Reversing Apartheid’s Lessons

Standing at her blackboard, Irene Nkwanyana has no textbooks for her fifth-grade history class at the Nkholi Primary School.

She is making history instead.

“In the past, I had to teach what the government wanted or I would be arrested,” said Nkwanyana, who has taught black children for 30 years. “I had to teach that the black man was inferior.”

No longer. This year, for the first time, she has discarded textbooks that portray whites as civilized and blacks as primitive. She has stopped teaching Christian Nationalism, the dubious myths and racist doctrine of the Afrikaner minority that imposed racial segregation and repression on South Africa for so long.

Those texts still are widely used elsewhere as new curricula and books are written and debated. After numerous delays, the first batch of post-apartheid textbooks is to be delivered to schools around Johannesburg this month and phased in across the country over the next six years.

But Nkwanyana isn’t waiting. Using newspapers, a handful of donated books and her own experience as a victim of apartheid, the 56-year-old black educator is proudly trying to change the mind-set of the next generation.

“It is necessary that children should learn what happened in South Africa,” she explained as her 37 pupils pondered her lesson on the meaning of democracy. “I tell them: ‘Find out! Find out!’ ”

In ways big and small, South Africans are trying to confront and correct the abuses of the past. But the search for truth--or at least fairness--has been as wrenching as it has been revealing in a society where free speech and free thought were proscribed until the end of white rule in 1994.

The nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has begun to overcome decades of official denials and cover-ups to document bombings, murders, torture and other atrocities by the former regime, including the 1977 beating death by police of celebrated black nationalist Steven Biko.

National museums, which long focused only on whites, have changed offensive exhibits, removing signs that described African culture as undeveloped. Some have added displays of squatter camp shacks, or graphic exhibits explaining the long-ignored exploitation of blacks in the country’s gold mines.

Government budgets now support more African art, although often under protest. “People say we are destroying Western forms of art and we are being, you know, brutish and selfish not to appreciate the values of ballet and opera and so forth,” Ben Ngubane, the former minister of arts, culture, science and technology, said recently.

But others are delighted. Tourists now line up each day in Cape Town to board a boat to the Alcatraz-like former prison on Robben Island. Some weep when they enter the tiny cell where Nelson Mandela, the political prisoner turned president, spent 18 of his 27 years in apartheid’s gulag.

Icons of Oppression

But many other icons of oppression remain. Only a few statues of grim-faced white rulers have come down. Most towns have streets, hospitals and parks named for apartheid’s leaders. Mandela has discouraged a new nomenclature, partly in fear that nearly everything would be named in his honor.

Many Afrikaners, descendants of the country’s original white settlers, are especially wary of purging the past. In a nation where history has always been politically charged, some fear that blacks are creating their own racial dogma.

“Only the negative aspects of our people are being highlighted,” complained Hennie de Wet, who heads an umbrella group of 22 Afrikaner cultural organizations. “The positive things are not publicized.”

How to find common ground in the bitterly contested terrain of the past is the challenge for those charged with rewriting history. And the problems go far beyond replacing textbooks.

Half the 1,500 public schools in Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg and Pretoria, have no electricity. A third have no toilets. Many have no desks or windows, or are desperately overcrowded.

Conditions are even worse in poorer provinces, where children often are taught under trees or in cowsheds. Nationwide, more than half the adults cannot read or write. Cheating scandals, teacher strikes, student protests, corruption in school meal programs and other problems dominate the news.

“The task is so overwhelming and enormous,” Mary Metcalfe, head of the Gauteng Education Department, said with a sigh.

Aiming for Servitude

Under a system first introduced in 1953 by Hendrik Verwoerd, the father of apartheid ideology, separate and unequal school systems were created for white, Indian, mixed-race and black children. The goal of so-called Bantu education was to provide menial labor for whites.

“Natives must be taught at an early age that equality with Europeans is not for them,” Verwoerd explained.

