalo's picture of a young white policeman with his dog tugging at its leash, lips curled and snarling at two black women.

"Why mommy?"

Once before I had had to fashion a story, collapsing around 300 years of history to explain how good people like Nelson Mandela or Bram Fischer sometimes ended up in jail, a place both my children know is for "baddies".

And as I told the story, I wondered whether other South African parents were grappling with the same issues.

Should we forget the past, let bygones be bygones?

Should we tell the story so as to teach our children how to be good citizens and to warn them that those who don't know their past are bound to repeat it?

How do we instruct them to look out for the dangers, recognise the warning signs and find the courage to act when the time comes?

The thing about history is that it is as easy to hijack as a Citi Golf without a crook lock.

There is an interesting interaction in Douglas Rogers' memoir of Zimbabwe, The Last Resort. The book is the astounding story of Rogers' elderly parents and their Zimbabwean friends who manage to find ways of surviving that country's implosion.

The book, unlike some Zimbabwean memoirs, attempts to understand how and why political events in that country have run a specific course and how these have affected ordinary people.

At one point Rogers asks a former veteran of the war (who pronounces it "whoe") why it is so hard for Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF to accept defeat.

The soldier replies: "There are three political parties in this country but only one party has a history. Only one party went to whoe: Zanu-PF. How can you feel if some puppet party comes that has no history of whoe and wants to rule? We fought for this country, we cannot just give it."

That Mugabe's power mongering has nothing to do with history and everything to do with a parasitic elite seems to have escaped the soldier. Zanu-PF's version of history has blinded him.

American playwright Arthur Miller, in a 2001 essay titled On Politics and the Art of Acting, writes that dictators rise from collapsing societies and that the licence to dominate is handed to them.

It is not, he writes, merely their talent as performers and for wearing the accoutrements of power - whether these are fancy uniforms or Breitling watches and Armani suits - that seduce us into surrendering to them.

We surrender because we do not know our history.

When art goes against the politics of the time, it serves the interests of history: if we are to look for a more objective lens then it is off to the galleries we must go. For The Butcher Boys are still among us.