“The station bomb in 1960 was the first act of urban terrorism in South Africa.” True or false?
Well-informed high school students who sweated over this, the first question in last month’s History Olympiad paper, must surely have realised they were facing a sticky situation. The vagueness of the phrase “the station bomb” would have knitted some brows, and not even the best-informed of candidates could possibly have identified some such happening in 1960.
Hapless candidates who felt sufficiently sure that the question must be referring to the explosion in the Johannesburg railway station for which John Harris was convicted might well have ticked “false”, on the reasonable ground that this explosion occurred in 1964, not 1960.
Others might have suppressed some qualms about whether the phrase “urban terrorism” has some widely accepted meaning, and reasoned that a lot in South Africa’s history before 1960 could arguably be so described. Incidents during the 1922 white miners’ strike, for example, suggests John Pampallis, director of the Centre for Education Policy Development. For these candidates, “false” would also have been their choice.
But this was a practice question with the answer sternly supplied: “True.” So all these candidates would have been wrong.
Candidates then had to pick their way through the minefield of real questions. They soon encountered this: “During the Seventies President Hastings Banda of Zaire was one of the few African leaders that [sic] was willing to engage in serious dialogue with South Africa.” True or false?
Well, false if you prefer to situate the fly-whisking former strongman where he belongs — in Malawi; true if you take the courageously risky step of assuming that the examiners have erred and that “true” is the answer they want. And true too that the English here and elsewhere in the paper leaves a lot to be desired, as several academics commented to the Mail & Guardian this week.
The organiser of the Olympiad is the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns. Established in 1909, the academy is, according to its (translated) website, a “multi-disciplinary science organisation. Its goals are the promotion of the sciences, technical skills [‘tegniek’] and the arts through Afrikaans and the promotion of the use and the quality of the Afrikaans language.”
The competition is sponsored by The Rhodes Trust. Based at Oxford University, the trust is perhaps best known for its use of Cecil John Rhodes’s legacy to fund the prestigious Rhodes Scholarships, awarded since 1903 to students in Britain’s former colonies.
Eminent South African historians challenge both the testing method and the apparent ideological leanings of the paper.
“While the History Olympiad is supposed to promote history in schools, the paper includes so many errors and distortions that it constitutes a gross disservice to
history,” says Christopher Saunders, professor of history at the University of Cape Town.
Diverse organisations run the South African Olympiads in a number of school subjects. The competitions are not part of the school curriculum, and have no
formal relation with the national or provincial education departments. This year more than 120 schools entered the History Olympiad, and about 1 200 students wrote the first-round paper last month.
“I am surprised,” Minister of Education Kader Asmal told the M&G after perusing the question paper this week, “that The Rhodes Trust has anything to do with a history approach that is firmly entrenched in the Christian National Education system of the past, which has nothing to do with our new conception of education and the place of history in a democratic South Africa.”
Dr Wessel Visser, a historian at the University of Stellenbosch who chaired the seven-member panel that set the questions, told the M&G: “I concede mistakes occur from time to time. But people mustn’t get the idea there’s an ideological agenda here. We’re not approaching history from any angle. The academy might have had ideological agendas in the past, but not now.”
“The paper is a huge mess,” says Emilia Potenza, author of history textbooks and a history curriculum policy developer. “It encourages the worst approach to teaching history, as though it’s merely a matter of facts — often highly dubious facts in this paper.
“In history, there’s not always consensus — there are debates and interpretations. It’s exactly here that history in the new school curriculum locates itself, and so raises critical questions such as whose version of history do we hear, what constitutes evidence and reliability, and how does one marshal evidence to build an argument.
“These are valuable cognitive skills — crucial to building society and democracy — that are completely undermined by the Olympiad’s approach.”
Educationally, the questions “reflect a disastrous frame of mind”, says Professor Jeff Guy, the University of Natal historian and author of The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom.
“What killed history in the past was its insistence on an uncreative memorising of facts.
“The paper’s attitude to knowledge reflects the state of history as taught in the apartheid era, with its authoritarian commitment to the memory of facts.”