To be Gobsmacked that someone doesn't know who Nelson Mandela is?

[Skeptical]

A very religious American lady was telling me all about how she has chosen to homeschool her children because she doesn't want them taught evolution. I was shocked enough by this, but then the conversation turned to history and what we are taught in English scools. I described how a big part of my GCSE's was about South African history and especially Nelson Mandela. Her response was "yes he was a great example of Englishness, oh you guys have done so much good in Africa"

I was completely shocked. I can't believe that someone doesn't know who he is and his history! It's even more alarming because this woman is homeschooling not only her own children but several others as well.

AIBU to think people who homeschool their children should do some sort of test to actually prove they know what they are on about?

LDNMummy, to be honest, I've never encountered that.

There is the "African Renaissance" at the moment and there is a huge emphasis on pan-African identity. I didn't go back for nearly a decade and noticed a distinct difference - south africans, or at least white south africans, were much more willing to identify themselves as African, whereas before they seemed to aspire to be Amerian or English.

I think there's more of a southern african/central african divide. The Maghreb though is just another planet - it's not really African at all.

I went to school and university in SA and would agree largely with Abs' assessment of what we learnt at school. However, my school was terribly liberal and forward thinking (natch) so we had some interesting additional elements whereby they actively encouraged different styles of teaching in different classes so while studying for final exams with friends, we were all quite surprised to discover that while we'd been learning the same facts, they'd been portrayed significantly different according to whose class you were in (I was in the "go revolutionaries" class which in retrospect, I wonder how much that affected me forever after! )

I subsequently studied history at university level and almost all my history studies were African, not just South African. We did very little European or American history and when we did, it was at the broadest levels. We could choose within Africa what we studied though so I took a combination of classes - others focused almost exclusively on Southern Africa.

As a South African, I think its sad this woman didn't know about Mandela, but I have no doubt that there are loads of very important civil rights leaders in the US about whom I know almost nothing. Similarly, what I know about Latin American history is woefully light. I'm okay on Europe but weak again on Asia. Even people with a specific interest in a topic, will fine tune and focus on just that

I know someone who has taken history as a GCSE, got a good grade and was born in the UK, lived here all of her life, yet she had never even heard of Margaret Thatcher!

Bling, that sounds AMAZING

I regret that I didn't stay to Matric, as we finally moved on from the freaking voortrekkers and started doing the origins of apartheid, which was incredibly interesting. Then studied history for A Level and University in the UK, and at University level I refused to do African history, as the slant was "colonies and colonialisation". I thought it was a rather depressing view of Africa, so went Medieval and Fundamentalist movements instead.

Yes - the first time you realise the Voortrekkers and the Xhosa didn't just "meet" at Fish River... it's a revelation!

Oh, and some of that colonialism stuff is frightening when you study it from the African perspective. I will never forget reading first hand sources (diaries, letters etc) from the Eastern Cape during the 19th Century and reading accounts of things like African chiefs being made to literally kiss the feet of the English general in town or whatever. Some of the missionaries stuff was horrific as well and just makes you think WTF.

No one person can know everything.

One of the biggest shocks of my life (and I had way more than my fair share trust me) was visiting (with all my family, kids 14-19) the slave trade market and 'storage' facilities in Zanzibar's Stone Town, now a museum of course.

No matter how much you study this from the comfort of the warm and light classroom, personal encounters bring you to hell and back in no time.

Man, I never got to do that. I did get to do a lot of "if you were a voortrekker, this is what your life would have been like" and trips to the giant 1950s radio Voortrekker monument in Tshwane/Pretoria (incidentally, a lot of my early history teachers were Afrikaans).

'this woman was in her 40's, so in the early 90's when everything was happening and he was all over the news she would have been in her 20's. So not really even history, just general knowledge I suppose. How could she have missed it? '

The idea that something would have been all over the news in the US is where you're going wrong. American commercial media in the late 80s and early 90s was appalling -- coverage of major events like the fall of Communism was a joke, and the internet was only really in its infancy at that time.

