Honour heroic Aggett by changing History curriculum

Thembile Ndabeni

CAPE TOWN - If we can all know how to answer the question “what is history?”

February 05, 2022 marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Neil Aggett. As a history learner in high school, we were undermined and mocked as dumb for studying about the dead. You were seen as a person with no future because you were doing what was considered a worthless subject.

Then you would be asked, how is it going to help as a career in studying the dead?

This took its toll, frustrating some of us. It is unfortunate that that narrow narrative got its way for a long time. In a way it is still getting its way, because the curriculum of history has not undergone a complete transformation.

It is because of this perception that the likes of the courageous late Dr Neil Aggett are not known. As a result, there are no lessons that were drawn from this noble white political son of Africa.

I elect to state his nationality because that on its own is a special statement. He was not a superman with a superpower, but only an ordinary human being created by God.

With God’s conscience in him he was touched by what was done by other human beings (white people) to other human beings (Africa/Black people).

He could not turn a blind eye when people created by the same God were inhumanly treated by others.

If the curriculum was fundamentally transformed, science learners/students would have realised the value of history as a subject.

They would come to their senses that the study of history entails knowing about the likes of Dr Aggett, the route they took and why.

In essence, what made a medical doctor join the broader struggle of freeing the other people, who were not white as he was, from his own white people.

Dr Aggett contributed to the “free” South Africa we live in. Let us forget now about the merits and demerits of freeness of our country and focus on the fact that opportunities and gates are open across.

In the past “gates” were closed to African/Black people and people of colour in general even in small things like public amenities, parks, toilets etc; even treatment of the ill, ailing, and the dying, was based on the colour of the skin. That is history. That is what Dr Aggett could not tolerate.

He committed both colour and class suicide. He forgot about his whiteness and joined the black people in the struggle against oppression from his fellow white people.

Harping on the late honoured founding president of the PAC, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, I argue that Dr Aggett was an African politically.

This is because he committed “colour suicide” and joined the broader national struggle to free the oppressed African majority from the yoke of the evil white-minority colonial apartheid regime.

One of the first things he did was learning a language of the people he worked with, isiZulu.

That was for communication, so that there was no communication barrier. He “committed class suicide”, being a medical doctor joining a trade union, not of white people but of the poorest of the poor, the down-trodden and exploited toiling masses of our people.

He was an unpaid organiser of the Food and Canning Workers’ Union in the Transvaal.

As much as his life ended painfully, he is a hero to most of the people who were oppressed by the white minority.

He crossed the floor knowing what to expect. Jesus Christ was killed by His own because he challenged the evil they were doing.

It is long overdue; the curriculum of History needs and must be changed with his contribution at the centre. I wish all the success in the inquest of his death for two reasons or so; firstly, for the family to get closure, and secondly, for the evil people behind his death to be exposed.

The law must take its course. To the union he served, or related unions, do the current members know about him? If not, what are you doing about it? Have you honoured him?

Compared to his killers who went down in history as heartless pathetic human beings, he went down as a hero. This quotation suits him very well: “He saw unrighteousness rampant and injustice enthroned. He saw ignorance supreme and parading up and down in the guise of knowledge” (Charles Leslie Wayper, 1954:16).

Thembile Ndabeni is a former history tutor at the University of the Western Cape, and former educator at Bulumko Senior Secondary in Khayelitsha

Cape Times