South African History Online was established in 1998 and registered in June 2000 as a not for profit Section 21 organisation. We have become the largest and most comprehensive online website on South African and African history and culture. In 2019 the website was used by 6.3m local and international visitors.
SAHO is a unique history project – our website, the organisation’s flagship project, is linked to a partnership programme with universities, community based history projects, educational and the cultural department of government.
Our mission is to write a new history which would break the silence on our past and to address the biased way in which the historical and cultural heritage of South Africa and the continent has been represented in our educational and cultural institutions.
We have committed ourselves to building, a non-partisan, peoples history project in partnerships with academic, heritage and community groups in South Africa and from the rest of the African continent.
Classroom
The Online Classroom is the mainstay of SAHO's schools History Project, which comprises of a number of inter-related projects aimed at popularising and strengthening the teaching of the new history and other subject areas curriculum requirements. The online classroom consists of the history curriculum for grade 4 to grade 12.
Biographies
SAHO’s biography project is one of the largest in South Africa. It includes biographies of people who have played a significant role in the Liberation Struggle in South Africa. The “Lives of Courage Project”, is an online “Wall of Remembrance” of people killed in the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa.
Communities
SAHO has developed links with community-based projects We have assisted community groups to build their own websites, which has enabled communities to market their heritage sites, local histories and festivals online. This programme has the potential to create jobs and promote tourism.
Archives
The SAHO archive is a unique feature of its website. It contains more than 50.000 documents, videos and images and acts as an invaluable resource for furthering new research. The material in the archive is linked to features, articles, biographies and the history classroom on the website.
Internship Programme
We are committed to building partnerships with institutions of higher education so that they can draw on the expertise of our educational institutions and on all our resources to contribute to knowledge production that supports the teaching and learning of history and to ensure the integrity of our content.
Oral History Competition
SAHO and the Department of Basic Education (DBE), jointly, run the annual Chief Albert Luthuli Young Historians Oral History Competition. This is a national oral history project, which invites learners and educators to undertake oral history projects on people who fought for freedom and those who are promoting democracy in their communities.
Exhibitions
SAHO has an online and a travelling exhibition programme. We have, over the past 20 years, organised a number of seminal exhibitions that have travelled locally and internationally. SAHO has also assisted artists and photographers with the designing, printing and marketing of their work.
Mafika Gwala Lectures
In 2016, SAHO launched the annual Mafika Gwala Lecture in partnership with the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and the National Institute of Humanities and Social Science (NIHSS). As part of the annual lecture programme, we began a school’s essay writing competition with 14 schools in Hammarsdale Township outside Durban, KwaZulu-Natal (KZN).
SAHO Board
- Ashraf Dockrat
- Xolelwa Kashe-Katiya
- Omar Badsha, founder and CEO
Contact Us
Tel:
+27 (0)21 447 4365
Address:
349 Albert Road,
Woodstock 7925
Cape Town, South Africa
Email: info@sahistory.org.za