This teaching unit represents a specific "dramatic moment" in history that can allow students to delve into the deeper meanings of selected landmark events and explore their wider context in the great historical narrative. Studying a crucial turning point in history helps students realize that history is an ongoing, open-ended process, and that the decisions made today create the conditions of tomorrow's history. This unit portrays the complexities of South Africa's past so that middle and high school students might understand that South Africa's history is not simply the story of white racial oppression or of black heroic resistance. The unit is based on primary sources taken from documents, artifacts, journals, diaries, newspapers, and literature from the period under study. Within the unit are teaching background materials, including unit overview, unit context, correlation to the National Standards for History unit objectives, an introduction to South African dilemmas in the twentieth century, and lesson plans with student resources. The teacher background section of the unit provides an overview of the entire unit with the historical information and context necessary to link the specific "dramatic moment" to the larger historical narrative. The unit's lesson plans include a variety of ideas and approaches for the teacher that can be lengthened or shortened. The lesson plans contain student resources that accompany each lesson and consist of primary source documents, handouts, student background materials, and a 30-item bibliography. (BT)