In light of its treatment of the Cold War in school history curricula and textbooks, South Africa’s stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t surprising. It is reflected in these as having a negative impact on Africa.
The Cold War pitted the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union, a rival nuclear superpower, from 1945 to 1990. The contents of textbooks are significant because they are the official approved representation of the nation’s history. Typically, this “official knowledge” embeds social controversies in ways that benefit ruling groups.
We recently contributed a chapter to a book about how history textbooks and classrooms around the world treat the Cold War. We looked for officially sanctioned Cold War images in textbooks for Grade 12 (the final year of senior secondary school).
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has strained relations between “the west” and the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union’s main successor state. A new Cold War could erupt as a result of their potential nuclear standoff.
South Africa’s image of its own history, as depicted in school textbooks and curriculum, suggests that a position aligned with the west is unlikely.
Selecting Textbooks
Textbooks closely follow curriculum guidelines, but they are also influenced by the authors’ own readings and understandings. The South African curriculum has been revised four times since 1994, including the most recent COVID-related “trimming.”
The section on the Cold War has remained largely unchanged as a result of these changes.
Publishers are invited to submit textbooks for consideration in a national catalogue after each revision. Teams of assessors examine texts for the catalogue using criteria given by the Department of Basic Education. Provinces choose textbooks from a list of approved textbooks based on school preferences.
We chose two textbooks from the top of the list in most provinces in 2016: Focus History and New Generation History. We compared them to textbooks from the apartheid era.
Representations of the Cold War in textbooks
The history curriculum was divided into two sections during apartheid: international and South African history. Until 1982, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, and the United States were included in the international history curriculum, but the rest of Africa and the global south were not. China, India, Vietnam, Latin America, and independent African countries have all been included since 1982.
The Cold War was covered in the international history section. A 2018 study of textbooks’ views on Russia revealed that apartheid textbooks contained a fear of Communism.
This approach was changed by the post-apartheid curriculum. The Cold War frames a section that starts with “Independent Africa” and continues with “Civil Society Protests” (in the United States and the United Kingdom) from the 1950s to the 1990s; “Civil Resistance in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s”;
“The Coming of Democracy in South Africa”; and “Coming to Terms with the Past.” “The End of the Cold War” and “Globalisation to the Present” round out the section. As a result, it integrates African and South African history into global history, which is dominated by the Cold War.
According to the curriculum, “responsibility for the Cold War” should be taught and learned through the presentation of many interpretations and points of view.
Nonetheless, a fresh story has emerged. The “baddies” in the curriculum and textbooks are no longer the feared Communists. Instead, the then-superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, are blamed for the Cold War and for fomenting spheres of interest and conflict through proxy wars, despite the fact that they represented opposing philosophies.
They are seen as using weaker states to manipulate them through massive military and financial aid, espionage, propaganda, and rivalry over technology, space, sport, and nuclear weapons.
In the section on Independent Africa, the former Belgian Congo is compared to Tanzania’s African socialism as a “Cold War instrument.” It concludes by examining how Africa became entangled in the Cold War, using Angola as an example. The Soviet Union, the United States, Cuba, China, and South Africa were all militarily active in Angola at the time. The segment on the Cold War concludes with the West emerging as the dominating force.
The Cold War was a binary confrontation between two blocs, but it also spawned a more independent, neutral attitude led by the Non-Aligned Movement, which was primarily composed of Afro-Asian countries. The leaders attempted to establish themselves as superpower-free. This isn’t covered in the curriculum, but it’s a crucial factor to consider.
Although the role of Africa and Africans in today’s textbooks is more significant than in apartheid-era textbooks, they nevertheless portray Africans as both passive victims of superpowers and active freedom fighters with agency and initiative.
South Africa’s current approach to the Russia-Ukraine crisis claims to be consistent with this, as well as the country’s own history of negotiated transformation.
The concern is whether upcoming curriculum adjustments will bring discussion of the Cold War and current conflicts up to speed. Curriculum designers and textbook authors may want to keep a focus on multiple perspectives.
This would allow the small minority of history students to examine all sides of the new Cold War’s complexities and make their own ethical decisions.
Linda Chisholm, Professor of Education, University of Johannesburg and David Fig, Honorary Research Associate, University of Cape Town