History for builders

Economic history deserves to be part of the new South African History curriculum

Imagine you could rewind about twelve thousand years. In the hills of the Fertile Crescent, something extraordinary was beginning – and, over the millennia that followed, in the Yangtze basin, in southern Mexico, and in the highlands of New Guinea too. People were gathering wild grasses and planting the seeds in soil they had cleared. They were penning sheep and goats instead of only hunting them. They were scratching the earth with digging sticks and waiting, on purpose, for something to grow.

This is the Neolithic Revolution. After the Industrial Revolution, it is probably the most consequential event in human history. It produced the first food surpluses – and, over the millennia that followed, the cities, writing, specialised labour, kings, priests, soldiers, merchants and bureaucrats that a surplus makes possible. It reshaped almost every aspect of what it means to be human.

So how does the new draft South African History curriculum teach this pivotal moment? Under a Grade 5 topic titled ‘Food’, built around the question: ‘How do we know what people ate in the past?’

Not ‘Why did people start farming?’ Not ‘What changed when they did?’ What did they eat.

For the past few weeks, the public debate about the amended History Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements has focused on one thing: its Africanness. Is it too Afrocentric? Does it sideline the French Revolution, the civil rights movement, Jan van Riebeeck, the Holocaust? Is it patriotic history dressed up in new clothes? These are serious questions, and serious historians have asked them.

But there is one major question that the curriculum has failed to address that I think is the more important one.

For most of human history, almost everyone was poor. Not poor as we understand the word today. Poor as in one or two dollars a day, in today’s money, for nearly all of humanity. Life expectancy of about thirty years. Child mortality of around forty per cent. Famine always one failed harvest away.

Then, roughly 250 years ago, something changed. In pockets of north-western Europe, and eventually across much of the world, living standards began to rise. First slowly. Then astonishingly fast. The average human today is eighteen times richer than in 1800. Global child mortality has fallen from 43 per cent to under four. Extreme poverty, which afflicted nearly half the world as recently as 1980, has fallen below ten.

This is the story of how humanity escaped poverty. It is the central story of the past two centuries. And it is still being written, not least in South Africa, where we remain caught between the world we came from and the one we are trying to build.

Here is the striking thing. In the new draft curriculum, this story is almost entirely absent.

Economic history – the study of how societies become prosperous – has been sidelined. The word ‘productivity’ does not appear in the Intermediate Phase curriculum. The idea of institutions as the rules that determine who benefits from trade and innovation is nowhere. Comparative advantage, structural transformation, human capital: absent. The Industrial Revolution is taught as a story of child labour and European imperialism, not as the moment when, for the first time in history, humans figured out how to generate widespread prosperity. The Mineral Revolution is taught almost entirely through the lens of exploitation. South Africa’s economic story, in Grade 12, ends in the 1930s. Nothing on what happened after 1994. Nothing on why growth stalled after 2008. Nothing on what young South Africans might do about it.

Put differently: a learner can complete twelve years of History without once being asked why some societies are rich and others are poor. A learner can finish Grade 12 without hearing an optimistic, evidence-based account of how humans have, repeatedly, figured out how to live better.

This begs the question: what is the purpose of historical learning? In the post-apartheid era, much has been said about the importance of History for nation-building: preparing young learners to be well-informed, responsible citizens. In 2018, a Ministerial Task Team recommended, rather ambitiously, that History should be made compulsory up to matric. That all sounds rather admirable, except that it’s unrealistic if no one wants to take the subject to begin with.

In the United States the number of students graduating with humanities degrees has fallen for eight consecutive years. History as a major has collapsed. Though the subject has always been relatively small, at its peak History majors accounted for 5.7% of US bachelor degrees in the late 1960s, in 2019 that number was less than 1.2%. Why? Setting aside questions of employability and earnings for History graduates, the bigger problem seems to be that History has a reputation problem. At best, the subject is perceived as dry fact, at worst, it gets dismissed as irrelevant and impractical.

So what’s the problem? It seems it is a question of relevance. The subject is important, but in an abstract sense. People want to know more about the past because they believe historical knowledge is intrinsically important. But a subject which is abstractly important struggles to attract builders – the people who want to make things, start things, fix things. Those students go elsewhere. They head for engineering, computer science, business where the link between action and outcome are more readily apparent.

