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128 12 Teaching africa through a comparative Pedagogy South Africa and the United States renée Schatteman What South african poet andries Walter Oliphant articulates in “The Struggle of the Two Souths” (1992) is the potential for comparative understanding that can be gained when placing South africa and the United States side by side. reading his own nation’s experiences of racial persecution from the perspective of civil rights, Oliphant reaches the conclusion that change in South africa is inevitable since “the earth belongs to the just ones” (1992:70). The poem posits that these two countries, simultaneously unknown and familiar to each other, are also closely linked in terms of influence , as seen in the way that Martin Luther King Jr.’s words helped fuel the antiapartheid movement. “The Struggle of the Two Souths” rightly suggests that numerous ideas about nonviolence, resistance campaigns, black consciousness, and black power were exchanged with impassioned interest across the atlantic as protesters in both countries saw their own fight as part of a larger global struggle for freedom. Scholars interested in teaching american students about the realities of life on the african continent understand the importance of getting them to relate the knowledge they learn to themselves and their own worlds. This chapter takes that pedagogical principle one step further by advocating comparative study, in this particular case between South africa and the United States. Since the beginning of the 20th century, there has been scholarly interest in the striking historical similarities between these two countries: the early settlement in each country by northwestern european Protestants; the eradication , displacement, or domestication of the indigenous populations they encountered, the Khoikhoi and the native americans, respectively; the ideologies of white supremacy that took hold in both contexts, especially through the practice of slavery; the civil wars Teaching Africa through a Comparative Pedagogy | 129 fought between factions of whites with opposing views; the racial divisions imposed by Jim crow and apartheid legislation; the resistance struggles that emerged from these repressive environments; and the advancement of biracialism-multiracialism rather than separatism that ultimately served as each nation’s most prominent liberation goal. in these ways, the political history of South africa over the past few centuries can be said to have more in common with the United States than with most other african countries. The study of these parallels was elevated to a new level with the publication of george fredrickson’s landmark works White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History in 1981 and Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa in 1995. These works inspired other notable studies as well as the 1999 creation of an academic journal named Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, which publishes articles that analyze the United States and South africa from an international, transnational , and comparative perspective. as indicated on Safundi’s website, the journal’s title “derives from the ‘S’ for ‘South africa,’ ‘a’ for ‘america,’ and ‘fundi,’ which comes from the Xhosa verb, ‘-funda,’ which translates as ‘to read,’ or ‘to learn.’”1 Safundi operates from the assumption that comparative study helps define a subject by relating it to another; as andrew Offenburger, the journal’s founder, et al. state, “Looking through the mirror of one country, [we] gain perspective on another” (2003:x). The scholarly rationale for this type of research can also be applied to teaching, since the benefits of bringing materials from parallel contexts into the classroom are multiple. Students engaged in comparative study come to better understand their own historical and cultural grounding. The contrasts between South africa and the United States allow students to appreciate the uniqueness of their own circumstances, while the similarities encourage them to reinterpret those circumstances in a new light. american students at certain moments are struck by the extremes of racial conflicts in South africa and conclude that their own country’s history involving race is of a different nature and of a lesser degree. When they discover meaningful points of connections between the two contexts, they reexamine their culture’s dynamics with a new seriousness and a greater appreciation for what those dynamics reveal about power, difference, and human relations. Students learn to look at american culture through a more objective lens and can read beyond commonplace interpretations of the past. comparativeworkalsofuelsahungerinstudentsforknowledgeoftheworldoutsideof themselves. By identifying with particular realities of life in South africa, students experience an investment in South africa as a...

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