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Abstract
Besides its pioneering scholarship on the social histories of the marginalised and oppressed communities in South Africa, the History Workshop (HW) at the University of the Witwatersrand has also made an immense contribution to the teaching of history in secondary school through its teachers’ workshops. Its input in the realm of teacher development has been quite remarkable in the context of the changing curriculum and educational policy more generally since the 1990s – an aspect of the HW's intellectual project that has received limited scholarly attention. After the introduction of the new curriculum, oral history was placed at the centre of the history syllabus from the early 2000s. However, the curriculum gave no concrete guidelines on how to deal with the complexities of oral history or other new components of the syllabus. Furthermore, no provision had been made for the retraining of the teachers, who were mostly left to their own devices. The HW with its many years of oral history experience partially filled the vacuum. It resuscitated its annual teachers’ workshops and provided the most critical support of introducing oral history to the educators, exploring its strengths and weaknesses, as well as showing how this could be beneficial in the classroom. This article reflects critically on the experiences of the HW on the issue of oral history in the schools mainly in Mpumalanga (but also in other provinces) between 2002 and 2009 – experiences that showed a mixture of possibilities and challenges.
Notes
This article is based on the presentation that I made at the History Workshop (HW)'s ‘Life after Thirty: Reflecting on Thirty Years of the History Workshop’ colloquium held at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) on 3–5 April 2009.
A substantial amount of work locally and overseas has gone into critiquing the Wits’ HW's intellectual project. Whereas some critics have commended the scholars associated with the HW for their pioneering work in the country in terms of using the oral history methodology and putting the marginalised African majority on the agenda of scholarship, or ‘giving voice’ to the oppressed and the ‘voiceless’, others have been more incisive in their criticisms, questioning, inter alia, the politics of knowledge production and the apparent division of labour along racial lines within the organisation. See, for example, Leroke Citation(1994), Hofmeyr (Citation1995:16–31), Minkley and Rassool Citation(1998).
Cynthia Kros and Nicole Ulrich (2008) are the only ones to have written on the HW's experiences. My own work is partly dependent on their work.
Running alongside the serious academic programme of research and conferencing, the HW had the ‘popular’ programme, which involved a series of public lectures combined with non-literary forms, such as film and theatre, activities which were ‘taken over’ by the audiences and popular intellectuals in the context of the growing assertiveness of the black trade union movement in the early 1980s. It was quite common to see hundreds of people from the black working-class communities descending onto the university's campus in fleets of buses on the HW's Open Days. See, for example, Bozzoli (Citation1990:242–3); Kros and Ulrich (Citation2008:88).
A host of talk shows on SAfm and other radio stations in the country had recently dwelt on the matter of OBE. Government officials and prominent education analysts gave their expositions on the matter. In her response to a barrage of criticisms and commendations from different callers, the Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga, retorted that OBE is a red herring. She argued that most criticisms of the new curriculum are misplaced and unfortunate, made by people who are uninformed about the actual content of the curriculum which, at its core, requires the educators to think carefully about the outcomes of each lesson they give, which is not such a bad idea. She concurred with Graeme Bloch, a prominent educationist and one of the early advocates of OBE, that this curriculum cannot be blamed for all the ills in our education system, most of which are historical, some of which have a lot to do with problems of implementation, teachers’ apathy or lack of ability to teach or lack of understanding of what the curriculum expects of them, and so forth. ‘SAfm Morning Talk with Siki Mgabadeli’, SAfm Radio, 21 September 2009.
Several of these popular publications are worth listing: Callinicos, L. 1981. A People's History of South Africa Volume One: Gold and Workers 1886–1924. Johannesburg: Ravan Press; Callinicos, L. 1987. A People's History of South Africa Volume Two: Working Life – Factories, Townships, and Popular Culture on the Rand 1886–1940. Johannesburg: Ravan Press; New Nation and History Workshop. 1989. New Nation New History Volume 1. Johannesburg: The Other Press. Other studies straddled the ‘popular’/’academic’ binary, see, for example, Delius, P. 1983. The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers, and the British in the Nineteenth-century Transvaal. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.
The keynote address has since been published, see Lekgoathi Citation(2004).
The first of these workshops was held at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg early in 2007, facilitated by Tshepo Moloi and Thapelo Pelo (project coordinator). Six educators were in attendance – two from Kroonstad, another two from Polokwane, one from Mzinoni township in Bethal and another one from Mjindini in Barberton. The purpose of the workshop was to introduce the educators to the concept of oral history, interviewing techniques and other mundane things about oral history before they could embark on their projects with their learners. Tshepo Moloi, Personal Communication, 8 January 2010.
Tshepo Moloi, Personal Communication, 8 January 2010.
The Oral History Association of South Africa (OHASA) is a non-profit making association that seeks to promote and facilitate the collection, recording and preservation of oral traditions and testimonies in the country. It was formed in 2004 by a group of oral history academics and practitioners with the support of the national Department of Arts and Culture. Together with the National Archives Services of South Africa, OHASA has held six annual conferences in the different provinces of the country, all of which have focused on oral history-related themes.
OHASA Conference Programme, 2008.