I am from Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, in Port Elizabeth. It is the only university in the world that bears the name of Nelson Mandela. As is well known, South Africa underwent a negotiated transition. Since the inception and intensification of the struggle in the 1950s, the black majority has had to accept the permanent presence of the settler colonial community in South Africa and Southern Africa. This shaped, among other things, the Freedom Charter tradition and the theory of colonialism of a special type, and it has had particular consequences for our country's trajectory. This negotiated transition, as I will show, manifests in various ways.
My university, for instance, was formerly a white nationalist institution associated with a highly right-wing secret organisation known as the Afrikaner Bond. The degree to which the sympathies of the white right wing remain embedded in South African political culture has been widely observed. This has shaped our relationship with the United States, as well as, very recently, our position within the G20, as our colleague has noted. It gives rise to a battle over memory, a battle over history, with real political consequences for South Africa's geopolitical context and social cohesion.
My presentation might more accurately have been titled: 'What is the purpose of the university at a late imperial and late capitalist stage?' With that question in mind, I will offer a brief profile of Nelson Mandela University. We have over 21,000 students, perhaps more at present, many of them born between 2000 and 2007. Our current cohort would have been children when Nelson Mandela died. Born roughly a decade after the formal end of apartheid, many of them are beneficiaries of state policies in education and social welfare, and of a largely open economy and democratic society. Yet the structural legacy of apartheid persists. Our students are largely working class: township students, rural students, drawn predominantly from what we call no-fee or low-fee public schools that are state-funded. We are also confronted with significant structural challenges, as well as the contradiction of economic marginalisation within an unequal economy and very high exposure to consumer capitalist culture. What we have, then, is a problem that has already been raised here: a substantial gap between those who lived through the history of our struggles and those born after it, under new conditions.
One of the central tensions in South Africa's transition and negotiated transformation is how to cultivate a general consciousness about apartheid colonialism, about our own role and place within global historical development, and about our connections with liberation movements and struggles across the world. Speaking now as a teacher, what I find is a poorly developed sense of historical consciousness around the making of the modern world, the deeper significance of ancient histories, and the recurring patterns of fascism in the 21st century.
The question we must ask, bearing as we do the name of Nelson Mandela and being built upon an institution with a right-wing institutional legacy, is: what kind of national leaders are we producing? What kind of curriculum should I, as a history teacher, put forward, given the contestation over South Africa's place on the global stage and the question of the role of the white minority in our country?
History education is under threat in many respects, and I do believe that a strong history education is the foundation for strong STEM education: where history education weakens, the rest suffers. What role does the university play, and what role does history play in the formation of our most educated members of society? I have come to approach this in two ways: thinking about history as an account of what has happened, and thinking about historical consciousness as our understanding of ourselves. More importantly, it is about the framework of interpretation and the means by which we address the gap between those who lived through the history and those who are now subject to its legacies. I quote here the late Minister of Education Kader Asmal, who held that history's aim is to develop a conscious consciousness. I also draw on another scholar who describes history as people's cognitive interpretation. Historical consciousness is cognitive interpretation. My view is that historical consciousness is one's capacity to intelligently interpret and understand history long after it has occurred, without having experienced it directly: the capacity to make moral and analytical judgements, to recognise patterns and draw wisdom from history, without carelessly imposing one's embodied experience of living in the present.
An African and Global South historical consciousness is, for me, far more than knowledge of historical events, the names of heroes, or the dates of our political struggles and revolutions. It is much more about the transmission of the liberatory spirit and its intellectual cultures. It is the capacity to have a deep sense of Oliver Tambo's democratic intellectualism without having met him. Oliver Tambo was the longest-serving leader of the African National Congress and the longest-serving leader of the anti-apartheid movement in exile. Many of our students are not fully aware of his role in the struggle; they have not quite grasped the spirit of Oliver Tambo, and they have no sense of what we mean when we speak of the Non-Aligned Movement. It is the capacity to understand the evolution of charisma, militancy, and pragmatism in a figure such as Nelson Mandela across a lifetime of struggle. It is a historical consciousness that allows us to connect with and draw upon the past without reducing our present memory to a political theatre that merely mimics it, in the manner that Marx observes in The Eighteenth Brumaire.
As for what I actually do: I have often questioned whether the classroom matters, but in South Africa it has become critically important. What I now say to our students is that we need to shift our perspective on how the world was made, and we begin with China. Through general history, we try to demonstrate that civilisational development does not flow from North to South but rather has an Eastern axis. We challenge our students to consider how Europeans first came to know much of the world at all, through their relationship with the Silk Road. The examples on my slides are not grand in scale, but they are important for illustrating, in our context, how we must teach an average 19-year-old South African who carries little memory and no direct experience of any of this to consciously understand the past. The basic examples include the East Indian route, familiarity with the Asia-Pacific, and an understanding of how Europeans came to semi-colonise China, as we have heard described. We take a comparative view of Japan and the question of how Japan's adaptation to the threat of American domination led it towards a fascistic modernity. We ask how that happened and why those choices emerged. We then discuss China's own experience over the past century, and we ask what that means for Africa, its future, and its future leaders.
My conclusion is this: we shift the axis of history, in significant ways, towards the East rather than the North. In South Africa, as a former English colony, this is a radical and important act. My argument, then, is that university history education remains critical for the intellectual orientation of students, and that historical consciousness will become increasingly significant in confronting the rising fascist threat. What it does is develop a critical ontology, a cognitive anchor that we seek to cultivate within our society so that it may function with greater effectiveness.
Watch the whole speech here: