Introducing Africa to High School and College Students

A GRAIN OF WHEAT by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. This book is a good one to introduce students to the concepts of "liberation struggles" and "liberation wars" in formerly colonized nations. Set in Kenya at the beginning of independence, this novel explores both the exhilaration of independence for those who struggled and fought for freedom, as well as the lingering shame of those who betrayed the dream.

CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY by Alan Paton. The book follows a black minister, Kumalo, who goes to Johannesburg to seek his missing son and rescue his sister from prostitution. In Johannesburg, he learns his son has murdered a white activist, the son of a white landowner who comes from the same rural area as Kumalo and his son. Paton carefully demonstrates how urban life devastates the African family and the individual (which he calls "breaking the tribe"). He offers no excuses for young Kumalo's actions, but the novel explains how living conditions in the city and the political climate of the nation created desperate young African men who had few choices besides crime. (Certainly, no lucrative choices besides crime.) What sets this novel apart then is how the white landowner changes because of his son's death, as though his son had charged him from beyond the grave to "bring good out of evil."

DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT by Alexandra Fuller. This autobiography, by a white woman who grew up in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), gives readers an acute sense of both the privileges and pressures of growing up in Africa as a white child during a time of civil war, when both sides were defending and fighting for a dream-one side to continue white rule and privilege, and the other fighting for freedom and democracy for all who resided in Zimbabwe.

MUKIWA, A WHITE BOY IN AFRICA by Peter Godwin. Peter Godwin, a white Rhodesian who served in the military during Zimbabwe's civil war, became the journalist who exposed Robert Mugabe's atrocities in Matebeleland against the Ndebele during the 1980s. Godwin's book recounts the civil war and the beginnings of independence.

SO LONG A LETTER by Mariama Ba. This novel, set in Senegal, is constructed as a series of letters from one African woman to another, Ramatoulaye to Aissatou. The book is the history of their marriages, marriages formed by intertwining African tradition with European customs. These two strands formed a weak braid

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