Students Tour African Village on Campus

Sixty Ventura students visited an African village Tuesday--without leaving the Anacapa Middle School cafeteria.

The seventh-grade students transformed the cafeteria into an African village as part of a festival to culminate to a two-month unit of their world geography class on African customs and culture. The students made traditional foods, costumes and artwork.

A hut, which would traditionally be built of bamboo with a palm frond roof, was represented by a paper replica decorated with masks and woven wall hangings.

The clothing committee paraded modern and traditional fashions they had made by draping fabrics into African styles.

The foods committee presented a variety of dishes such as akwadu, a coconut and banana salad and fufu, a cream of wheat-based porridge.

Student Kelly Cox described fufu as tasting “like a cross between fish and pancakes.”

Although the students used forks, it would be more accurate to use fingers, another student suggested.

The project was the work of teachers Brenda Smith and Laurie Curtis-Abbe. The students used their language skills to write reports and poems about the continent.

One of the most effective parts of the unit, Smith said, was showing films and getting students’ reaction to apartheid. “They were outraged.

They had been unaware of who Mandela was and they said they were happy to know about what was going on.”

She stressed, however, that she does not tell the students how to think about political issues but just to increase their awareness of global issues.