Teaching the Past in All Its ‘Messiness’: Slavery in the Grade 7 Curriculum

Abstract

The title of this article is inspired by Peter Novick's injunction in his The Holocaust and Collective Memory (2001) to allow for encounters with the past in all its ‘messiness’, as a way of helping school learners to develop life-long habits of autonomous thinking, reasoning and working both systematically and imaginatively through evidence that might assist them in making difficult ethical choices. The article analyses one aspect of the current Grade 7 curriculum in South Africa, namely slavery at the Cape. It then proceeds, by following up on one of the items in the curriculum to imagine an age-appropriate way of exploring, with the aid of a Collingwood notion of re-enactment, the brutal ideology of paternalism that several South African historians have argued was central to the maintenance, not only of slavery, but also later systems of labour control and reproduction.