Bryan Rostron
Attending a conference at the University of the Western Cape recently on Not Telling: Secrecy, Lies and History, it was disconcerting to hear one South African historian greet another with: “And how many retrenchments have you had?”
A firm sense of history, about the distortions of the past as well as the lies of the present, was a vital part of the anti- apartheid struggle. Today, such innocent certainties have been swept away, not just by the intellectual vogue of post-modernism, but by the overthrow of a seemingly monolithic enemy. One result seems to be that history, as a subject in schools and universities, is slowly faced with becoming, well, history.
Academics at the conference estimated that in the past two years student enrolments in history departments across the country had dropped by as much as 50% to 60%. On one hand, this is part of a global, market- related trend: what, bottom line, is the point of history?
Can you bottle, merchandise, franchise or make a profit from the stuff? What can one buy with history, how will it advance your career, or bolster corporate imperatives? One history department here, for example, had recently to cede much of its departmental space to the more obviously utilitarian subject of information technology. This encapsulates one of the central paradoxes of our age: the more technological communication flourishes, often the less authentic information is widely available.
Like haute couture, intellectual fashions change. During the 1980s, in South Africa, there was a quote in such bookish vogue that, once noticed, it became like a nervous tic. It was from Italian communist Antonio Gramsci: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”
Now a new mantra has surfaced, endlessly recycled to the point of clich. This is practically a morbid symptom in itself, resurrected from Czech writer Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Such phrases gain circulation because they correspond to a perceived reality: first, the macabre symptoms of the dying “ancient regime” today, a widely held desire that we never forget such abominations, or let them be repeated. But while it is a maxim to which almost everyone subscribes, what in reality is the commitment of the new regime to this struggle against forgetting?
John Wright of the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, suggested that while the apartheid regime had an interest in holding on to the past as a way of legitimisation, the African National Congress may not have the same incentive regarding the immediate past. Such “history” contains a potential to embarrass the government – for example, the ANC’s radicalism of the Eighties, compared to their enforced conservatism of the Nineties. This could serve as potent ammunition for critics, suggested Wright, so that the ANC might feel the need to “de- commission” history, at least for a while, and promote “heritage”.
Heritage is often seen as a conservative packaging of the past, nostalgia as spectacle: the ruling class embalmed in a fixed, unchallenged tableau, with the lower orders cast as pitiful walk-ons in the pre- ordained pageant of history. Thus there was considerable concern about popular presentations of the past in museums (which, it was revealed, literally have hundreds of Khoisan skeletons in their cupboards), and in theme parks like Ratanga Junction (“the wildest place in Africa”) in Cape Town.#
One theme that emerged clearly from Not Telling was the development of new educational pressures to displace historical notions of conflict with images of conciliation. Social harmony, sometimes at the expense of “not telling” or downright fibs, is the new orthodoxy: nation building, in short, before truth.
With the advent of Curriculum 2005, history will disappear as a subjectin grades one to nine, swallowed up with geography and “civic education”.
Cynthia Kros of the University of the Witwatersrand concluded that there is a powerful lobby, “who would really like us to forget all about history except as it serves to legitimate new elites and paper over the cracks”.
June Bam of the University of Stellenbosch recalled virtual guerrilla warfare in helping to formulate the new human and social sciences “outcomes” curriculum. “Interestingly,” she said, “the major battle was over the specific inclusion of the history of apartheid.”
Previous forms of political control are being replaced, claimed Bam, “by covert forms of betrayal of democracy and transparency through conspiracies of silence, collective lies, denial of conflict and the promotion of tunnel-vision consensus”.
Thus, for the while, history as a subject seems set to atrophy. We live in an age of instant global communications, with a corresponding capacity for almost instant amnesia. So watch out for that mantra about “memory against forgetting”. The more this is repeated, the more I suspect it is but the consoling hymn of uneasy consciences; another morbid symptom, to dull us to the fact that so very soon, we are already forgetting so very much.
History, goes the old nostrum, is written by the winners. Or in our case, it seems, scarcely at all. Which, post-modernly perhaps, is just one more way of rewriting history.