A history that fails to give learners an account of how change actually occurs – how poor societies have, in specific and identifiable ways, become richer, freer, healthier – fails to empower them. Empowerment comes from whether a subject explains how change happens. Economic history excels at identifying what incentives people faced, how institutions shaped behaviour, how small change compounds over time. It turns facts into mechanisms and supplies actionable insights.

Without that, how do we teach a young South African that poverty is not destiny?

None of this is to say that slavery, colonialism and apartheid should be taught less. They should be taught well – and economic history can help teach them better.

Why did the transatlantic slave trade happen? Not because Europeans were uniquely cruel. But because an institution took hold that made human beings into property – a form of capital that could be bought, mortgaged and put to work on sugar plantations at a scale no free labour market could supply. And because that demand, meeting European firearms, transformed African political economies too: kingdoms that could capture and sell people acquired guns, wealth and the coercive power to capture more. The trade wrote itself into institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. And why were its consequences so lasting? The economist Nathan Nunn has shown that African countries from which more enslaved people were taken are significantly poorer today – not because of some inherent disadvantage, but because the slave trade destroyed social trust. Communities that had to fear enslavement by their own neighbours grew mistrustful of strangers, and that mistrust still shows up, measurably, in surveys today.

Economics does not diminish the horror of slavery. It deepens it, by showing that the damage extended far beyond the millions of lives directly destroyed.

In the report I submitted to the Minister last week, I make a simple argument. Nothing I am suggesting requires a new curriculum. Nothing demands extra teaching time. It is a shift in framing: bring the economic dimension back into topics already taught, so that learners leave school with a fuller picture of the human past.

Take Grade 6, where learners study the trans-Saharan trade. The topic already describes gold, salt and cowrie shells moving across the desert. Add one question: what made Mali rich? A big part of the answer is exchange – Mali controlled the gold fields of Bambuk and Bure to the south, the Saharan salt mines lay a thousand miles to the north, and caravans crossing between them enriched elites on both ends. Mali taxed, conquered and enslaved too. But a great deal of its fabled wealth came from trade rather than plunder – and that is a powerful corrective to the assumption that African wealth, wherever it appears, must have been taken from someone else.

Take Grade 8, where learners study the Industrial Revolution. The framing is ‘what were the inventions, what were the social consequences?’ Add one more question: why did it happen in Britain, and not in China or India, both of which had been much richer a few centuries earlier? The answer – which involves institutions, property rights, scientific culture and incentives for innovation – is one of the most important questions in all of history. It is also directly relevant to a country still negotiating its own industrial transformation.

Take Grade 12, where we currently stop the South African economic story in the 1930s. Bring it forward. Teach the Mandela-Mbeki years, when growth returned and poverty fell. Teach the post-2008 stagnation. Teach state capture and the dismal economic performance, exposing the contrast with other developing countries that have outpaced us. Learners deserve to understand the country they are inheriting.

I do not make this case only as a critic. The ten South African chapters of my book Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom cover precisely this territory, from pre-colonial economies to the present. From next year, the full book will be freely available – I would love to see it in the hands of every History teacher who wants it. Alongside the book, a free-to-read graphic novel based on ten of its chapters will be published in January 2027, aimed at a high school audience. Both are offered as resources for any teacher, learner or curriculum developer who wants to bring this story into the classroom.

This is a debate worth having. The Minister and her officials have opened the curriculum for public comment precisely because they know that an early draft is not the final text. There is time to add the economic dimension without disturbing the structure they have built.

Luckily, we still have the opportunity to change this. A review commissioned by the Department of Basic Education in 2024 found that enrollment into high school-level History has actually increased in recent years. Tellingly, the report suggests this may be because History is perceived as easier than subjects like Physics. All the same, we risk losing this golden opportunity. As I wrote in my report, History education has always been important but it is especially important today. The generation now entering South Africa’s schools will inherit an economy that has not grown in per capita terms for over a decade, where unemployment stands above 30 percent and where inequality remains among the highest in the world. These are economic outcomes, and they have historical causes. A History curriculum that equips learners to understand those causes, and to imagine how they might be overcome, is a necessity.

If we learn anything from history, it is that the future is likely to be better. But it requires us to wish it so.

An edited version of this post first appeared on News24 – my final column for the platform, as my contract came to an end in April. From here on, the twice-monthly columns will continue exclusively on Our Long Walk. Writing like this is now supported directly by readers, and if you’ve valued the column over the years, a paid subscription is the most direct way to keep it going. I would be grateful for the support.