Know the past to grasp today: Political grandstanding on a sickening scale deprives us of opportunity to teach and to learn

Written by Jonathan Jansen

What is the difference between the defacing of Archbishop Tutu's statue in East London (2008) and the tearing down of HF Verwoerd's statue in Meyerton (2011)?

Not much, if you think about it (please read the preceding five last words again), for it is done by the same sort of people for the same kinds of reasons with the same kinds of consequences. It is done by people who believe that destroying symbols you do not like, or of those whose ideas you disagree with, is an appropriate way of acting in the world. It is the same people who burnt down the office of a principal in a Cape Town township school last week as they disagree with his position that school premises should not be used in school hours for electioneering politics.

To respond to my question with full-throated indignation, that the Arch is good and HF was evil, is to miss the point of the question. Tutu is often slandered by young thugs in politics, and his bust was once defiled after he spoke out against bad behaviour in powerful circles.

To claim that Arch is a good man is incontestable. And to claim that HF was a terrible man, whose racist ideas contributed to the miserable social, economic and educational lives of black people, is self-evident.

So the good versus evil argument is not only medieval sentiment, it is unhelpful in the present. What I am concerned about is our national tendency, against good and bad people, to destroy without thought.

Of course, in the case of the Meyerton debacle, the removal of the statue was pure political opportunism. Not only did that statue of HF exist under both ANC and DA administrations, and nobody cared, there are hundreds of roads and statues and other symbols of terrible people from our apartheid past that today exist peacefully in big cities and small towns of South Africa.

If what led to the removal of HF's statue were deep and considered deliberations in local communities about the meanings and appropriateness of apartheid symbols in and around our municipalities, I for one would take sides on a decision to consign Verwoerdian symbols to the dustbin of history.

But this did not happen. What we saw was political grandstanding on a sickening scale and the loss of another opportunity to teach and to learn about our tragic past. That is what I, as a teacher, lament today, the loss of teaching moments in the political madness that engulfs us.

My main concern therefore about the removal of Verwoerd's statue is this: how do we teach our children, black and white, about the violent past, if we remove all evidence of its existence? To use a wicked parallel, imagine how much more difficult it would be to teach about dinosaurs in the absence of physical evidence of their fossil remains?

Rather than teach about Verwoerd and his place in Meyerton and South African politics, we tear down reminders of his existence as if such destructive acts in and of themselves rids our society of the racism and inequality that he and the system he supported bequeathed to our country. In short, we displace deliberation with destruction, pedagogy with penalty, and engagement with eviction.

There is now a generation of post-apartheid children who know nothing about Verwoerd, except to use his Dutch name as a swearword. They will not learn that there were Verwoerds in more recent generations that stood against the mad ideologies of this Stellenbosch professor, and joined the ANC. They will never hear of the racial and ideological complexities of his killer, Demetrios Tsafendas. They will not understand why Trevor Manuel's comparison of Jimmy Manyi with HF Verwoerd was so stinging a reminder of how race-essentialist ideas can survive the removal of the bust of an evil man. All these political youth will know is that anything you do not like, good or bad, you destroy.

Given that most of our high school children will leave school without any senior certificate qualifications in history, these public spaces where symbols of various kinds stand must be used to teach about the past as a way of understanding the present and anticipating the future.

Public history must not be reduced to tourist history (Apartheid Museum) or nostalgic history (Voortrekker Monument).

Our children must urgently and critically learn about Verwoerd, or else we risk the birth of many more of his spiritual offspring, not all of them white.

(This story was provided and used with permission by Timeslive.)