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Children's Literature About Africa: A Reassessment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Nancy J. Schmidt
Nancy J. Schmidt*
Affiliation:
Indiana University Library, Bloomington, Indiana
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Extract

In the last five years as Americans have continued to discover Africa and have increased their efforts to include African perspectives in school curricula, the publication of children's literature about Africa has increased in quantity and to some degree in quality as compared with the years before 1965. Publishers now seem as anxious to publish anything pertaining to Africa for children, which they think will sell, as they are to publish such books for adults. The writer of children's books need no longer search for small publishers such as Fideler, Meredith, Beckley-Cardy, or Hale, but can apparently have books accepted by most of the major publishers.

There are now special series about Africa, or Afro-America to which authors can contribute, for example, the Zenith history series and the Watts first book series. The former includes paperbacks for older children, and the latter, hardcover books for children in the lower elementary grades. In the Zenith series, history is presented in outline form in Basil Davidson's A Guide to African History (1966), as culture history in AGlorious Age in Africa (1965) by Daniel Chu and Elliott Skinner, and through biography in Great Rulers of the African Past (1966) by Lavinia Dobler and William A. Brown. These history books are factually accurate, illustrated, and, in the case of the latter two, interesting to read. All the books in the Zenith series are more substantive than those in the Watts series, which are simplified for younger readers and shorter, even though they often try to cover more material than do the Zenith books.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , December 1970 , pp. 469 - 488
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1970

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References

REFERENCES CITED

NOTE: The following bibliography includes books published since 1965 which were consulted in the preparation of the essay. It is not an exhaustive list of recently published children's books about Africa. No titles from my earlier article (see footnote 1) are included unless explicitly referred to in the essay. All books are for upper elementary and junior high school pupils unless marked (E), indicating lower elementary or (JR), indicating junior high level and older. Where a book is about a specific region, nation, society, or ethnic group and this is not explicit in the title, it has been noted in parentheses at the end of the reference.

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

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