But South Africa is grappling to decide what to replace them with. You have this old history which is that South Africa starts in 1652 with the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck. The problem is what you replace that with. It's the only country in Africa that had slaves imported from other parts of Africa, and when some of those slaves were freed they took slaves themselves. The problem is to address this kind of thing without vilifying one group and making martyrs of another.
Nothing is straightforward in our history.
The first stage of officially reassessing South Africa's history has focused on schools, which are still waiting for the government to decide what will be taught, let alone rewrite the text books and print them. There was common agreement that history is discredited and therefore in crisis. It is a considerable irony that we are having to address a 'crisis in history' when the pressing importance of history continues to be demonstrated daily in South Africa. For we live in a society in which contemporary issues are continually understood and judged within the powerful context of a past which has bequeathed a violent legacy of conquest, colonialism and apartheid. The result of the crisis is a school system still heavily reliant on the old history books.