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The Great Trek was a real migration; Blood River was a real battle; the farms burned and the republics built were real. But it does suggest that what is being mourned as an immemorial tradition is, in several of its most potent forms, a mid-twentieth-century ideological construction. A mature curriculum would make this distinction its subject – teaching the historical event alongside the history of its mythologisation.
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The Department of Basic Education’s (DBE) proposed revision of the national history curriculum has reignited a perennial conflict in South African public life – a contest over whose past carries weight, whose suffering warrants a place in the collective memory, and who possesses the authority to narrate the nation’s soul to its children. The debate has acquired a particular urgency in the opening months of 2026, with the DBE having opened public comment on draft CAPS history documents for grades four to 12 in late March – a consultation period closing on the 19th of April. We are, in other words, inside the very moment of decision. What is written and argued now will shape what South African schoolchildren are told about themselves for a generation.
The direction of reform is clear. The department pivots from a Eurocentric inheritance toward a more Afrocentric orientation – emphasising African empires, oral traditions and liberation struggles – while also proposing to shift the pedagogical frame away from the great individual toward broad, thematic structures. Revolutions, global movements and the deep grammar of historical change, rather than the biography of exceptional men – this is the new method of teaching history it is proposing.
It has triggered, predictably, a profound alarm within Afrikaner communities. There is a palpable fear that the pillars of their historical identity – the Great Trek, the Anglo-Boer Wars, the desolation of the concentration camps – are being quietly excised from the national syllabus. Both the proponents of reform and those who fear erasure carry legitimate grievances. This convergence of valid concerns makes the current moment volatile and so demanding of intellectual seriousness.
The long history of a contested curriculum
The contestation of the CAPS curriculum is not a new phenomenon. Scholars have argued since the 1990s that the syllabus remains tethered to a Eurocentric orbit, granting Europe an undue monopoly on our historical agency. In response, the Ministry of Basic Education established a History Ministerial Task Team in 2015, charged with recentring the African experience and exploring the possibility of making history a compulsory subject through to grade 12. Its findings were unsparing. The curriculum was judged to be “very Eurocentric and not focused on building the character of an African learner”.
The task team’s own report contained a quieter self-criticism, one that receives almost no attention in the public debate. The existing post-1994 curriculum had not simply ignored black women and ordinary people; it had replaced “great white men” with “great black men” – a mirror reversal that left the structural logic of hagiography entirely intact. Little attention had been paid to gender, to the agency of ordinary people on the street, or to the fluid, contradictory interactions between communities that constituted the actual texture of history. This admission ought to discipline both sides of the current dispute. The problem is not merely which faces appear in the textbook; it is the frame itself.
Central to the new proposals is a reduction in the prominence of figures like Jan van Riebeeck, and a move away from individual biography toward broad conceptual themes. The Great Trek serves as the quintessential example of current tension. Between 1835 and the early 1840s, roughly 14 000 Boers migrated from the Cape Colony to escape British hegemony, a movement that laid the foundations for the Orange Free State and the Transvaal – and that simultaneously facilitated the systematic dispossession of the Zulu, Sotho, Tswana and Ndebele nations. The historical event is, in this regard, morally complex and pedagogically irreplaceable. It is the kind of episode that demands to be taught rather than adjudicated, because it explains not only our history but the extant national identity.
What the current debate rarely confronts, however, is the extent to which the mythology of the Trek – the ox-wagon, the covenant, the divine mission – is itself a relatively recent political construction. The 1938 centenary of the Trek was not a spontaneous welling of popular feeling, but a deliberate mobilisation organised by the Afrikaner Broederbond and the Afrikaanse Taal en Kultuurvereniging under the chairmanship of Henning Klopper, designed to unify rival streams of Afrikaner identity under a single nationalist banner. Nine ox-wagons travelled from the statue of Jan van Riebeeck in Cape Town to the Voortrekker Monument site in Pretoria; a crowd of over 100 000 gathered for the cornerstone ceremony. As Gideon Roos remarked at the time, Afrikaners had never possessed a unifying symbol before – the ox-wagon became that symbol, manufactured for the occasion.
