Introduction
The ability to teach the stories of Africa through the medium of film is an exciting challenge for me, and it satisfies the need I have to make this amazing culture come alive in the minds of my young adolescent students. I traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, in June, (winter) of 1999, to visit my daughter and her husband, who were graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, teaching and doing research. Kim drove me to Crossroads Township, where thousands of black migrant workers from Transkei, in the Eastern Cape, had been displaced under apartheid. She mastered the Xhosa language, and here I was honored to listen to velvet voices tell their stories of abuse. I traveled to Robben Island where Nelson Mandela's story came alive. This was when I fell in love with Africa. The long trip back to Santa Fe allowed me much time to ponder how I would pass this experience on to my students in the fall. Indeed, that September, I tried, but retelling a foreign person's special story is an arduous task, and I had little response from my students. Seeking a methodology by which my eighth graders would carry these stories in their hearts and minds as I do became my quest.
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