But there are learners here who say it was better to have a white government than a black government. To the disquiet of some teachers, a survey by Johannesburg's Witwatersrand University discovered that a high proportion of black schoolchildren want to know more, not less, about Jan van Riebeeck. But it is not the old Bantu education version they are interested in. What pupils are curious about are the real reasons that whites came at all, and what happened next to the black people who encountered the Dutch settlers. Bashe says that in many ways it would be easier to leave history out of the curriculum.
History is very difficult.
It's very difficult to say these are the facts and these facts are beyond question. If you look at the role of Shaka and his part in building the Zulu nation, he was taking over the smaller ethnic groups and some fled to what is Lesotho now. Zulu students may see him as a hero, but Shaka is not a hero to those he chased out. They will understand this is a wrong thing and that is why this must never happen again. So if the government says we are going to oppress the white people who did this to us, they need to understand why that is wrong.