Teaching history from multiple perspectives is essential to understanding how power shapes knowledge, belonging and belief.
My grandmother remembered a representative of the colonial administration visiting her family’s home in Angola to assess how “assimilated” they were. In her account, speaking Portuguese and demonstrating approved habits were part of an inspection of whether the family lived in a sufficiently Portuguese, sufficiently “civilised” way.
I share this as family memory. Establishing its precise historical context requires attention to the period, the territory and the administrative practices involved. Yet the question it raises is clear: what happens when an authority claims the power to decide whether another family’s way of life deserves recognition?
That question reaches beyond the colonial household. It concerns the categories through which people are understood, the knowledge institutions recognise and the histories schools pass on. It also brings us to religion: who has had the authority to define the sacred?
The power to name
I am the daughter of Angolan parents, with Angolan, Portuguese, Goan and Brazilian family roots. My family’s history connects places often taught as separate chapters. It also brings together unequal experiences of mobility, privilege, exclusion and resistance.
These connections make it difficult to accept a historical “we” built around a single experience. I belong to Portuguese history, including its contradictions. Understanding that belonging requires room for the different people whose decisions, labour, knowledge and beliefs shaped it.
Religion offers a particularly revealing way to examine this question.
Calling one tradition a religion while describing another as superstition establishes more than a difference in vocabulary. It can confer intellectual and moral legitimacy on one community while denying it to another. Such distinctions deserve scrutiny wherever they appear: in historical documents, museum displays, public debate or teaching materials.
The task is to ask who made these classifications, under what circumstances and with what consequences.
That inquiry also demands complexity. Religious institutions and believers have occupied different, sometimes contradictory positions in relation to power. A serious historical account must be able to examine domination, resistance, community protection and struggles for dignity without reducing an entire tradition to a single role.
Who gets to act in the story?
The organisation of a historical narrative matters as much as its contents.
A chapter may include African societies while giving almost all initiative to European explorers, missionaries and administrators. The reader learns who arrived, but much less about those who were already there: their political choices, systems of knowledge, spiritual practices or interpretations of the encounter.
A useful question for any textbook is therefore: who gets to act?
Who thinks, negotiates, creates and changes events? Who appears mainly as a population encountered, converted or governed?
These questions help identify Eurocentrism at the level of narrative structure. Every historian works from particular questions and circumstances. The difficulty arises when one standpoint becomes the universal measure against which every other experience is judged.
African-centred historical inquiry has an essential place here. African people and societies must be studied as historical actors, through their sources, memories and intellectual traditions, with full attention to their internal diversity and disagreements.
The same commitment applies to Indigenous, Asian, European and other perspectives. Bringing these into relation allows us to understand connections that a single centre of attention can obscure.
Multiple perspectives require rigorous evidence
A pluricentric approach to history recognises several centres of initiative and interpretation while examining the unequal power between them.
It asks who could create and preserve records, whose accounts institutions accepted and whose experiences survive through oral testimony, material objects, practices or rituals. Each kind of source requires appropriate methods and careful interpretation.
This approach carries a demanding standard of evidence. A perspective does not become reliable simply because it was previously marginalised. Every account must be examined for its authorship, context, purpose, limitations and relationship to other evidence.
Students need to understand both why an account deserves attention and what its sources allow us to conclude.
That discipline has immediate relevance beyond the classroom. Learning to establish who produced a document, for which audience and under what circumstances helps people evaluate political claims and social media posts. Historical thinking gives us practical tools for navigating a public sphere in which confidence can easily be mistaken for credibility.
What schools can make possible
Teachers need time, resources and institutional support to undertake this work. They cannot be expected to resolve, individually, every omission in curricula or teaching materials.
Nevertheless, three principles can guide practical choices.
Agency: teach enslaved and colonised people through their knowledge, relationships, strategies and aspirations, including the choices they made under severe constraints.
Complexity: examine religious and cultural traditions as diverse and changing. Broad labels should open an inquiry, rather than settle it.
Critical questioning: distinguish the vocabulary of a historical source from the language used to analyse it. Terms such as “civilisation”, “pagan” or “discovery” require context.
A classroom exercise might place a missionary’s account alongside testimony from the community being described, or a colonial regulation alongside a petition challenging it. Students can investigate what each source reveals, what remains uncertain and where the accounts diverge.
Religious literacy belongs within this wider historical education. Students with different beliefs, and those without religious belief, benefit from understanding how religion interacts with culture, authority, belonging and political life. Freedom of conscience and critical inquiry should guide that learning.
What we pass on
Children should encounter people with histories like their own as participants in the making of the world. They should be able to study injustice alongside intellectual achievement, creativity, negotiation and resistance.
They should also be able to examine the past without being confined to inherited roles of victimhood or held personally responsible for their ancestors’ actions.
What we pass on is more than information. We transmit assumptions about whose experiences deserve attention, which sources are worth seeking and which questions can be asked.
For the Humanity Pact Alliance, these are questions of dignity and participation. A commitment to equal human worth must extend to how knowledge is produced, taught and discussed.
The question “Who gets to define the sacred?” invites us to examine authority itself. It asks us to investigate how some people acquired the power to classify the beliefs and knowledge of others, and to consider what a fuller historical understanding requires of us today.
Education can give the next generation the evidence, curiosity and confidence to pursue that inquiry.
Who Gets to Define the Sacred?
Teaching history from multiple perspectives is essential to understanding how power shapes knowledge, belonging and belief.
