TOM EATON | The ANC is rewriting history and once again history repeats itself

I don’t blame Angie Motshekga for sounding like a tin of expired ham slowly rusting in the back row of the Soviet Politburo in 1954. The human soul can only take so much punishment, and when you’ve helped waste as much human potential as she has, you must, inevitably, become so numbed that you stop hearing yourself.

Admittedly, the words she chose to use in Friday’s briefing, in which she provided an update on the new history syllabus to be introduced in 2024, sounded like something from Stalin’s personal porno stash.

According to the basic education minister, a task team was hard at work deciding on the “correct content” to trepan into the skulls of the youth, an important first step before the “major challenge” began, which, Motshekga said, “is around the rewriting of history”.

“Even the task team said: ‘You can’t present the current history as it is’, so it has to be rewritten,” explained Commissar Lobotomy, before reiterating her hope that rewritten history be made a compulsory subject until matric.

Now I understand if this sort of thing alarms you. “Correct content” and “the rewriting of history” are the top two blocks on Jackboot Bingo, right before “Everyone looks sexy in brown sacks” and “It’s not torture if it’s re-education”. Any second, it seemed, Motshekga was about to reveal that children who failed matric would be erased from grade 1 class photos.

At the risk of sounding naive or cavalier about the ANC’s worst urges, however, I must admit that I don’t find this type of language particularly chilling when it comes from the ruling cabal.

Yes, the ANC is very good at rewriting history: it takes real skill to erase the PAC from Sharpeville Day, but it takes a special type of revisionist flair to erase Sharpeville Day altogether.

But carrying out a vast and sinister programme of brainwashing would require commitment, talent and a coherent plan, and the ANC hasn’t had any of those for years. In modern SA, a communist plot is the bay where Blade Nzimande parks his Mercedes.

Which is why, when Motshekga talks about a new syllabus, all I hear is that the vast, clanking, crumbling machine of government has sucked up another few dozen consultants, shovelled them into committee rooms, doused them with money and mission statements, and has now belched out a plan to move the tiny, flickering headlamp that is high school history a millimetre in another direction, leaving the past 100,000 years as unexplored as ever.

Which is why, when Motshekga talks about a new syllabus, all I hear is that the vast, clanking, crumbling machine of government has sucked up another few dozen consultants, shovelled them into committee rooms, doused them with money and mission statements, and has now belched out a plan to move the tiny, flickering headlamp that is high school history a millimetre in another direction, leaving the past 100,000 years as unexplored as ever.

I’m certainly not suggesting things were better in my day. The history I was taught in matric seemed designed to serve only three purposes: training future lawyers to memorise entire books by rote; turning my writing hand into a shrivelled, cramping, monkey-like claw; and keeping us too overwhelmed with lists to ask why we were learning about the US in the 1930s and not SA in the 1980s. Even now, I suspect a great many middle-aged South Africans know more about the US Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930 than they do about the 1913 Land Act in this country.

The trouble is, I’m not sure that what’s replaced that system is very much better. Of course, the story of apartheid is finally getting proper coverage and it is a good thing, at least in theory, that history is being used as a means of teaching children how to piece things together for themselves, using evidence to develop critical insights.

But without the bigger picture, I can’t help feeling that this type of sleuthing can only produce confusion: as police procedurals have taught us, it’s all very well matching the gun to the bullet dug out of the wall, but unless you know why the shooter was in the motel, and why they’d left their small town in the dead of night, and why their ex had stopped talking to them, you don’t know very much at all.

I understand that it’s naive and impractical to hope for a history syllabus that shows children the glorious immensity of it all. Between political electioneering, academic trends and the relentless realities of teachers at the chalkface, high school history can never be more than a fleeting image glimpsed through a train window.

Still, I can’t help wondering how much healthier and happier our world might be if children were exposed to the vastness and reassuring familiarity of the past 10,000 years; discovering that people are always people and that history is the story of how we try to make the best of that exalted, infuriating, bloody and blessed condition.

At the very least, it might help ease some anxieties about the present, which, children are constantly being told, is the worst place ever.

I understand why they believe this mantra of despair. When you don’t know that you live in a world in which genocide was, for most of human history, the assumed and natural outcome of war, with enslavement considered a form of mercy; if you don’t have the perspective to understand how miraculous laws and non-lethal childbirth and anaesthetics and antibiotics and schools and fire brigades are, then yes, today could easily feel like a very nasty place indeed.

But it is impossible to know the worst of the past and still see only the worst in the present.

Even a present containing Angie Motshekga, task teams and the ANC.