Professor Dr. Raymond, is an Associate Professor of History and Social Sciences in the Faculty of Education at Sola University. He is also the Head of the Department of Teaching Humanities at Sola University. Sola University is located in Ley, South Africa. It is one of the newest post-1994 universities in South Africa.
How is the role of the Soviet Union in World War II presented in South African history textbooks?
The topic, which depicts Russia's role in World War II, is in a ninth-grade social studies textbook. My observation is that it is limited. It focuses mainly on the war in the Pacific, the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. And it makes little mention of the plot, of the Russians and the hardships they endured in terms of human life and bravery. So the Red Army and Russia is presented largely in terms of the reaction to Adolf Hitler's actions. But notwithstanding this, it is also mentioned that it was part of the Allied forces that contributed to the downfall of Adolf Hitler.
I just don't have the range. If you take, for example, that it's a chapter, it's a topic for about 20 pages, it's only about one paragraph that talks about the role of Russia. Everything else is more about what was going on in Germany and the persecution of the Jews, but even in the war itself, it's more about the war in the Pacific. So I think the scope is limited to the very important and significant role that Russia played.
To what extent are students in your country aware of what the Eastern Front was and the Red Army's contribution to victory?
To follow up on my answer to the previous question, because it is a very limited narrative of the whole. So students are not very informed about the important role that the Russians played. And that has to do with the nature of the curriculum. The curriculum is the vehicle that enforces the curriculum along with the textbooks. So if the textbook is not very explicit, not very detailed, not very elaborate, then the students are also not informed. So what students are informed about is mostly about the atrocities of Germany.
It's mainly about the role of the Western powers, Britain and France, and to a large extent the US, but it's also about what was going on in the Pacific, because that's what the textbook focuses a lot on. So when you ask students about civilian casualties, the Battle of Stalingrad and so on, they're not really informed because of the shortcomings of the textbook itself.
Those textbooks do not include such key events as the Battle of Stalingrad, the role of the Normandy landings and the Battle of Berlin?
Actually, no. It is mentioned in passing, but I would like to say, as I said, more needs to be done in terms of giving space in the curriculum to elaborate on some of these very key issues. I was saying that the textbook, one of the textbooks that I analyzed, only gives a short paragraph about all of this, all of these battles, but even the ninth grade curriculum itself only mentions it. Now it's left to the textbooks to analyze. But unfortunately many textbooks don't do that, for whatever reasons, the textbooks mostly focus on the war in the Pacific.
Did the situation change after the end of the Cold War or after 1994 with democracy in South Africa?
As far as I know it has changed, before 1994 and after 1994 there is a different way in which the South African curriculum and the South African education system sees communism itself. Before 1994 we observed that communism was a taboo subject by the National Party, it was a subject that should not, could not be discussed in school and in the curriculum and so on. And even when it was talked about, it was talked about in a way that discouraged the ideology. But we see that after 1994 that changed because the new democratic South Africa embraced the ideology of communism. In fact, we have a South African Communist Party that is in the Alliance and is a partner of the ANC.
So there's the South African Communist Party as part of the government. And that's also changed. The way of thinking and the ideology in which, the government embraced communism, and also the way the curriculum also embraced communism, changed the way of thinking. But that's the only aspect where you see a change in the portrayal and representation of Russia from the apartheid period to the post-apartheid period. It's just in terms of the portrayal of communism in terms of the portrayal of World War II and the role of Russia. Nothing has really changed. Yes, there is the sense that Russia was not a significant partner in the war effort against Nazism, perhaps deliberately so.
Are there discussions in the South African education community about the roles of the various Allied nations in World War II?
Yes, there are talks going on, but unfortunately they are not focused on the voice of Russia or the history of Russia.
This is a process we call the decolonisation of the curriculum. So we actually want to remove more Western perspectives, and Russia could perhaps be one of those Western perspectives. And talk more about the role that Africa and Africans have played in that world. So it's a process of decolonization, now we have African voices, African soldiers, African civilians, what have they played? How they were victims of that and so on. So that's where the conversation is going. And the new curriculum? It's going to be a curriculum that will foreground Africa, African narratives, African voices and African perspectives more than Western narratives. So that's where the conversation is heading.
How are the current attempts to revise the results of the war perceived in South Africa, especially with regard to the role of the USSR and Russia? Especially with regard to the role of the USSR and Russia in South Africa.
There are a lot of conversations going on that started from a movement we called Rhodes Must Fall. That sparked a debate around the Africanization of the curriculum and the decolonization of the curriculum. So there's this huge sense of engaging African voices. And to reduce the influence of European perspectives. I mean, and when Europe and I talk about European perspectives, it includes Russia, it includes the US with Arab, and to the fore, really African voices, African people, and their contribution to international historical events. But in this case, including the Second World War. So it's not the intention, the effort in South Africa at the moment to revise the curriculum with the hope of adding a voice or increasing the narrative about Russia's role in World War II at this stage.
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