I don't remember much from history at school, but one thing that stuck in my mind was that the Zulu ruler, King Shaka kaSenzangakhona, apparently used to make his impis dance on patches of thorns to harden their feet in preparation for battle. Haakdoring or enkeldoring, I’m not sure, but it lodged itself in my head, if not my foot. Not much else did, but that’s OK because while the world and its assembled commentators don’t have much to say about the future, there’s no moving on from the past. Increasingly, the present is a repackaged past. Welcome to the great encore.
We’re living in a time of a great reckoning, an accounting for the racism, colonialism, imperialism, sexism and ageism of the past, and sometimes of the present. Glorious histories have become shameful chapters of conquest and plunder. It’s a time of revisionism, complete with turning points and crossroads and sea changes. It’s #metoo and Black Lives Matter.
So if you don’t know your history, it helps to watch the news to catch up on the past.
Want to know about the Berlin airlift of 1948, when the Americans flew tons of food into Germany to get around the Soviet blockade? If so, watch CNN to see the Americans scrambling out of Afghanistan, desperate to meet the new Taliban rulers’ August 31 deadline. US president Joe Biden cited the Berlin airlift to provide some historical context to what the Americans are doing. Except that Berlin was the setting for an act of great heroism and fortitude. Kabul? Not so much, but if you’ve got a few planes in the air, those who can’t tell a C-54 from a Boeing C-17 might also confuse Biden with 33rd US president Harry Truman, and perhaps he does so himself on occasion.
I haven’t checked our history syllabus lately, but I’m fairly sure it’s moved beyond the African warriors chasing each other into Zimbabwe and Swaziland and Lesotho; the soft-footed Brits poncing about in garish battle regalia and setting up tea kitchens in the veld; the flinty-eyed Boers, forever gnawing at a strip of biltong and swindling people out of land with their endless treaties that set the stage for further wars, and then Cecil John Rhodes mincing onto the scene in a waistcoat and pince-nez and stealing the show from under their noses. It was a right romp, and to crown it all, this pantomime of greed and buggery on a grand scale was given a Hollywood ending, with the emergence of a shiny new republic in 1961, but only after they’d got rid of that smarmy Anglophile Jan Smuts. And that was history, as handed down by the Transvaal Education Department. You better believe it!
An obvious problem with learning from the past is whose past are we talking about here? Like old friends who have fallen out, whose version leading up to the final schism is one to believe? Is one of the parties always the sinner, and the other sinned against? They say history is written by the victors, but doesn’t that make it even less reliable as a true account of what really happened, and why?
Some time during high school, we were offered the choice of a few more years of history or French, so I chose French. Both subjects, I can confidently say with considerable hindsight, are non-starters commercially speaking, although a working knowledge of French comes in handy in the streets and markets of Yeoville nowadays.
Some of my unessential past came to mind when I read a news story about parents complaining that their little ones are wasting time learning history, and that this frivolous exercise was even more difficult to sustain with regular schooling now curtailed by the Covid-19 epidemic. What’s the point of learning about the Dutch East India Company, the parent groaned, and you imagine his little darling in the background urging him on. Concentrate on languages and mathematics, he said.
In a similar vein, the South African writer Herman Charles Bosman once deliberated in an essay on whether schoolchildren would be better engaged learning Latin or the character-building pastime of cardboard modelling. He had many good things to say about Latin, but after he’d set out the case for cardboard modelling, it was quod erat demonstrandum against Latin. Perhaps sensing that history could succumb to the same fate as, for example, learning Latin or the harpsichord, the history establishment has been hard at work, chiselling out a foothold in the economy, and seeking to hold the world to ransom with the claim that we will repeat the mistakes of the past unless we learn from them.
An obvious problem with learning from the past is whose past are we talking about here? Like old friends who have fallen out, whose version leading up to the final schism is one to believe? Is one of the parties always the sinner, and the other sinned against? They say history is written by the victors, but doesn’t that make it even less reliable as a true account of what really happened, and why?
The idea of history as a big, ready-made lesson from years gone by may be ludicrous, but it has sustained generations of those who gain from this fiction: namely the history establishment with its teachers and professors and textbooks and guided school tours of Isandlwana, and the politicians, for whom history is the canvas upon which they sketch further lies and deceit, often in the name of righting historical wrongs.
Unfortunately, politics (and by that I mean mainly the debilitating squabbles and acrimony that pass for political discourse) is impossible without history. There may be no ANC, for example, without the Land Act of 1913, which formally dispossessed Africans of their land; without Empire and the Boer War there may have been no National Party in 1948; without the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela and the banning of the ANC no 1994, and so on. The idea is to pick the lesson that suits you, and to discard the rest. Politicians thrive on easy access to the low-hanging fruits of history, as they set about “correcting the mistakes'' of the past and making their own new ones.
So as we flatfoot or tiptoe on the thorny ground of the past, the best lesson and the one valid thing to teach in schools is that history is primarily a contest of ideas about how we got here. While some interpretations of history may be more valid than others, there is no single truth waiting to be uncovered. It is, indeed, a harvest of thorns: tread at your peril.
Sunday Times Daily
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