The construction of the African being in South African history textbooks

Abstract

This study is rooted in the move by the South African government at the turn of the 21stcentury to spearhead the conception of what then President Thabo Mbeki referred to as anAfrican Renaissance. This move entailed cultivating an African consciousness; educationbeing one of the key tools. With textbooks still playing a critical role in the educationsystem, I analysed South African National Curriculum Statement-compliant historytextbooks in order to understand the construction of the African being. I employed a criticaldiscourse analysis methodology to analyse a sample of four contemporary South Africanhistory textbooks with a focus on the chapters that deal with post-colonial Africa. At adescriptive level of analysis, the textbooks construct the African being as five-dimensional:the spatial, the physical, the philosophical, the cultural and the experiential notions. Theinterpretation is that the African being is constructed as multidimensional. I usepostcolonial theory to explain that while the macro-level of power produces the dominantdiscourses, the micro-level of the citizen also contributes to the discourses that permeate thehistory textbooks. Indeed, the production of textbooks is influenced by multifarious factorsthat when the discourses from the top and from below meet at the meso-level of textbookproduction, there is not just articulation but also resistance, thus producing heteroglossicrepresentation of the African being.

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