History education for transitional justice: how students understand and construct historical legacies in the post-apartheid South African history classroom
Keywords: Transitional justice
History education
Post-conflict
South Africa
Ethnography

Central to the transitional justice agenda is a society’s attempt “to come to terms with a legacy of largescale past abuses” (United Nations, 2004, emphasis added). While there has been extensive scholarship on how students learn history in post-conflict societies, there has been almost no attention given to how students learn about historical legacies. The scholarly silence on post-conflict legacies is reflected in history curricula. The South African history curriculum – a focus of this study – deals extensively with large-scale past abuses, but does not require students to reflect on whether these past abuses have lasting effects.
This dissertation focuses on how young South Africans learn to construct legacies of historical injustices in the context of their history classrooms. It draws on nine months of ethnographic research in four Grade 9 history classrooms in Cape Town, each with a different racial composition. Every history class over three terms was observed, and teachers and students from each class were interviewed multiple times over the course of the year.
The research makes several important contributions to the field of history education and transitional justice. The first contribution is the theoretical framing of historical legacies as social constructs which are shaped by and give meaning to the present. This challenges both transitional justice scholarship which portrays legacies as “self-evident” (Stoler, 2016), and history education research which considers “legacy thinking” as an historical thinking skill (Foster et al, 2008). The socio-cultural approach to legacy construction – which this study pioneers – opens up an exciting new intersection of study.
By adopting an ethnographic methodology, this study contributes a new approach to researching how historical legacies are constructed and negotiated among young people in different classroom spaces. Wittenberg’s (Wittenberg, 2015) conceptualization of “causal legacies” provides an important framework for the analysis of ethnographic data. The study pays particular attention to the factors that mediate the construction of historical legacies – such as racial identity – and how these shape the ways in which students learn to develop explanations for contemporary society, and their own “historical identity” (Rüsen, 2014, p. 68). Lastly, this dissertation contains detailed portraits of how historical legacies are negotiated, contested, and constructed in the Grade 9 South African history classroom. It suggests that there is great diversity in how apartheid legacies are constructed, even if the “historical facts” are largely consistent. Students in some classes, for example, learn about the horrors of apartheid, but also learn that those past abuses have no influence on their lives or contemporary society.
These data furthermore demonstrate that history classrooms can have a strong influence on how students construct legacies. By exploring the contradictory ways in which students learn to construct apartheid legacies, we are in a stronger position to understand why transitional justice in South Africa continues to be so divisive.