Born a Crime

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. South Africa’s apartheid policy, a system of racial segregation, lasted from 1948 to the early 1990s. What do you know about South African apartheid? Who were the key political figures that were involved? Why did it end?

Teaching Suggestion: This question will equip students with a firm, historically accurate foundation of facts for discussion of the larger theme in Born a Crime of Identity and Race in Apartheid South Africa. Students may have very little knowledge of how apartheid functioned in South Africa. If conversation is slow to start, you can ask some leading questions, such as: Have you ever heard of Nelson Mandela? You may also elect to walk through the following resources together as a class:

• A Stanford University student’s Timeline of Apartheid, part of a class web project titled “Global Perspectives on Human Language: The South African Context”
• History.com’s broad overview of apartheid in “Apartheid in South Africa: Laws, Ends, & Facts”

Differentiation Suggestion: For advanced learners, consider having students draw connections at Bloom’s Taxonomy levels of analysis and synthesis between South African apartheid and racial segregation in the United States.