Saturday, January 30, 2010

Africa


Why an article on Africa? There is not just one reason...

The students in 1st of Bachillerato are meant to read Dancing with Strangers. Stories from Africa as compulsory reading this term and I wanted to give them some information to introduce this continent. Searching for a nice way to do it, I found this video in which you can listen to a beautiful reading of the articleHow to Write About Africa, written by the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, where all the stereotypes of Africa are mentioned and ironically criticised from the point of view of an African person. This is the video, but if you really want to follow it, you can click on the title mentioned above and read the text as it was published in Granta magazine. because it´s worthwhile reading it slowly to be able to take in all we are told about the continent. (click here to get a translation)




But as I was surfing the net searching for interesting articles about Africa, I found this video where Chimamanda Adichie speaks about her experience as an African writer. I have only read a book written by her, Half of a Yellow Sun - which I recommend- but her lecture in this video is entertaining, easy to follow and, I hope, interesting since it explains how she became aware -and proud- of her origins. It is in English, of course, and you can choose the language of the subtitles (English is the right choice for you, mind you, you know that, don´t you?)



Something else made me think about Africa: when I was telling my students about Martin Luther King Jr and the post about him in this blog I realised many of my students had not heard about racial segregation and from that I jumped to South Africa and, surely enough, to Nelson Mandela (talking about African stereotypes...) and since some of my students play rugby I took the opportunity to recommend Invictus; here´s the trailer subtitled in Spanish, but click here and the subtitles will be in English

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