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Date : 16/07/2003
Source: Ministry of Education
Title: Asmal: Launch of new learning material for history teaching in SA


SPEECH BY THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION, PROFESSOR KADER ASMAL, MP, AT THE LAUNCH OF NEW LEARNING MATERIAL FOR HISTORY TEACHING IN SOUTH AFRICAN SCHOOLS, Department of Education, Sol Plaatje House, Pretoria, 16 July 2003

Distinguished guests
Officials
Ladies and gentlemen

Welcome to the launch of the new history material for schools project. Taking place in the early months of the tenth year of our freedom, this event marks a special moment in the history of education for freedom from apartheid in South Africa. It signals the symbolic end of an era, but also points to the beginning of a journey through enabling our schools to explore our painful yet rich and fascinating history, both as a country and a continent.

The importance of developing a broader continental identity is central to our transformation efforts. Indeed, for our nation-building programme to succeed, the development of a new South African identity cannot occur in isolation from our identity as Africans. And for the first time ever, Africa has now been placed at the centre of our curriculum, which is reflected in our National Curriculum Statements for Grades R-9 and Grades 10-12, where there is an integrated focus on South Africa, Africa and the world.

As our President recently said,

"when we returned to our country after exile in the early 1990s we realised how little many of our people knew about the rest of the continent, because over many years we had absorbed an image of the African continent projected by a media that was relentlessly contemptuous of many things African."

This has encouraged feelings of superiority of South Africans towards other Africans, even amongst the oppressed in our country. Many South Africans are said to know nothing about the ancient centre of learning in Timbuktu, Mali, where there are books published on mathematics, astronomy and physics, as early as the 13th century. We do not know about Timbuktu's ancient mosque built of bricks, which is still standing after hundreds of years. We know little about the startling Makonde sculptures that speak of African creative activity in Tanzania. Many of us have not heard about Goree Island, which is just off the Senegalese capital of Dakar, from which African slaves were transported out of Africa to the Americas. Few of us acknowledge the great African intellectuals and philosophers such as Leopold Senghor and Sheikh Anta Diop. Nor are we aware of the historical places, which make us the cradle of humanity, in Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and even in our own country.

No longer should myths and stereotypes about Africa and its history be perpetuated. No longer should there be an absence of Africa in the world triumph. These notions are captured by the academic Rajani Kanepalli Kanth, who in Breaking with the Enlightenment (1997), argued that because Cleopatra was portrayed as white, her suitably pale image, seemingly granted us the wonders of ancient and mysterious Egypt, and indeed all the wonders of Africa's great civilizations - a popular image still in recently produced films.

Our ability to ensure the success of our curriculum transformation project is however dependent on the nature of the teaching and learning support material that we provide to our schools and this is precisely what makes today's launch so important.

To this end I would be remiss if I did not thank Unesco for giving us the license to reprint the General History of Africa Volumes 1 to 8, which we are producing for schools in South Africa. We will also distribute a supplementary book covering Africa since 1990 to the present, which has been written by imminent South African historians, as well as a Teachers' Guide to the volumes. This Teachers' Guide is particularly exciting. It includes classroom activities, historical and ionic artefacts of African history, a history methodology map and a political map of Africa. This material will be ready for distribution by February 2004.

The second project we are launching today is the South African History Online electronic classroom, which has developed the latest chronology on South African history. The online classroom has an impressive selection of specialist chronologies, the largest listing of biographies as well as detailed information on key issues on South African history.

This History Online classroom provides a rich resource of this country's history to teachers and students. It spans from oral history methodology, to exciting content on those who fought for freedom in this country as well as includes information on our rich cultural history.

We recognise the provisional nature of knowledge and the importance of ongoing research in history and would therefore welcome public participation in the rewriting of South Africa's history through this project.

Ladies and gentlemen, our efforts today are aimed at encouraging those teachers who still cling to methods that encourage rote learning, imparting history as a set of facts to be memorised and reproduced mechanically, to actively engage themselves with the text of this new material. This will spark and sustain a vibrant interest in history amongst our students.

This learning material should succeed in discouraging teachers from using discredited apartheid-era textbooks, or other less inspiring publications. These resources provide also for those involved in training teachers to ensure that pre-service and in-service training is based on up to date history research content and new teaching methods.

I trust that this material will assist all South Africans to find their identity as Africans, and will make us proud to call this country and this continent our home. I also hope that they will rescue the imagination from the kind of programming that compels stagnation. As Es'kia Mphahlele says, Bantu Education compelled teachers to instruct their students on how to feel and be inferior, limiting the frontiers of educating the imagination, while our education must make possible the attainment of the farthest reaches of the imagination.

In closing, I wish to leave you with the timeless insight of the well-known historian E.H. Carr, whose words of wisdom are relevant today:

"we eagerly peer back into the twilight out of which we have come, in the hope that its faint beams will illuminate the obscurity into which we are going; and conversely our aspirations and anxieties about the path that lies ahead quickens our insight of what lies behind. Past, present and future are endlessly linked in the endless chain of history."

I thank you.

Issued by Ministry of Education
16 July 2003

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