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Interpretative paradigms
Concepts defining the events include ‘Holocaust’, ‘genocide’, ‘systematic killings’ (T1 and
T2), ‘extermination’ (T1, T2 and T3), ‘systematic genocide’ (T2 and T3), ‘Final Solution’
(T3), ‘massacres’ (T3) and an explanation of the Greek words ‘holos’ and ‘kaustos’ (T3).
Documentation is varied and comprises maps, photographs, facsimiles, extracts from
Anne Frank’s diary, caricatures, tables and eyewitness accounts. All images depict victims;
only 10 percent of the images in T2 depict perpetrators alongside victims. The textbooks
focus primarily on political policies and motivations such as territorial expansionism, as
well as on military manoeuvres, but also enquire into how the Holocaust happened, and
present its significant stages and discuss discrimination, humiliation, social exclusion and
murder in response to this question. T4 differs insofar as it enquires into why the event took
place and why camps were set up. Camps are mentioned but not explored in detail, and the
terms ‘concentration’ and ‘extermination’ when defining camps are used interchangeably
in T3. No mention is made of perpetrators’ personal motivations for their actions. In line
with the South African curriculum, which prescribes that ‘the study of history … support[s]
citizenship within a democracy by … promoting human rights and peace by challenging
prejudices …’, 55 the textbooks present the Holocaust as an example of the violation of
human rights by underscoring similarities, on the basis of images and texts, with South
Africa’s policy of apartheid, and by comparing the Holocaust with other genocides such
as the Rwandan genocide. Likewise, emphasis placed on the definition of the concept of
genocide creates a common conceptual thread between the Rwandan genocide and the
Holocaust. However, only T3 and T5 make explicit mention of the fact that injustices done
to the Jewish people violated their basic human rights. None of the textbooks address
meta-historical questions such as types of historiography or the commemoration of, or
transmission of personal memories of, the Holocaust.
Narrative structure and point of view
All narrators adopt a neutral stance except for sporadic references to ‘terrible medical
experiments’ (T1, p. 43), ‘shameful episodes in the history of the world’ (T3, p. 119), and
to events which are ‘too horrific to be true’ (T4, p. 112), for example. The proportion of
the books occupied by authorial text varies considerably between 80 percent in T1 and 20
percent in T5. The multiplicity of viewpoints stands in proportion to the space devoted to
documentation in each of the textbooks.
Didactic approach
The textbooks contain largely open questions at the end of each section, requiring pupils
to analyse maps (T1), to reflect personally on general questions such as ‘Why […] minority
groups [are] more vulnerable than the majority groups’ (T1 and T2), or to conduct document
55 Department of Basic Education, Republic of South Africa, 2011, National Curriculum Statement (NCS). Curriculum and
Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) (for history), p. 8.
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