Deviating from the old course is controversial, but it is also a necessary and useful redirection.
The new school history curriculum, which has changed to an Afrocentric focus and is still in draft form, has drawn much media comment. As history education experts (we all work, or have worked, in history teacher training in a variety of institutions), we want to see the draft curriculum for the possibilities it offers: both in its current form and for the ways in which it can grow and improve.
Global Africa
An Afrocentric curriculum, which will replace the Eurocentric curriculum into which generations of South Africans have been socialized, will help learners understand that community and state in Africa were sophisticated, innovative and global relations long before the colonial era. It is fundamentally different from anything hitherto encountered in any school history curriculum in South Africa.
Proposed Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) The paradigm shift in the history curriculum is controversial because it contradicts the ghosts of a 1963 statement by British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who argued, “Africa has only the history of Europeans. The rest is darkness.” In this history, Africans often appear only as victims or as disruptors of white society on the margins of history. Being educationally socialized into this way of thinking about Africa…