An analysis of the construction of African consciousness in contemporary South African history textbooks.

But more dominant, on the other hand, is the exceptionality of South Africa and the South African from the construction of Africa and the African being. I argue that the kind of African consciousness that is promoted in the textbooks to a greater extent leads to the polar affect, which is a preference of the group with which one identifies over others.

Introduction
Background and contextualisation
Rationale and motivation of study
Focus and purpose
Key research questions
Research design and methodology
Outline of the thesis
Conclusion

It is clear that the position of South Africa in Africa is a decisive aspect of the discourses on South African foreign policy. A description of the South African context reveals that the country does not have one official perspective of Africa and being African.

Introduction

Discourses on the origins and meanings of Africa as a designation

This can be considered as the beginning of the view of Africa as the area south of the Sahara. Nevertheless, by the time of the Arab settlement of the Maghreb (North Africa around the Mediterranean Sea), following the Islamic attacks of the 7th century AD, there is evidence that the construct Africa was used with an attachment to races ( and religious) connotations.

Discourses on Africanness

On the other hand, African Americans are Africans by blood (black race) but not by land (continent). This is the basis of the anthropologist's argument that the two Africas (Sub-Saharan and Maghreb) have separate, homogeneous cultures.

Towards an understanding of African consciousness as a conceptual framework

African consciousness is also about connecting the past, present and future with the self and space. Finally, with reference to the possibility of multiple forms of African consciousness, I refer to Rüsen's (1993) typology of historical consciousness.

Figure 1.1: An adapted framework for African consciousness

Conclusion

Breaking with the norm, this type of consciousness would be characteristic of an individual who does not necessarily conform to the constructions of the dominant discourses that the elite usually make for the rest of society. This implies an understanding of Africa and the African being that is based on accepting what can be seen as foreign to what society considers normal. Genetically African consciousness would mean that anyone or anything can qualify to be described as of Africa or as an African being.

Introduction

Katzen (1983, p. 37) who assert that "the field of textbook analysis has been particularly concerned with historical teaching materials." This does not mean that I have neglected studying for textbooks in general. Following this introduction is the first part of the textbook and is divided into seven subsections. The second section is about History textbooks and how they are sites of collective memory that can construct consciousness.

The textbook

I begin the first part by explaining the position of the textbook as an aspect of educational media. However, questioning the aforementioned dominance of the textbook in the teaching and learning process is not an entirely new development. As a process to restart textbook production, one of the main disputes was the role of the international community in the production of History textbooks (Maposa, in press).

Figure 3.1: The three levels of genre, subgenre and micro-genre

History textbooks and the construction of consciousness

As Gordon (2005) noted, what is in history textbooks plays a large role in the construction of a national narrative within which the ideologies and norms of the powerful are veiled. From the above arguments, it can be seen that the content in the history textbooks can be responsible for the African consciousness of the students, in addition to the subgenre. The chapter concludes that the discipline of history has a nature that forces history textbooks to follow a particular subgenre.

Research on issues related to History textbooks in South Africa

According to Waller (2009), Auerbach acknowledged but did not explore issues of stakeholder involvement in the production of History textbooks. On the contrary, Pretorius (2007) argues that Afrikaner history does not even appear in post-apartheid History textbooks. The latter explored the concept of historical literacy and how it was promoted in History texts.

Conclusion: The gap exposed by the reviewed literature

The limited amount of research on History textbooks in Africa, compared to international trends, justifies the need to do more research in the field. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze the African consciousness that can be constructed in South African History textbooks, taking into account the gaps and motivations that have been reviewed in the literature. Although the literature review explained how History textbooks can construct African consciousness, the study went on to show this construction and the contestations involved.

Introduction

This leads to a section on controversies about postcolonial theory, which led me to the “game of belief” and the “game of doubt” (Elbow, as cited in Maxwell, 2010). The final section before concluding this chapter explains how an understanding of discourse theory enriches postcolonial theory in the form of discursive postcolonialism. Therefore, the narrative style helps to show how the theory was an integral part of the wider thinking as I developed my study.

Conceptual framework: possibilities and limitations

With this understanding I decided to refer to African consciousness conceptualized in Chapter 2 as a conceptual framework. The second function of my conceptual framework was for the analysis and discussion of data. At a higher level, the conceptual framework also helped me to make abstractions of the findings as seen in Chapter 6.