Historically, though, the US has not really had any ties to SA, and events there would not have resonated in the way they did in the UK; the African American community felt more connected to the end of apartheid than the majority, but the media tends not to reflect the preoccupations of the minority. There was absolutely no excuse for the woeful treatment of events in Europe however.

In defense of American history education, I was very impressed by the courses taught at DD1's US high school and the level at which they were taught. She studied World history, American history (AP course) and Middle Eastern history. However, not all students took these courses, except for World history which was a graduation requirement in her school, and of course it is up to each individual student to actually learn something in any given class.

FlorenceCalamnty -- I have to say I agree with your post about British lack of knowledge when it comes to Ireland; mind you I think the same could equally apply to Ireland. I don't know if my primary school was the exception but I never learned a single detail about British geography in school, while I could name every single major river, mountain range, city, port, railway junction, source of various raw materials and large industrial area of mainland Europe (western Europe at any rate). Primary school history started with the Iron Age and ended in 1916, so it definitely had a theme of the Irish colonial experience and 'struggle for freedom' in the later years, with references to the wider world thrown in as needed to explain Irish events. Modern European history for the Inter Cert and Leaving had a decent curriculum though.

YANBU

Abs: I so agree with you about the change in white South Africans perceptions of themselves as Africans.

Having left because of the politics when I was 3 (my dad had been active in student oppositon to the Nationalist Party and had a police file - which he only found out about 'cos someone came to ask him about his farm being for sale and he saw his file on the car seat; the farm wasn't for sale, as he was passing it to his brother and the only other people who knew they were leaving were my mum's parents ) and having been brought up to be very aware of the politics (understandably), I only visited in my mid teens (with my brother but not my parents who wouldn't - then- go back) and then again in my late 20s, just as Mandela was being released.

I saw the difference in my uncle (my mum's brother) - someone who was a real hedonist and who considered himself to be a liberal but really didn't want to think about politics (he was in Durban ) - but who was finally describing himself as an African (not even a white African). He even acknowledged that the sports boycott had worked - that it wasn't nice to think that world didn't want to play with you. (Non-South Africans really can't understand how obsessed the white South Africans were with sport, especially rugby).

We now visit ever 2-3 years and it is fascintating to watch the changes and the challenges that it faces.

As an irrelevant aside: on my father's side I am descended from South Africa's first ever post man! :)

The most interesting change I've observed (from people I went to school with, so limited) is with the blacks, particularly (like the ones I know) those who grew up amongst middle class whites (e.g. going to private schools).

All the black boys I went to school with were obsessed with African American culture; they all listened to rap and hip hop, talked like P diddy etc. (before he was P Diddy); most wanted to leave SA when they could to go to the States. Fast forward 10 years - the guys I'm back in touch with are so proudly South African. One who's now become a DJ is really into developing south african talent, and is ridiculously proud of being from Soweto. It's quite a happy change

... because I am that much older than you I never got the opportunity to get to know any non-whites as my relatives just did not know any themselves - and even if I had lived in SA, would not have been allowed to be educated alongside blacks :(.

My dad was nototrious amongst his farming neighbours for "spoiling the blacks" because he allocated decent housing and paid a living wage to his workers

Prettybird - well done to your dad. Both our families got similar. MIL refused to have an outside toilet for blacks (why shouldn't they use the same one as everyone else) and the neighbours complained.

My grandma had the nanny/mother's help to eat with them and neighbours complained about that too. She felt if someone was good enough to bring up her precious children, she was good enough to share a table with! She left in the end, couldn't stand being chastised for being human.

It's good to read these stories. My parents were not activists but in their own wsy they did things that I only realise were revolutionary now. My mother's best friend was in prison on a number of occasions but j still remember her being present for family things because my parents would not desert her. And the nanny they nursed in secret in our home for weeks after she was stabbed.

The thing about south Africa is that there were lots of people who weren't bad necessarily, and lots of people who were very very good. I remain optimistic about the country because of that.