Gettin' Crazy With Curricula.

As I sat down to craft my unit plan for this final project, I wanted to focus on an issue in African history/society/literature that we didn't get into much in this class. One perspective that we didn't get from the books we read was that of the white African experience. With that in mind, the novel I chose to use in my unit plan is The Syringa Tree, written by Pamela Gien, a white South African native now living in the United States. It tells the story of a young girl named Lizzie whose affluent family clandestinely works against apartheid, at great risk to themselves.

It's easy to demonize all white people in Africa as carpetbagging imperialists or missionizing fanatics. And during the colonial period, this was too often exactly the case. However, there are many people of European descent who are native Africans, and I wanted my unit plan to show instances of different ethnicities working together for issues of social and political justice. To that end, in addition to The Syringa Tree, I also used journalist Donald Woods' nonfiction book Biko, about his friend, murdered anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko. After Biko was killed in police custody, Woods was forced to go into exile after his anti-aparthied stance and support of Biko's cause made it too dangerous to stay in South Africa.

Every good unit plan or lesson encourages students to think for themselves. I hope that by challenging preconceived notions of race and racial conflict in Africa, my unit would, if used in a classroom, do just that.