Black Historians, Historiography, and History Education in the Era of #RhodesMustFall

Abstract

Black historians have played a role in South African historiography and their role has been woefully neglected. This paper attempts to reappraise the work and effort of black scholars whose works have contributed to South African historiography in the context of history education in the high school curriculum. Much of their work has not filtered into the CAPS curriculum and the history education curriculum. Through the works of Black historians, we can gain a decolonial reading and understanding from the local context and understand that there is a historical scholarly tradition which goes back to the 1920s. This paper links Black historians’ work to historiography, history education and the #RhodesMustFall movement. The #FeesMustFall movement and the generation involved called for a decolonised curriculum, and this paper, attempts to contribute to that discourse. Through looking at the works of scholars such as Molema, Fuze, Jabavu, Magubane, Mohlamme and Keto, the paper seeks to link these authors’ work to the high school history curriculum. These Black writers and historians were chosen because many of them were pioneers in writing about South African history and society, and their work is important as part of South African history and historiography. The literature review focuses on works surrounding curriculum transformation, and a decolonised curriculum centred on the #RhodesMustFall movement. This paper uses a narrative review framework as part of its methodology and data analysis. The works of these scholars were chosen because they are book-based, and because they were mostly printed for publication, which makes them accessible to some extent. This paper engages with the work and contributions of Black historians and makes several findings: (1) Representation matters in scholarship; (2) Part of decolonising history is changing the racialised discourse of historiography; (3) Black historians have made contributions to studies on colonialism, ethnicity, education, world wars and African-centred paradigms of history, and (4) The work of Black historians must be recentred in the high school history curriculum for the benefit of future generations.