Voices From The Continent: A Curriculum Guide To Selected Southern African Literature

Voices from the Continent: A Curriculum Guide to Selected Southern African Literature, Volume 3

Sara Talis O’Brien and Renée Schatteman

This curriculum guide provides anthropological and historical research as well as literary criticism on six narratives from Southern Africa: Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head, Fools and Other Stories by Njabulo Ndebele, Six Feet of the Country by Nadine Gormider, and Mother to Mother by Sindiwe Magona. The background and critical materials are integrated into well-developed lesson plans, which include reproducible student handouts, teacher resources, and reading resources.

Voices from the Continent will be a useful guide for college professors and teachers of English and social studies on the high school level who seek to diversify the standard curriculum by introducing students to modern African literature written or translated into English.

The featured literary works are available in the United States and appropriate for use in a variety of courses with students at different reading levels. These literary works introduce a wide range of universal themes while simultaneously presenting the experiences of particular ethnic groups in different regions of Southern Africa.

The lessons contained in this guide may be used in whole in or part, and they may be integrated into larger units on world literature, cultural diversity, psychology, social studies, sociology, and women’s studies.

Sara Talis O’Brien trains teachers as an associate professor of education at Saint Peter’s College in New Jersey. She has taught English at the high school level and African literature, anthropology, sociology, and religion at the college and university levels in the United States. She has also trained teachers in East, West, and southern Africa and has published several works in African Studies including A Teacher’s Guide to African Narratives (Heinemann 1994).

Renée Schatteman is an assistant professor of English at Georgia State University where she teaches post-colonial literature and assists in the secondary English program. She specializes in African literature and has published a number of articles, reviews, and interviews about African women writers and writers of the African diaspora. In addition, she has taught secondary English in Zimbabwe and in the United States.