Push for Afrocentric history in schools
The Basic Education Minister said the aim is to roll-out a completely new curriculum of history that is Afrocentric rather than Eurocentric.
BASIC Education Minister Angie Motshekga says the department aims to phase in a new-look curriculum on history over seven years. The Minister said this when she briefed the media ahead of tabling the department’s Budget Vote at the National Assembly earlier this week.
She said since the advent of democracy, the broader objective for government was to provide access to education which is a human right. She said that she believed the department was making progress in that regard.
She said the curriculum needs to evolve to respond to current dynamics.
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She said a report of the task team that was established to look at making history compulsory would be released on Africa Day and thereafter, interested parties would be invited to give input on the report through nationwide consultations in what will be a “festival of ideas” on how the history curriculum should look.
“Our contention is that we can’t have radical economic transformation without the appropriate and requisite skills. And what does that need? We need a diversified curriculum, we need to be part of the fourth industrial revolution, we need to make sure that there are skills of the future that are imparted to our nation. We have set up a huge task team, received a report, we will be launching the report on [Africa Day] and the thrust of the report is that in the next seven years, we have to roll-out a completely new curriculum of history as compared to the current one that we have.
“We will phase it in, we will make the necessary adjustment but we will also take the paradigm – the paradigm can’t be a Eurocentric paradigm, which teaches about the French revolution only. They have to know about the French revolution but they have to also know about Haiti just to have an Afro-centric perspective about the rest of the world,” she said.
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