African Studies Resources for K-12 Educators

Gateways and Portals:

Africa South of the Sahara: Selected Internet Resources
This guide to Africana on the internet, developed by Karen Fung for the Electronic Technology Group of the African Studies Association, provides an excellent gateway to Africana information. The site is searchable by topic, country, or keyword/phrase.

Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This site provides access to a variety of useful resources, including the CODESRIA site, a variety of electronic journals, some Africana library collections in the U.S. and Europe, and international news sources. The library page also provides additional access to many resources.

Columbia University: Area Studies: African Studies Internet Resources
This site, developed by Yuusuf Caruso, African Studies Librarian at Columbia, provides access to online journals and newspapers from or about Africa, an international directory to African studies scholars, and some Africana library collections in the U.S., Europe, and southern Africa. You can search the site by keywords or browse by subject or country.

An A-Z of African Studies on the Internet
This guide is revised regularly. It encompasses Internet sites, discussion lists and any other e-resources of relevance to Africa or African studies.

H-Africa Network Homepage
An important international interdisciplinary electronic discussion group, H-Africa's homepage links to current and past discussion threads and forums; conference announcements; archival collections in the U.S., Europe, and Africa; lists of recent Africana dissertations; tables of contents of Africana journals; book,exhibit,and film reviews; and obituaries.

Intute Arts & Humanities Hub
This portal provides access to Intute's catalogue of online arts & humanities resources.  It includes topics such as historical and philosophical studies, literature, and linguistics, among many others.

Curriculum Resources and Lesson Plans:

Indiana University's African Studies Program - Outreach
http://www.indiana.edu/~afrist/outreach/outreach.html

Boston University: Lesson Plans
http://www.bu.edu/africa/outreach/materials/lessonplans/
Includes lesson plans on literature, art, history in Mali, and the Indian Ocean trade. Developed by Boston University's African Studies Center/Outreach Program.

H-Net Lesson Plans
http://www.h-net.org/~afrteach/afrteach/search.php
H-Afrteach is one of the H-Africa "family" of academic lists. This site includes lesson plans, syllabi, academic papers, and images.

PBS - Africa
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/africa
This PBS site, called Africa, includes resources and lesson plans.

University of Florida: K-12 African Lesson Plans
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/aleslie/K_12Websites/K-12WebsiteList.html
Lesson plans on various African studies topics (history, literature, art, science, etc.) developed by the Outreach Program of the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - Outreach
http://www.afrst.uiuc.edu/OutreachKids.html
Includes links to teaching resources websites on various topics; also includes a link to "Country Information"; which has maps of Africa and lists of African political resources, sorted by country.

University of Pennsylvania: K-12 Electronic Guide for African Resources
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/K-12/AFR_GIDE.html
The aim of this guide is to assist K-12 teachers, librarians, and students in locating on-line resources on Africa that can be used in the classroom, for research and studies. This guide summarizes some relevant materials for K-12 uses available on the African Studies WWW. Maintained by Dr. Ali B. Ali-Dinar at the University of Pennsylvania.

University of Wisconsin: K-12 Educational Resources
http://africa.wisc.edu/outreach/resources.htm
Maintained by the Outreach Program of the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin.

Country Resources:

U.S. Central Intelligence Agency World Fact Book:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html

Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress; Country Studies/Area Handbooks.
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html

Green Boxes pages for Sub-Saharan Africa
http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=1766
Provides links to print and online country resources. Created by the Government Information and Statistical Services Department from Indiana University.

U.S. Dept. of State, Bureau of African Affairs
http://www.state.gov/p/af/
Country and background information, presented by the U.S. Department of State.

Folklore and Culture:

African Art
http://www.dia.org/collections/african/default.asp
Images and information on African art, presented by the Detroit Institute of Arts.

African Voices
http://www.mnh.si.edu/africanvoices/
Interactive exhibit on Africa's history and culture, presented by the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

National Museum of African Art (Smithsonian)
http://www.nmafa.si.edu/
Online gallery of African art objects.

World Heritage: Africa
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/
Information on sites in Africa designated as World Heritage sites by UNESCO; has photographs.

Global Music Archive
http://www.globalmusicarchive.org
Provides access to recordings and images of music from Africa and the Americas. There are approximately 1100 digital recordings of East African music as well as bibliography and catalog on associated topics.

Language:

Digital Dialects
http://www.digitaldialects.com/
Contains language games for learning basic greetings, numbers, animal names, etc.  Has sections for Swahili, Afrikaans, Somali as well as French, Portuguese, Italian, German, and English.