Textbooks, some still in use, were written with that aim.

“They are distorted, maimed and appallingly poorly written,” said historian and author Luli Callinicos. “They are biased and bigoted. The chapters are called ‘The Indian Problem’ or ‘The Native Question.’ They were written to prop up Afrikaner nationalism.”

In the books, blacks steal cattle, kill whites or are faithful servants. There’s no recognition of black culture or contributions by South African blacks in either world war or other endeavors. Vicious racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes predominate.

“All Indians were commercial, a merchant class,” Haroon Mahomed, head of curriculum development for Gauteng province, said bitterly. “Blacks were of lower intelligence, less civilized. Colored [mixed-race] were racially inferior, alcoholics.”

Fable as Fact

There was little room for dissent, even by Afrikaners. In 1977, a professor at all-white Pretoria University was tarred and feathered after he questioned the historical basis for the sacred vow supposedly uttered by rifle-bearing white settlers before they slaughtered thousands of spear-carrying Zulu warriors at Blood River--blacks called it the Ncome--in 1838.

The fabled Covenant, in which the whites allegedly took an oath to celebrate the day forever if God granted them victory over the Zulus, became key to Afrikaner myth and culture. Under apartheid, it was taught as fact--to suggest divine approval for white domination of the black majority.

New school guidelines in 1994 let teachers edit offending parts of the syllabus. But without new books, many schools still focus on the Covenant, the white Great Trek into the country’s interior, heroic tales of white victories and bitter ones of massacres by blacks, and other sagas of essentially white history.

“The history of South Africa didn’t begin in 1652 with the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck,” the first European to settle in what is now Cape Town, complained historian Emilia Potenza. “But that’s what the books say. Everything else is regarded as primitive history.”

Potenza is the coauthor of several radically different textbooks that will be used in the schools. Discussions and creativity, not rote learning, are encouraged. The goal is to prepare students to think, not just for exams, she said.

“Now Van Riebeeck is three-fourths into the book in a debate called ‘The Struggle Over Land,’ ” she said. “Neither side is portrayed as heroes. It’s not about goodies and baddies. It’s about understanding people’s motives for what they did.”

Among other facts not taught before: Afrikaans was initially derived from Dutch by the early settlers’ Malay slaves, and its first known written use was to publish the Koran, not the Bible. Charts show how the apartheid government spent 10 times more on white students than on blacks.

Photos and text highlight the 1976 Soweto uprising, when police shot schoolchildren protesting the forced use of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction.

Others focus on the forced removal of millions of blacks to desolate dumping grounds known as “homelands” and other once-taboo topics.

Dissenting Die-Hards

The new textbooks can’t come too soon, according to Mareka Monyokolo, a policy analyst at the independent Center for Education Policy Development Evaluation and Management in Johannesburg.

“Teachers are sick and tired of books that say Nelson Mandela is a terrorist and is still in prison,” he said. “That’s got to change.”

Only a few die-hards publicly disagree. Andrew Gerber, education spokesman for the right-wing Conservative Party, says de-emphasizing Afrikaner annals is “totally unacceptable to our people.”

“We want our children to be taught our history,” he complained. “We’d rather teach about Hendrik Verwoerd than Nelson Mandela. They want to teach about their heroes. We want to teach about ours.”

Striking Results

But many former all-white schools have moved on their own to embrace the new history and the new nation. Johannesburg’s suburban Greenside Primary School, for example, now has equal numbers of white, black and Indian students.

Zulu classes are compulsory for everyone. So is study of the liberation struggle. The results are striking.

“Every time I have a Zulu lesson, I go home and teach my mother,” confided Natasha Rimmer, a blond-haired fifth-grader.

Vusi Mngomezulu, a 10-year-old classmate who lives in Soweto, says his mother taught him black history all last year. Then his class began to study the life of Mandela. “Now it’s turned around, and I’m telling her everything,” he said happily.