WAEC SSCE - Literature In English - 2021 (Prose)

Answer Details

In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Mary Rambo is the warm-hearted black woman who takes in the narrator after he collapses following his ordeal at the Liberty Paints factory hospital. Though a minor figure, she plays an important role as a symbol of nurturing, of racial memory and of ordinary black endurance in Harlem.

Her character

• Mary is motherly, generous and morally grounded. She feeds and shelters the narrator without demanding rent when he has no money.
• She is proud of her people and of their history, urging the narrator to remember where he comes from and to do something worthwhile for the race.
• She is practical, patient and strong, a stabilising presence after the confusion and violence the narrator has suffered.

Her role in the novel

• Refuge and recovery. Mary's home is a place of healing where the narrator regains his strength and sense of self after being nearly destroyed by the factory and hospital.
• Link to roots and identity. She represents the folk values, the Southern black heritage and communal warmth from which the narrator has drifted; she reminds him not to lose himself in the city.
• Moral touchstone. Her selfless kindness contrasts with the exploitation the narrator meets from the Brotherhood, the college and white employers, throwing their manipulations into relief.
• Spur to leadership. Her hope that he will become a credit to the race helps push him towards a purpose, even though he later abandons her home when he joins the Brotherhood.

Significance

• Mary embodies the dignity and resilience of the ordinary black community that the various ideologies in the novel try to use.
• Leaving her house marks a stage in the narrator's loss of authentic identity; remembering her marks his lingering conscience.

Conclusion

Mary Rambo is the nurturing mother-figure of Invisible Man. Her kindness, pride in her race and moral steadiness make her both a refuge for the narrator and a reminder of the roots and communal values he risks betraying in his search for recognition.

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Buchi Emecheta's Second Class Citizen is largely a protest against the low status forced upon women in both African and immigrant society. The treatment of women is shown through Adah's experiences and those around her.

Denied education

• As a girl in Lagos, Adah is almost not sent to school at all, because the family spends its scarce money educating her brother Boy. Girls are treated as less deserving of learning.
• Adah has to fight and scheme even to attend school, revealing how female ambition is discouraged from childhood.

Valued only for marriage and money

• Women are seen as a source of bride-price. Adah's relatives look forward to the dowry she will fetch rather than to her own fulfilment.
• A wife's worth is measured by her ability to bear children, especially sons. Motherhood is expected as a duty rather than chosen.

Domination by husbands

• Francis treats Adah as his property. He beats her, spends her earnings, refuses to work himself, and expects her to serve both him and his family.
• He opposes her use of contraceptives and her desire to write, burning the manuscript of her first novel, The Bride Price, to crush her independence.
• Francis relies on the support of his parents and the customs that place a wife beneath her husband and in-laws.

Double burden as immigrants

• In London women like Adah face racism as blacks and inferiority as women, making them, in the novel's terms, second-class citizens twice over.
• Adah must earn wages, keep the home and raise the children while her husband contributes little.

Resistance and change

• Against this treatment Adah asserts herself: she works, educates herself, controls her fertility and finally leaves Francis to raise her children alone.
• Her defiance shows Emecheta's belief that women can rise above the second-class role society assigns them.

Conclusion

Women in the novel are generally treated as inferior beings, denied education, exploited for bride-price and children, and dominated by men. Yet through Adah, Emecheta insists on the woman's right to dignity, independence and self-expression.

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In Alex Agyei-Agyiri's Unexpected Joy at Dawn, Mama Orojo is Nii's long-separated sister who has settled in Nigeria and become a devout member of the Amen Kristi church. Her relationship with her fellow worshippers reveals both her deep faith and the comfort and community that religion offers her while she hopes for reunion with her lost brother.

A devoted and respected member

• Mama Orojo is a sincere and committed Christian who finds in Amen Kristi a spiritual home and a family to replace the blood relations she has lost.
• The congregation holds her in high regard for her generosity, her piety and her steadiness of character.

Generosity and motherly care

• As a successful businesswoman she supports the church and its members materially, sharing her wealth and standing by those in need.
• She acts as a mother-figure within the fellowship, offering counsel, prayer and encouragement, so that the church members become a substitute family.

Mutual support and hope

• The church members in turn give her fellowship and sympathy in her loneliness and in her longing to find Nii.
• Prayer and worship within the community sustain her faith that she will one day be reunited with her brother, a hope the novel finally rewards.

Faith set against a corrupt world

• Her wholesome relationship with the church contrasts sharply with the greed, xenophobia and violence of the wider society through which Nii struggles.
• Amen Kristi thus stands as a small circle of love and decency amid national disorder.

Conclusion

Mama Orojo's relationship with her fellow church members at Amen Kristi is one of mutual love, respect and support. The church becomes her surrogate family, sustaining her faith and hope, and her generous, motherly conduct within it marks her as a figure of goodness set against the harshness of the world outside.

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Setting is one of the most powerful elements in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The two houses and the wild Yorkshire moors are not mere background; they shape character, mirror emotion and drive the meaning of the whole novel.

The two contrasting houses

• Wuthering Heights stands high and exposed, battered by storms. Its name itself means turbulent, stormy weather. It is stern, wild and comfortless, and it reflects the passionate, harsh natures of Heathcliff and the elder Catherine.
• Thrushcross Grange, sheltered in the valley, is refined, calm and comfortable. It reflects the gentle, civilised, somewhat weak Linton family.
• The movement of characters between the two houses charts the clash of two worlds: raw passion against social refinement.

