The Hot Zone Lesson Plan

Why does Preston find the African countryside familiar?

His family lived there briefly when he was 12. Though he has never visited as an adult, he feels a fondness for the smells and sounds of the landscape. To Preston, Africa seems to be a land out of time, in a way that is fond but also smacks of colonialist narratives about the continent as a giant backwater, resistant to technology and cut off from modern life. He recognizes the life of Kenya's rural people as similar to that he saw years earlier, but identifies that countryside lifestyle with the whole of a bustling continent. Students may have further opinions on the way Preston romanticizes and exoticizes Africa...