Ethnologue
http://www.ethnologue.com/
A vast language resource indicating which languages are spoken where, the complete language classification, and statistics on the number of speakers.  Also contains substantial bibliographies for different languages and helpful information about dialects and regional differences.

Language in Africa
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/lang.html
Portal with numerous links relating to the topic of language in Africa, ranging from links to associations, online dictionaries, language policies, etc. Maintained by Karen Fung, Africana librarian at Stanford University.

National African Language Resource Center
http://lang.nalrc.wisc.edu/nalrc/resources/index.html
Focused on providing support for African language education in the United States, this site provides a number of resources for interested educators.  Includes the Language Map of Africa, containing information and audio samples of a number of African languages including Twi, Worlof, Amharic, Kinyarwanda, Luganda, and Chichewa.

Omniglot: writing systems and languages of the world
http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/index.htm
Contains basic phrases and samples of several African languages: Afrikaans, Sesotho, Xhosa, Zulu, and Swahili.  Also, the site has sections on indigenous writing systems including Ethiopia, Somalia, West Africa, and more.

Children's Literature:

Africa Access Review
http://www.africaaccessreview.org/aar/index.html
Designed to "help schools, public libraries, and parents improve the quality of their children's collection on Africa."  Contains book reviews, recommended books for K-12 students, book awards, and more.

African Children's  Literature Resources (University of Florida, George A. Smathers Library)
http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/cm/africana/children.htm
This web site, created by Lillian Temu Osaki, is part of the University of Florida's library guide to Arts and Humanities resources for Africana.  It currently includes information on nine children's authors whose books deal with African themes, and provides web links to other resources on African children's literature.

ICDL - International Children's Digital Library
http://www.childrenslibrary.org/
Provides access to dozens of children's books written in English, Arabic, Swahili and other languages.  Books are free, online, and full-text.

General Literature:

African Literature: African women writers
http://aflit.arts.uwa.edu.au/FEMEChomeEN.html
This site from the University of Western Australia has links to information about francophone African women authors, selections of their work (in French), and information on francophone African literature in general.

African Literature on the Internet
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/africa/cuvl/aflit.html
Provides links to African literature resources on the Internet.  Major authors have their own subsections, including Wole Soyinka, Cyprian Ekwensi, and Mongo Beti.  Frequently updated.

African Writers: Voices of Change
http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/cm/africana/writers.htm
Biographical information on various African writers. Prepared by Dan Reboussin, librarian at the University of Florida, George Smathers Libraries.

Afrique Francophone
http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/deanhum/langlit/french/afrique.html
Information on the cultures, music, and literature of francophone Africa (maintained by Prof. Thomas Spear, associate professor of French, Lehman College).

Francophone Africa: lessons from Cameroon
http://www.iub.edu/~afrist/outreach/curriculum.html
Lesson ideas from Indiana University's Outreach Program for incorporating Cameroon into the classroom.

Politics and History:

The Abolition of the Slave Trade
http://abolition.nypl.org/home/
From the Schomburg Center of the NY Public Library, this site contains extensive images, texts, maps, essays, and more on the slave trade and its abolition.

History resources for K-12
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/history/hisk12.html
Includes useful information and resources for the classroom (teacher's guides, lesson plans, etc.).

Portal for resources on slavery
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/history/hislavery.html
Another excellent link from Stanford's Africa South of the Sahara website.

Primary, full-text sources
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/history/hisprimary.html
Includes francophone texts.

South Africa - Overcoming Apartheid, Building Democracy
http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/index.php
Provides video interviews, documents, biographies, images, suggested activities, and other resources for understanding the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa.


Print Resources:

Africana: the encyclopedia of the African and African-American experience.  2nd. ed.  5 vols.  Kwame Appiah and Henry Gates, eds.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Africa: South of the Sahara.  Europa Publications.  London: Europa Publications Ltd, 2008.


Recent Politics/News:

AllAfrica.com
http://allafrica.com/
Daily news about Africa from more than 70 news organizations, by AllAfrica Global Media.

BBC News: Africa
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/default.stm

Global Voices Online
http://globalvoicesonline.org


Maps:

Afriterra
http://www.afriterra.org
Focuses on early European maps of Africa, but also contains maps from 17th-20th centuries.  High quality digital images allow for zooming and easy navigation.

Northwestern University Library - 16th-20th Century Maps of Africa
http://www.library.northwestern.edu/govinfo/collections/mapsofafrica/
113 digital replications of the authentic maps from throughout the European exploration of Africa.  Can browse by title, date, region, and even cartographer.

Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection, University of Texas-Austin
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/africa.html
Numerous recent maps of the African continent, plus maps of specific countries and cities. Also has historical maps.