Main Trends of History Teaching in Africa From a Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

History education has always been a highly contested terrain especially in contexts whose pasts are marred by huge controversial, sensitive and emotive moments. This reality is more significant in the African continent, where issues such as slavery, colonisation, decolonisation, the partition of Africa; border crises; complexity of identity; race; apartheid, wars, xenophobia; chauvinism; military coups, forced evictions and subsequent land reclamations, are some of the key themes and discourses that are characteristic of its history. This experiential reflection and theoretical paper draw from the researcher’s personal experiences as a history teacher/lecturer in at least three African countries and from literature to reflect on the main trends of History teaching and learning in Africa. Although there has been a wave of curricular decolonisation in Africa at the turn of the century, including in History teaching, the article argues that there is still a lot of reasons to be concerned about the state of history teaching as a subject. The article acknowledges an existential and humane need for a reconstruction, decolonisation and Africanisation of the history curriculum in Africa by means of postcolonial socio-cultural and epistemic systems and practices that reclaim indigenous African voices in curriculum knowledge. The article recommends that history teaching and curriculum in postcolonial Africa need to move away from discrete and sometimes overt, heroic, one-dimensional and neatly packaged master narratives that deny students the opportunity to critically engage and interrogate the rich and complex histories as a pathway to improve the relevance of the subject in the continent.