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Crossposted from H_SAFRICA Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1998 From: Siphamandla Zondi, Cambridge <wsz20@hermes.cam.ac.uk> I quite agree with Asma's question as to what are SA universities doing to encourage black graduate students (black as inclusive) to take part in the SAHS. I think there is a great potential out there, but low esteem, coyness, inferiority complex and simply lack of information, sometimes. This is also very true of young women of all groups (Asma was one of the very few at last year conference). There is a lot that the emergence of black academics can do to the struggling, but promising black students. Fortunately, they are beginning to emerge in some universities. Also pleasing is the existence of progressive senior historians (some are now assuming headships). They should be supported and commended for their redress measures rather than reading fall of standards. Whose standards? They should be protected at whose expense? These are obvious questions, but ignoring them will have real dire conequences for SA history. There is also the embarrassing question of the backwardness of the school history curriculum whose main aim was political. I think if current changes in history are to be sustained, a similar focus should be put on school history as on academic history. My young brother still learns history as if it started in 1652; it is still loaded with the rises and falls of white political parties; blacks feature largely as rebels etc; the revisions of as early as the 1970s are absent. No wonder many in education policy-related structures think history as it is has no place in the new educational dispensation, they naively think we can do without history as a school subject anyway- few, if any, are historians for most that tell me this are black. Let me hold it here.
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