Embracing theory

The struggle to identify a theoretical framework for my study would be complicated as I searched for a theory that fully explained what I was doing. In addition, Maxwell (2010, p. 5) warns that "any theory both reveals some aspects of that reality and distorts or conceals other aspects." This meant that no matter which theory I had to deal with, there would always be weaknesses. Therefore, in the rest of this chapter, I explain how the two theories, on the one hand, added value to my study; and on another created constraints.

Postcolonialism: its volatility and contestations

However, being postcolonial does not automatically guarantee that textbooks are postcolonial in terms of the nature of the discourses they convey. However, the use of the term “postcolonialism” as a temporal marker is fraught with complications due to the overlapping of colonial and postcolonial. Despite the complications, postcolonial theory has facilitated my contention that South Africa is currently in its postcolonial period since 1994.

Discursive postcolonialism

It is for this reason that this section explains discursive postcolonialism through a discussion of the main tenets of discourse theory. To understand discourse theory, one must trace the roots of the concept of discourse. Using this thinking, it can be argued that the dominant controllers of the context (usually politicians) follow certain discourses that play a role in building an African consciousness within the ordinary citizen.

Conclusion

Due to the nature of my study and the thread of my thoughts, discursive postcolonialism was an ideal theoretical framework for the research. In order to achieve the purpose of this chapter, I first needed to explain my study's need for a theoretical framework. After defining discursive postcolonialism as a theoretical framework, I acknowledged the role of discourse theory within it.

Introduction

A hallmark of qualitative research like this is the fluidity of meanings and concepts. Similarly, the research literature shows that researchers tend to often use contrasting understandings of key research concepts, such as research design, strategies, styles, approaches, methodologies and methods (Wellington et al., 2007; Babbie et al. , 2008; Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2009; Mouton, 2011). However, as will be shown in this chapter, a research design, in this study, refers to the plan that represents the type of study I conducted, while a methodology is the overall process of conducting the study.

Paradigmatic considerations

Here, a social constructionist view implies that I take people as responsible for the construction of knowledge and reality (Wellington et al., 2007). A social constructionist viewpoint recognizes the role of the textbook user in the user's mental construction of African consciousness. My acceptance of the social constructionist paradigm was not based solely on my ontological and epistemological assumptions.

Research design

Although research designs can consist of other aspects, these are the basic four that I focused on in classifying my research design. i) Nature of the study (ii) Nature of data. iii) Type of data (iv) Data control. Therefore, criticism of textbook analysis can be seen to involve the nature and position of the subject explained above. So, instead of analyzing the source of the image, I analyzed the role of the image as it is used in the textbook to create meaning, making it secondary data analysis.

Methodological considerations

Much of the work in textbook research is found in references that deal exclusively with textbook analysis (Mikk, 2000; Nicholls, 2003; Pingel, 2010). I became involved in the generation of data first through the selection of specific parts of the textbooks for analysis. At this point I gave descriptions of the visuals associated with Africa and the African beings.

Ethical considerations

For example, I created themes about Africa after combining related codes and categories, drawing heavily on concepts from Chapter 2. Therefore, I did not pursue the connotations of these findings in the two descriptive chapters. In Chapter 9, I explained the findings with a view to designing the theorization of African consciousness in South African history textbooks.

Issues of trustworthiness

As previously mentioned, I also visited the Georg Eckert Institute twice where I was exposed to international textbook research literature and experts and had the chance to make two presentations, one on my methodology and the other on my findings. All of these ways of sharing my work worked to increase the trustworthiness of the study.

Conclusion

Introduction

This is the first of two chapters in which I present the findings of the analysis described in the methodology chapter in response to the first two of the three sub-questions above. Consequently, the findings are organized and presented in two chapters (6 and 7); the first is a description of findings about Africa, and the second is about an African creature. Therefore, the visual text findings described in this chapter are predominantly from Textbook 1 and Textbook 4.

Themes on Africa

The meaning constructed by case study presentation of the countries of Africa is different. Therefore, the analysis revealed an unstable construction of the concept of Africa in the verbal text of the selected textbooks. As with the verbal text, however, there are cases in the visual representation of the spatial idea of Africa where Africa is not constructed as one unit.