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Video Transcript GATES: Why do you think pre-colonial history wasn't offered before? SOPHISO: Pre-colonial history wasn't offered before because of the obvious threat that history can serve as an ideological tool for whoever is in power. So the person who was in power, the African *** made it a point that their own version of history will take effect. So in a way what you do in that instance, you decide to push to the back the history of the people who have been here. You start your time line, if I may say, your chronology when, as a colonist, when you arrived. GATES: So 1652 … SOPHISO: Then 1652 … GATES: … when the Europeans … SOPHISO: … when the Europeans came. GATES: So school children in South Africa were taught that before 1652 … SOPHISO: There was nothing. GATES: Nothing. SOPHISO: This was an empty land. And they came with the myth of the empty land, they came with a *** that most of the African people that you find here migrated from sub-Saharan Africa and probably they reached these shores the same time as the white people in 1652. GATES: And so then it was survival of the fittest. SOPHISO: Then it's survival of the fittest. GATES: I see. Sophiso, what do you think the importance of this course is to you and to black people in South Africa? SOPHISO: We have our roots here in South Africa and for a person who lives in the present he has to know where he comes or where she comes from. || LOST CITIES OF THE SOUTH EPISODE ||
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Sophiso Ndolovo on Apartheid and History