ABSTRACT
History is important to all human beings. The past is never dead or irrelevant. It shapes the present through our social, political, economic and cultural institutions and constructs our identity. The relationship between the past and the present is symbiotic. Our understanding of the past is shaped by that past. For, as E.H.Carr has explained to us in What is history?, our knowledge of the past is always partial and has been formed by groups who had the power to hand down to posterity their version of history. Consequently, our knowledge of history is always political, as are our ways of interpreting it.