Albert Grundlingh and Hilary Sapire’s scholarship is instructive here. The centenary functioned as what they describe as a peak in emotional Afrikaner nationalism, a cross-class mobilisation in which the Eeufees reunited Afrikanerdom by presenting the power of the past. At the Blood River site that December, DF Malan – leader of the National Party and soon to be the second architect of apartheid – spoke of the need to preserve South Africa as a “white man’s country”. The theological and the racial were, in the event’s own articulation, inseparable. The National Party’s narrow election victory ten years later in 1948 was built, in significant part, on the emotional infrastructure laid in 1938.
This history does not invalidate Afrikaner grief. The Great Trek was a real migration; Blood River was a real battle; the farms burned and the republics built were real. But it does suggest that what is being mourned as an immemorial tradition is, in several of its most potent forms, a mid-twentieth-century ideological construction. A mature curriculum would make this distinction its subject – teaching the historical event alongside the history of its mythologisation. That is not erasure, but real education.
A shared catastrophe: The Anglo-Boer War
Perhaps more troubling than the potential diminishment of the Trek is the risk that the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902 might recede into the background – a war whose moral weight is undeniable and whose pedagogical possibilities remain largely unrealised. The statistics alone demand attention. Elizabeth van Heyningen’s landmark social history of the camps establishes that approximately 28 000 Boers died in British concentration camps – 79% of them children – deaths attributable to inadequate accommodation, epidemic disease and the catastrophic neglect of a military administration that had interned civilians for strategic ends without the slightest preparation for their welfare. Rations were withheld from the families of men still fighting in the field; sanitation was non-existent; measles moved through the canvas settlements like fire through dry grass. Emily Hobhouse, a British subject who had the moral courage to enter the camps and report what she found, brought the scale of the disaster to public attention and forced the government’s hand.
But the narrative, as it has been received and transmitted within Afrikaner national consciousness, is radically incomplete. The camps were racially segregated. Sixty-six black camps existed alongside the 45 Boer camps, holding an estimated 115 000 people at their peak. The official death toll in these camps stands at 14 154, but researcher Gavin Benneyworth, examining actual graveyards rather than incomplete British records, estimates the figure at no fewer than 20 000. Eighty-one percent of the recorded fatalities were children. The black camps operated on an entirely different and more lethal model compared with the Boer camps. The inmates were not merely interned, but expected to provide labour in exchange for food; they received almost no medical support, and were afforded no formal investigation equivalent to the Fawcett Commission that eventually prompted reforms in the Boer camps. When the Aborigines Protection Society wrote to colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain in early 1902, requesting that black internees be afforded the same care as Boer detainees, a senior Colonial Office official minuted the request as coming from a “busybody” not worth troubling Lord Milner about.
Van Heyningen has made the further observation that the history of the camps – for all their genuine suffering – was never properly investigated. Instead, a mythology was created by emergent Afrikaner nationalists, who deployed the women’s testimonies to establish what she calls a “paradigm of suffering” – a paradigm that served powerful political purposes while systematically crowding out the comparative and racially bifurcated dimensions of the same catastrophe. The suffering was real. The use made of it was ideological. A curriculum equal to this history would mourn both losses, name both injustices and teach children to hold them with the same respect – because they happened in the same camps, in the same years, under the same imperial sky.
The Anglo-Boer War offers a rare chance to teach history as shared catastrophe:
a moment when British imperial power ground down both Afrikaner and black lives,
complicating the rigid racial binaries that continue to stifle South African public discourse.
The necessity of the Afrocentric lens
None of this negates the urgent need for reform. The existing curriculum has long implied that historical significance is the exclusive preserve of white men in power, while the oral traditions, cultural achievements and political sophistication of indigenous knowledge systems has remained silenced or been rendered peripheral.
