Peru Textbooks and History

Thank you to a very generous ex-student who is living in Peru, I've been researching how Peruvian high school (which in Peru runs from grades 7-11) textbooks address Peru's early history.  It's very interesting.  Peru has historically been one of the more conservative nations in Latin America, long dominated by the Spanish and their descendants, but its textbooks now celebrate its pre-Columbian past more than the its Spanish colonists or even creole patriots.  Scholars have advanced a couple of explanations for this.  First, since the tremendous bloodshed and disruption that plagued Peru in the 1980s and 1990s was rooted in part in racism and other aspects of inequality, the nation is using its education system to emphasize racial and social harmony.  Second, international organizations emphasizing neo-liberal development projects are also touting multi-culturalism and tolerance.  Both sets of interpreters note that embracing racial reconciliation and Peru's Inca heritage in the abstract do not preclude extreme economic/racial stratification or even denigrating Indians in the present.

More Films About Africa

I have been watching some more recent films about Africa.  I heard about one in a recent Atlantic article about Jack Abramoff, the powerful lobbyist sent to jail some four years ago.  Abramoff, with funding from the pre-Mandela South African government, helped to create the anti-Communist film Red Scorpion, which was a bomb at the box office and hardly approaches great art.  But the film--evidently intended to undermine support for the ANC--is very typical of its genre in showing how a wise and simple African man from the bush tutors a lost and alienated soul.  The redeemed soul in this instance is a nearly superhuman fighting machine who has been cast aside by the Russians and tortured by the Cubans.  (The film isn't long on subtlety.)  He gets his revenge--and serves black Africa--by kicking the living snot and a lot of other bodily fluids out of the Communists.  "A Far Off Place" is much less violent film that appeared four years later, in 1993 (and features a young Reese Witherspoon) that follows some of the same themes.  In this case it's a jaded teenager visiting from the U.S. who learns wisdom from a bushman.  These films show black Africans in much more favorable roles, on the whole, than their counterparts from the 1940s did, but the major black characters are always noble, never interesting or dynamic.

Ghana Historiography

I've lately been working on a piece that's a bit of a departure for me, an article assessing three recent surveys of Ghanaian history.  All three books have been published in Ghana since 2000.  Scholars have commonly made a pair of criticisms of post-independence African histories: 1) That they tend to be celebratory and non-critical of powerful African nations and leaders, before and after European contact; 2) That they tend to mimic traditional European histories in focusing on political history, narrowly defined.  The three books I've analyzed are guilty of the second charge but not the first.  All three books approach Ghana's history critically and address shortcomings of or resistance to Asante (the powerful empire) and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana's most celebrated founding father).  But all three books define Ghana's history, particularly after European contact, in relatively narrow, political terms.  This neglect of social and cultural history can be attributed to habit, particularly since at least two of the books are intended for high school students who follow a prescribed syllabus, a history of Ghana in which the main subjects have already been established.