LGCSE History (0184) study guide
LGCSE History (0184) · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
LGCSE History (0184) is a school-leaving history qualification in the LGCSE suite, listed in this guide as Botswana LGCSE History. It suits candidates who can read evidence critically, explain causation, and write organised arguments rather than memorise a single narrative. The LGCSE History (0184) study guide has 6 sections and about 1,997 words.
01Historical skills and source analysis: evidence, interpretation, bias and reliability
You are tested on how you use evidence, not on whether you like a source. Concepts to name precisely: primary and secondary sources; provenance (author, date, place); purpose ; audience ; bias ; reliability ; usefulness ; corroboration ; interpretation ; empathy - understanding a past mindset without excusing it.
365 words, about 2 min02Botswana and Southern Africa before colonial rule
Pre-colonial southern Africa is a topic in its own right - society, economy, politics and the evidence used to reconstruct them. Peoples and economies: San hunter-gatherers; Khoikhoi pastoralists; Bantu-speaking farmers who spread through the region in the first millennium CE, bringing iron working, sorghum, millet and cattle.
325 words, about 2 min03Colonial expansion, colonial rule and African responses in Southern Africa
Concepts: the Scramble for Africa; the Berlin Conference (1884-85); chartered companies, notably the British South Africa Company (1889); protectorate versus colony; indirect rule; hut tax; land alienation and reserves; pass laws; migrant labour; primary and secondary resistance; collaboration. Botswana's case: in 1885 Britain declared a protectorate over Bechuanaland, partly to block Boer and German expansion.
331 words, about 2 min04Nationalism, decolonisation and independence in Africa
Concepts: nationalism; pan-Africanism; elite and mass nationalism; the political party and the trade union; the press; civil disobedience and strike; armed struggle; negotiated transfer of power; majority rule versus independence; the Organisation of African Unity (1963); the Cold War. Chronology to handle: Libyan independence (1951); Ghana (1957); Macmillan's 'wind of change' speech (1960); Sharpeville (1960) and the turn to armed struggle in South Africa; the founding of the OAU (1963); the wave of independence across the continent between 1960 and 1966; Zimbabwe (1980), Namibia (1990) and South African majority rule (1994).
319 words, about 2 min05International relations in the twentieth century: world wars and the Cold War
Concepts: alliance systems; militarism; imperialism; nationalism; the July Crisis (1914); the Treaty of Versailles (1919); collective security and the League of Nations; appeasement; total war; the United Nations (1945); superpower rivalry; containment; the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan (1947); NATO and the Warsaw Pact; the Berlin blockade (1948-49); the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962); détente; non-alignment and the Bandung Conference (1955); proxy war. Two organising ideas: first, the shift from a European balance of power to a bipolar world dominated by the USA and USSR; second, the efforts of newly independent states to escape that bipolarity - and their transformation into battlegrounds when they could not.
337 words, about 2 min06Social and economic change: development, labour, migration and society
Concepts: migrant labour; the compound system; remittances; the cash economy and hut tax; land alienation and reserves; railways and ports; urbanisation; mission education and Christianity; health and demography; gendered divisions of labour; customs unions; enclave development; inequality; measures of development beyond GDP. The classic chain: colonial taxation obliged men to earn cash; the quickest route was wage labour on mines and farms; labour migration drew men away from rural households; remittances sustained rural families but increased women's agricultural and household burdens; chiefly authority was both used and undermined by the colonial state.
320 words, about 2 min