History study and writing
A week after I had given a lady my manuscript on ancient Greek history to be typed on a computer I went to find what progress she had made. She grumbled about the spelling of names she found in the manuscript. I asked if she had not already come across such names during her secondary school days. Her reply was: “I have no interest in history”.
Her case is perhaps not unsual. I operate a distance learning institution in which we offer tuition for both Junior Certificate (JC )and Malawi School Certificate of Education (MSCE) exams. I have noticed that at MSCE, one of the optional subjects is history. This has puzzled me because I feel that for personal development in life, history is useful.
Someone might argue that I am saying this because I have a natural inclination to study history. Maybe it is so, but see what Bertrand Russell, Britain’s greatest philosopher of the 20th Century wrote on history:
Of all the studies by which man acquires citizenship of intellectual commonwealth, no single one, is so indispensable as as the study of the past. To know how the world developed to the point at which our individual memory begins, how religion, the institutions, the nations among which we live became what they are, beliefs differing widely from our own, these things are indispensable to any circumstance of our position and to any emancipation from the accidental circumstance of our education.
People engaged in a variety of disciplines find the study of history most valuable. This is so because the knowledge we have depends on what we discovered earlier. Isaac Newton attributed his scientific discoveries to the fact that he was standing on the shoulders of the giants. He meant he had studied the discoveries of the great sages of the past. That was history.
History provides lessons to those who want to act or behave wisely in public life. This is because history is a compound of biographies. It is what great people did in the past seen as a collection. Those great people provided role models for later generations. Napoleon Bonaparte the French military genius read the biography of Alexander the Great of Greece. Our own Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda apparently modeled himself on King Frederick II of the Great Prussian, judging from the frequent references he made to the monarch who considered himself the first servant of his country.
People who engage in public life such as politicians ought to be interested in history because the present has been shaped by the public affairs of the past, while the public affairs of today in which politicians participate will be studied by future generations as history.
No matter what careers we have chosen for ourselves, we are duty-bound to be patriotic, to love our country. Our well-being depends on the well-being of our country.
Without basic knowledge of the history of one’s country, your patriotism falters. It is by knowing the heroes of the past that you can identify yourself with the greatness of your country. That knowledge will encourage you to try and make your own contribution to history.
At the end of the 1920s John Maynard Keynes wrote that a would be master economist must study other disciplines in depth. In those disciplines, he included history. Some teachers of economics forgot this advice. Because of the 2007 to 2008 financial meltdown, curriculum developers of economics are now including economics history as never before.
History is related to literature such as a novel and an epic. The main difference is that in history, we read real people while in novels we get imaginary ones. Great stylists in writing such as Edward Gibbon Babington Macaulay, Winston Churchill and others have made their history books and biographies as delightful to read as the best novels. It is history books written in the style of a thesis that some people find heavy to read.
The Ministry of Education and others concerned with developing young minds should see to it that no one goes through secondary education without adequate knowledge of our heroes and the main pillars of our history. The recent JC curriculum for the history of Malawi needs to be revised. We do not find some individuals who played a pivotal role in the struggle against the hated federation of Rhodesia and Nysaland and those foreigners who facilitated our struggle for independence.
