In Johannesburg Long Walk Original Manuscript (Image #55)

This problem is by no means peculiar to South Africa. It is a characteristic way in which colonialists have presented the history of colonial peoples, hardly ever examining events on the basis of the indigenous sources of information. Until South Africa produces progressive historians who will write a true history of the country there will always be serious discrepancies between the established tradition of the oppressed people and the written history. Even in regard to the writing of history of Europe there have been examples of this blatant chauvinism in which historians have ignored historical truth and become openly partisan. A prominent student of international politics has cited the case of the first imperialist world war when the Oxford Faculty of History issued a manifesto on the strength of the evidence they had examined, unanimously declaring that Britain was in the right and Germany in the wrong. The Oxford Manifesto was challenged through a counter manifesto pdublished in the name of all the most famous German historians that Germany was in the right and Britain in the wrong. History cannot be raised from this propagandistic approach to a scientific level in the prevailing state of the world, where nations are divided by basic interests and policies where the regimes in power represent racial minorities. When classes have disappeared in society and full equality of all peoples has become the basic principle of life, then the conditions will be created for the emergence of scientific history. In our own country, the oral history of the people will become an important source of information.