Oh Great! More twists in history’s tale

Suffer the little children who had the heroics of the Great Trek repeatedly stuffed down their throats during the era of Christian National Education.

It took a gravel-voiced guide, unnamed lest reprisals, to finally break the spell one Saturday afternoon at the Voortrekker Monument.

Standing in front of the marble bas-relief frieze showing Piet Retief and his followers being clubbed to death by Dingane’s warriors at uMgungundlovu on February 6 1838, the guide pointed out that the story has always been about the Voortrekker leader being betrayed by a duplicitous Zulu king. “But then maybe Retief was, actually, just a cattle thief?”

Who knew the slaughter of sacred cows would be met with such marble-frosted loathing?

Which is where South Africa seems to be heading, once again, with the bubbling discontent over the new school history syllabus.

Gazetted by basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube, the proposed curriculum is either an anti-intellectual, nationalist stump speech for the ruling party … or a shift that, through language, oral history and storytelling, puts African history first.

Which, as it turns out, is the way history is practised. Who’s telling the story and why?

The Guyana-born British poet John Agard skewers things nicely with his 2004 poem Checking Out Me History, one verse of which goes:

“Dem tell me bout Florence Nightingale and she lamp / and how Robin Hood used to camp / Dem tell me bout ole King Cole was a merry ole soul / but dem never tell me bout Mary Seacole”.

Seacole was a Jamaican nurse and entrepreneur who, like Nightingale, travelled to Crimea in 1855 and set up a camp for wounded British officers. The Times war correspondent William Russell would later write of her: “A more tender or skilful hand about a wound or a broken limb could not be found among our best surgeons.”

A bit of mansplaining, then, from a son of the empire from which, by the way, those Voortrekkers were fleeing with their wagons and children.