The inclusion of precolonial civilisations is not ideological posturing; it is basic historical literacy. Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe, flourishing from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries CE, developed complex political structures, monumental stone architecture, and trade networks that reached directly into the Indian Ocean world – connecting, through the ports of Kilwa and Sofala, to Persia, India and China. At its height, Great Zimbabwe housed an estimated 18 000 inhabitants, a figure broadly comparable with many medieval European towns of the same period. Mapungubwe was the first society in southern Africa known to have developed a class-stratified political structure and advanced stone masonry. These should not be minor footnotes to our national history; they are our history. A learner who has studied the scramble for Africa while remaining ignorant of the continent’s cultural and commercial sophistication has received not education but a carefully curated illusion.
Similarly, the inclusion of resistance histories – like Nkosi Maqoma, Charlotte Maxeke, Nontetha Nkwenkwe and the women of the 1913 Free State pass protests – is not a matter of ideological preference, but of factual completeness. These lives and struggles existed; they shaped the world South Africans now inhabit. Their exclusion from the national syllabus is a form of civic miseducation. The Afrocentric turn is not in itself the problem. The question is always how it is done.
The danger of substitution
The fundamental error lies in treating curriculum design as a zero-sum game – a competition in which the inclusion of Nongqawuse necessitates the exclusion of Piet Retief, or in which the voicing of African agency requires the silencing of Afrikaner memory. South African history is not a shelf with limited space; it is a dense, layered and irreducibly plural narrative.
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A curriculum that cannot make a schoolchild feel the weight of those deaths in their own chest has failed at its most essential task.
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There is, moreover, a particular danger in the proposed shift from biographical to thematic history that deserves attention beyond the predictable conservative complaint. The concern is not that themes are wrong, but that abstract frameworks, divorced from individual lives, strip history of the quality that makes it inhabitable. Great movements are understood through the lives they consume and the choices they force upon ordinary people. The bittereinder dying of typhoid in a Bloemfontein camp and the black child buried without a name in a Free State field are not statistics in a structural argument; they are the argument. A curriculum that cannot make a schoolchild feel the weight of those deaths in their own chest has failed at its most essential task.
The comparative context of Zimbabwe is instructive here. Post-independence curriculum reform there attempted to ground education in unhu/ubuntu philosophy, only for scholars to identify what has been termed a “paradox of superficial interpretation” – ubuntu as doxa, invoked ritually without epistemic depth, and replicating rather than dismantling the inherited logic of colonial education. South Africa risks the identical failure of replacing Eurocentric hagiography with Afrocentric hagiography, substituting one set of heroes for another while leaving the structural logic of the nationalist story – teleological, top-down and indifferent to ordinary lives and gendered experience – entirely untouched.
Toward a capacious history
What South Africa requires is not a curriculum that replaces one community’s story with another’s, but one with the intellectual generosity to hold multiple, often contradictory truths simultaneously and with equal gravity.
The Great Trek must be taught alongside the testimony of the nations whose land was crossed – and alongside the history of how the Trek was mythologised into a political weapon a century after it occurred. The Battle of Blood River should be studied as a pivotal military event, as a profound act of theological self-mythologisation, and as a moment whose commemoration has been instrumentalised repeatedly to authorise racial hierarchy – from the 1938 Eeufees to the speeches of Malan to the volksteologie of apartheid’s Dutch Reformed Church.
The concentration camps must be mourned in both their Boer and black contexts, not as competing griefs but as entwined ones, produced by the same imperial machinery and denied the same official acknowledgment. Emily Hobhouse’s courage in exposing the Boer camps deserves its place in the curriculum; so does the Colonial Office official who dismissed concern for black internees as not worth Lord Milner’s time.
