Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Ten Years After Apartheid, South African Voters Face Jobs, AIDS Issues: 4/12/04
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june04/safrica_4-12.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What do you know about South Africa?

2. What is apartheid?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What is happening in South Africa?

On Thursday, South Africans will head to the polls to vote in the country's third democratic election since its independence ten years ago. The African National Congress, or ANC, South Africa's ruling party, is expected to remain in power.

2. What is significant about the South African election?

The election coincides with nationwide celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the end of apartheid -- the policy of racial segregation enforced by South Africa's white minority government from 1948-1994.

3. What are some of the positive changes in South Africa since the end of apartheid? What are some of the continuing challenges in the African nation?

For South Africa, a decade of self-rule has brought innumerable changes to the country, including a complete overhaul of government services, a democratic constitution grounded in human rights, and free press including newspapers, radio and television stations.

But the legacy of apartheid has not yet been obliterated in a country where half the population still lives below poverty level and where wealth remains divided along color lines.

The last ten years have brought vast improvements in housing, water and electricity, as well as political stability and international support, but South Africa is still, as Mbeki observed, a country of "two nations" -- one mostly white and rich, and one mostly black and poor. In addition, South Africa faces massive unemployment, rising crime, and -- especially devastating -- one of the highest rates of HIV in the world.

4. Who is the leader of the main opposition party in the South Africa Parliament? What are his challenges in the election?

But critics like Tony Leon, who heads the Democratic Alliance, the main opposition party in the South African Parliament, says that the ANC has done too little to help the South African people improve their situation.

Leon will most likely earn the majority of white voters' support, but since whites only make up 13 percent of South Africa's population, the real task for the DA is to win over the support of black voters.

5. What impact has AIDS had on the country?

Of particular concern is the response to the devastating toll HIV and AIDS is taking on the country. Mbeki raised a storm of international controversy several years ago by publicly expressing doubt about whether HIV causes AIDS (it does).

Antiretroviral medications are still widely unavailable to the 20 percent of the adult population that is HIV-positive, despite an ambitious government plan rolled out in February.

Estimates for the next ten years put the death toll from AIDS-related diseases in South Africa as high as 6 million.

Discussion Questions (more research might be needed):

1. Why do you think there are still so many problems in South Africa even though apartheid officially ended ten years ago?

2. If you were president of South Africa, what would you do to help alleviate poverty and the effects of AIDS?

3. Should people in the United States pay attention to what is happening in South Africa? Why or why not?

Send your answers, in essay form, to extra@newshour.org for possible publication!