For reasons I can’t quite remember, I once studied history under professors whose expertise was in what is usually a human failing and a liability, namely, an inability to forget the past. To move on and prosper.
From these cardigan-wearers I learnt each human misstep taken in the gloom of antiquity, by slave, serf or sans-culotte, has ineluctably brought us to where we are: paralysed by the past, blinded to the future. Shaped by circumstances not of our own choosing, we are inshallah nonetheless superficially free to completely mess it all up again. And with history, there’s no final episode, so the best or worst is always still to come.
A lot of top minds see the study of history as pointless. Many lesser minds do too, and I’m always shouted down when I suggest that burdening young people with dates and happenings of fleeting value, and a few specious historical deductions to make it seem worthwhile, is an unnecessary burden on schools and a cruel punishment to inflict on an innocent mind. It’s a handicap for busy young people who’d be better off learning mathematics and English, and spending more time socialising by playing sports. Or chess.
Supporters of the teaching of history would never admit it’s the catechism of the secular age, the Sunday school of pious nationalism. Ideal though for sustaining dubious historical conclusions to justify illogical political ideology. Necessary to build hegemony, or just brainwashing in academic camouflage?
Further, we’re told that if we don’t know the past, we’ll be doomed to repeat its mistakes. So when we do, at least we’ll know we have?
History is the must-read book no-one actually reads, and shouldn’t much bother reading either. Except for entertainment value and case studies in hubris and disillusionment. It’s a soap opera for nerds, proceeding not in a straight line, if anywhere at all, but instead in circles, its orbits pulled momentarily out of shape by the deadweight gravity of planet-wobblers such as Julius Caesar, Napoleon or Jeffrey Epstein.
History is meant to be nuanced, but in the wrong hands it's a blunt object of clumsy fallacy and hopeful fantasy
The only thing we learn for certain from history is that there’s no such thing as learning from history. I never have, and that’s after doing the prescribed reading.
History is meant to be nuanced, but in the wrong hands it’s a blunt object of clumsy fallacy and hopeful fantasy.
The ANC, of course, prides itself as a product of history, and could yet become all past and no future. Which is a fitting irony perhaps, because most of its flagship racial policies, such as BEE and expropriation without compensation, labour under the illusion that the past can be unwound.
The ANC has bet the house (not parliament, because that’s history) on the idea that history can be reversed by retracing its steps, doing it again, but this time with meaning. This self-serving historical determinism snuffs out alternative lateral approaches, cancelling them as ahistorical and politically incorrect, even if they have a better chance of success.
Trying to remake the apartheid movie, instead of entertaining a truly free and individuals-based new script, imposes a stifling template on the national project. It also limits the state’s options in playing its part in dealing with our problems in a modest and incremental way that avoids populist debt traps. And by its incompetence and corruption it risks immiserating the people amid splendour and jaw-dropping opulence.
Expect much more on the theme of historical grievance as the national dialogue offers its cosy sofas to participants in an extravagant babble-lounge for fanciful notions on how to go into the future with your eyes fixed firmly on the past. All the while keeping a straight face as BEE creates a super elite of “we the people”, so special that they take precedence over thousands of autoworker jobs in the Eastern Cape threatened by Donald Trump’s tariffs.
It’s hardly surprising that there have been attempts to take the sting out of history, given how setting too much store by it can curb rational human functioning and pervert the true common purpose. In 1992, an obscure US political scientist with the provocative name of Francis Fukuyama declared The End of History and the Last Man. His would be the last book on the matter. A best-selling postscript.
Fukuyama punted the idea that human political evolution had reached its zenith, and that the obvious preference for liberal market capitalism had made debate over systems or isms superfluous. He couldn’t have foreseen Gwede Mantashe. Or Vladimir Putin. And so, just a few decades later, we have to admit that not only has history not ended, but that it may only be beginning to begin.
It’s a sacrilege to suggest we should forget the past, but while we’re not doing so, perhaps paying a bit more attention to recent history, years rather than centuries, might just give us a better handle on the future.
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