And the precolonial civilisations – Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, the Mutapa state, the Zulu kingdom, the Cape Khoikhoi before dispossession – and the Frontier Wars of Xhosa land dispossession deserve genuine intellectual engagement, not mere token inclusion. They deserve the kind of teaching that allows a learner to grasp that the people who built those stone walls in the Limpopo valley were doing so at the same moment that Europe was constructing its medieval cathedrals, and that the trade networks linking Great Zimbabwe to Kilwa and onward to the Arabian Sea were operating centuries before any European set foot on southern African soil.
Conclusion: The work of memory
The South African Constitution mandates the healing of past divisions. This cannot be achieved through selective amnesia, nor through a selective generosity that welcomes some communities’ wounds while dismissing others’. It requires what the German tradition calls Erinnerungsarbeit – the work of memory – pursued not as a political transaction, but as an ethical obligation to the full complexity of what happened here.
The current moment is not merely a bureaucratic debate about syllabus content. It is a question about what kind of country South Africa intends to be, and what it intends to tell its children about the world they have inherited. A curriculum adequate to that question will look every child in the eye – black, Afrikaner, coloured, Indian, San, English – and confirm: Your people were here. They suffered, they built and they erred. Their story is not separate from anyone else’s story; it is, in the most demanding sense, part of the same story.
That is not a betrayal of history by the demands of transformative justice. It is what transformation, pursued with integrity and without flinching, actually looks like.
A note on sources
Statistics on Boer deaths in concentration camps draw on Elizabeth van Heyningen’s social history of the camps (reviewed in The American Historical Review, 2015) and her article “Costly mythologies: The concentration camps of the South African War in Afrikaner historiography”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 34/3 (2008). Figures for black camp deaths follow the South African History Online summary, drawing on the work of G Benneyworth and S Kessler, “The black concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902 (War Museum of the Boer Republics, 2012). The phrase “paradigm of suffering” is Van Heyningen’s, from her History Compass article (2009). Grundlingh and Sapire’s analysis of the 1938 centenary appears in “From feverish festival to repetitive ritual? The changing fortunes of Great Trek mythology in an industrializing South Africa, 1938-1988”, South African Historical Journal. The Ministerial Task Team’s findings on curriculum Eurocentrism and the gender blind spot are drawn from the Report of the History Ministerial Task Team (2018) and the Parliamentary Monitoring Group briefing on curriculum reform (2024). The comment period for the draft CAPS history documents closes on 19 April 2026.
See also:
Reading for comprehension deur Michael le Cordeur: ’n onderhoud
Te min geld vir onderwys: ’n onderhoud oor die regering se plig en ouers se taak
Kommentaar
Op hoërskool (ten minste in graad 11 en 12), behoort leerlinge oók in geskiedenis van die ‘sielkundige hoekom’, wat fokus op wat het mense/groepe onbewustelik gedryf in die verlede vir die keuses wat hulle vir identiteit en oorlewing geneem het, iets wat universeel is tot alle mense en die geskiedenis storie is.
Die aspek word psigohistorie genoem.
Daarsonder is 'n sinvolle verstaan van die mens, en 'n ware begrip vir beter verhoudinge tussen groepe twyfelagtig. Byvoorbeeld, wat is die langtermyn gevolge van vernedering en van trauma op groepe? En wat is die gevolglike impak daarvan op toekomstige generasies? Hoe verduidelik dit slagofferskap en wraak - die twee aspekte wat die geskiedenis van die mens is. Hoe breek jy die siklus? Hoe kan sinvolle en empatiese versoenings andersins plaasvind, eerder as weer 'n herhaling van vernedering en wraak?
Daarsonder bly geskiedenis vir die meeste skoliere 'n verwyderde en vervelige relaas van 'n tydvak waarmee hulle nie kan identifiseer nie. Plus hulle het niks behalwe 'n negatiewe beeld van ‘die ander’ geïnternaliseer nie. Is dit versoening? Is dit vooruitgang van die mensdom?