For most of my time in middle and high school, there were only two history teachers for hundreds of us. Mrs. Aboah, referred to affectionately as “mama,” was a petite, older, Ghanaian woman with a short, cropped Afro and firm disposition, who when she liked you, would invite you to her house on campus to talk to you about her wide-ranging perspectives on history and current affairs, and the occasional story that she would let slip about her children and family whom she adored. Mrs. Wilson was a tall, African-American woman of the same generation who would rock either a headscarf or wig, with personal opinions and stories that would be constantly integrated into our lessons as she shared everything with us, from the time she was scouted as a model, to her years in Scotland, to her marriage to the Swazi man who brought her across the world.
Mrs. Aboah and Mrs. Wilson taught history in the same way. In their chairs, seated at the front of the class, they spoke for forty-plus minutes with hand-written notes in front of them that they never even glanced at, preferring instead to speak from memory about ancient civilisations, 18th century independence movements, and post-Cold War current affairs, interspersing facts and figures with their own interpretations that they would share. We sat and listened, occasionally raising our hands, frantically taking down notes that we would later compare with our rarely-opened textbooks.
History was required for the three years of middle school, then I opted to take it as a subject for the two years that I was taking my IGCSE Cambridge exams, and then for my last two years of high school, I took History as one of my three higher-level International Baccalaureate subjects. Mrs. Aboah and Mrs. Wilson taught me the history of the world, consequentially shaping how I saw it and where I wanted my place for it to be. Years later, I still think, they taught me everything I know.
History is never objective. The study of all that has come before, is irrevocably tainted by context, firstly, by all that precedes and succeeds the history being taught, and second, the meta-level circumstances in which the history in being taught. Any assertions claiming neutrality are not only disingenuous, but they miss the point completely by failing to pose the question that it aspires to answer. Not how to teach it, but why do we teach history at all?
History is myth creation. It is telling the story of a moment, or a people, or a place, not in its staticity, but in retrospective reflection. We teach history to learn who we are, and even and especially as we learn about who others are. We teach history to tell others who we are, and additionally and implicitly, who we we want to be. We teach history because we know that the stories we tell ourselves are the tinted-glasses with which we view the world, and that understanding the past is the best way for us to move forward, with confidence in who we are, clarity of what has been done before, and road maps of where we could go next.
I am who I am because I was a Black girl who was taught about the world by Black women. The history I learned was subjective and context-specific, and affirming and validating, expansive and deep, problematic and complicated. My history education taught me who I was, where I was, and why I was. Perhaps that is why we teach history after all.
Waterford Kamhlaba was, and still is, a school built on and around its history. Founded in eSwatini in 1963 as a multiracial opposition to apartheid before joining the United World Colleges international schools movement in 1981, WK saw itself in many ways as being the conflux between Western and African education. My classmates and I were from Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Norway. Our teachers were from Uganda, Chile, and Ireland. And our topics for history included Mfecane and the dispersal of Southern African ethnic groups in the 1800s one year, the rise and establishment of single-party states in Germany, China, and Tanzania, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Mrs. Aboah and Mrs. Wilson taught their subject with meticulous recollection of names and dates that they pulled straight from their memories. They would include their own outlook during lessons, sharing their experiences living through fights for African independence and the tensions of the Cold War. We would spend hours getting into the nuances of all sides and explored a little bit of history from all over the world.
We studied Africa every year and for the first time, I was learning my own history in school. About our prosperous societies and civilisations, the scramble for Africa and the presence of Europeans around the continent, and the post-colonial political societies that made the way for our nation states today. I loved seeing our history take up space alongside the history of other major societies worldwide, and I was proud to be African. When it came time to do our final IB History projects, I ended up writing a research paper that I became obsessed with about the Tanzanian government’s role in the South African liberation movement, and learning about the Pan-Africanism of the end of the century reminded me of that same spirit of cross-continental unity that was playing out on my campus.
We teach history to ensure that certain myths live on. The stories we want to tell our students about what their ancestors did and did not do, in order to perpetuate certain narratives central to political ideology. There is a reason that how history is taught in school is the often the first battleground for authoritarian and fascist regimes looking to take control of the record by telling the people who they are by teaching them who they were.
If we want a society that is diverse and democratic, what history we teach and how we teach it is central. We need to tell students of all the different stories that make up the collective, and we need to tell their stories with equal care, value, and consideration. A history in which we all matter.
Mrs. Aboah and Mrs. Wilson taught me that I was African, which meant that I was the embodiment of a legacy of Third-World alignment and freedom fighting. They taught me that I was in a part of a world that emerged from migration patterns, forced domination, and self-determination. And that I was who I was because of generations of Africans charting their paths and inspiring me to do the same.
A few weeks before the start of the second trimester of my senior year, we all saw a Facebook post announcing that Mrs. Wilson had quietly passed away during a visit to her family in California. It was a shock that knocked the wind out of us, still young enough to only sporadically experience grief and its aftermath. When we got back to school, we held a memorial service for her during an assembly and when Mrs. Aboah spoke about her best friend and co-teacher of 20 years, we were all left in tears.
We finished off the school year and many of us received top scores in IB History as a testament to the wonderful teaching we experienced, that left us not only socially-emotionally confident for whatever stage would come next, but also prepared us academically and intellectually to understand the world around us.
The following year, as I sat in an introductory Political Science lecture at Columbia with close to a hundred students, I found myself looking around flabbergasted at the history that was being taught in its one-sided, pro-American, pro-colonialist lens. After a few weeks, I emailed Mrs. Aboah to tell her how thankful I was for her and Mrs. Wilson. I owed them more than I had known.