Tarzan, Terrs, and Liberation: A Challenge to Teachers Using Films on Africa

Films are one vehicle for reducing the narrow, limited, and at times inaccurate information about Africa available to American students. Films also offer (1) a medium other than the written word, a medium much more accessible to some students; (2) perspectives other than those of the teacher; (3) when shown outside regular classroom hours, a supplement to formal class sessions that focuses a bit more of students' attention on Africa; and (4) for some students, a stimulus to action, both intellectual and political. Yet, many films on Africa are inaccurate, incomplete, severely dated, and not easily comprehended without contextual and supplementary information. Some good films are hard to obtain, while others are too long to show conveniently during a class period. Though many of these problems are serious, they also offer the teacher an opportunity to use images to which students are regularly exposed to develop students' own critical abilities and to encourage students to take responsibility for their own learning. Tarzan and Terrs (terrorists, the while Rhodesian contraction for liberation movement soldiers) are what students see. The teacher's challenge is to assist students in understanding Africa in spite of and through those images. From the images of Tarzan and Terrs must be drawn an understanding of Liberation. I review here several of my experiments in that direction.