The moors

• The open moorland is the natural home of Catherine and Heathcliff's love. As children they roam it freely, and it symbolises their wild, boundless, untamable bond.
• The moors also stand for freedom, danger and the supernatural; Catherine's spirit is imagined wandering there, and Heathcliff longs to be reunited with her upon it.

Weather and atmosphere

• Storms, wind, snow and darkness accompany moments of crisis and violent feeling, so that nature echoes the turbulence of human passion.
• Lockwood's nightmare and Catherine's ghost at the window gain their eerie force from the bleak, isolated setting.

Isolation

• The remoteness of the setting shuts the characters into an intense, enclosed world where their passions grow extreme, unchecked by ordinary society.

Conclusion

The setting of Wuthering Heights works almost as a character in its own right. Through the contrast of the two houses, the symbolism of the wild moors and the pathetic fallacy of storm and weather, Bronte externalises the passions of her people and gives the novel its brooding, elemental power.

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Adah, the heroine of Second Class Citizen, grows from a poor, overlooked Ibo girl into a determined woman who insists on shaping her own life. Her growth in confidence and determination is the backbone of the novel.

Early determination against the odds

• As a child in Lagos, Adah nurses a secret dream, her "Presence", of travelling to the United Kingdom and bettering herself.
• Denied schooling because she is a girl, she boldly sneaks off to school on her own and later works hard to win a scholarship, showing early strength of will.

Building a footing

• She secures a good post at the American Consulate library in Lagos, earning more than many men and gaining a measure of independence.
• She marries Francis but uses her earnings and her savings to finance his studies in England and to bring herself and the children over, taking charge of the family's future.

Confidence under hardship in London

• In England she meets racism, cramped housing and her husband's idleness, yet she keeps her library job and provides for the household.
• She refuses to accept the second-class role marked out for her, insisting on decent lodgings and on educating her children.

Pursuit of her dream to write

• Her deepest ambition is to become a writer. She composes her first novel, The Bride Price, and is proud of it.
• When Francis burns the manuscript in contempt, she is wounded but not broken; the act hardens her resolve rather than killing her dream.

Final independence

• Adah at last leaves Francis, taking her children and facing single motherhood with courage.
• By the close she stands as a self-reliant woman who has grown from timid dependence into confident self-determination.

Conclusion

Adah's journey is one of steadily rising confidence: from a girl fighting for schooling, to a working wife bankrolling her family, to a writer and single mother who chooses dignity over subjection. Her determination in the pursuit of her dreams makes her one of African literature's memorable strong women.

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The eviction scene in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is a turning point. Wandering through Harlem, the narrator comes upon an elderly black couple being thrown out of their apartment into the winter street, and his response to the scene launches his public career.

What he witnesses

• The narrator sees the old couple's household possessions piled on the pavement by the marshals: their few pitiful belongings, including free-papers, a torn Bible and other relics of a life reaching back to slavery.
• The sight of these objects stirs him deeply; they evoke the long history of black suffering and dispossession, and he is moved by the old woman's grief and the crowd's mounting anger.

His response

• Almost against his own intention, the narrator begins to speak to the gathering crowd. His improvised speech both restrains the people from senseless violence and voices their outrage.
• He discovers a sudden power of oratory, an ability to sway a crowd and to give shape to collective feeling.
• The crowd, roused, carries the furniture back upstairs, briefly defying the eviction, before the police intervene.

Consequences

• Brother Jack of the Brotherhood witnesses the speech and, impressed by the narrator's gift, recruits him into the organisation.
• The episode therefore begins the narrator's involvement with the Brotherhood, which will later use and betray him.

Significance

• The scene awakens the narrator to his own talents and to a sense of solidarity with dispossessed black people.
• It links his personal story to the wider history of the race, since the evicted couple carry the very documents of freedom and bondage.
• Ironically, the moment of his fullest human sympathy also draws him into an ideology that will render him more "invisible" than ever.

Conclusion

At the eviction the narrator finds his voice, his cause and the beginning of his fatal alliance with the Brotherhood. The experience is a milestone in his growth, fusing personal ambition, racial memory and the manipulations that will drive the rest of the novel.

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In Alex Agyei-Agyiri's Unexpected Joy at Dawn, Nii's encounter with the man nicknamed "I-Put-it-to-me" (also called Tally O) is a small but telling episode that dramatises the theme of survival under harsh, repressive conditions and prepares the way for the later fortunes of Nii's sister, Mama Orojo.

The setting of the encounter: the curfew. The soldiers in power have imposed a curfew that forbids movement at night, yet ordinary people still have to get home when the day ends. Nii, whose wife Massa lies bedridden and dependent on him, has stayed out and now has to slip home after the curfew hour. To beat the soldiers and the vigilante patrols on the streets, he uses his wits and pretends to be a lunatic, and in this way he passes safely through the security net to his own door.

The meeting itself. As Nii reaches his house he notices a man sitting on the stump of a tree in front of his door, biding his time to get past the curfew. He passes the man and enters. This stranger is I-Put-it-to-me, an illegal gold miner and a member of the Daga group of miners. Soon an army lance corporal comes into Nii's room, having caught I-Put-it-to-me for breaking the curfew. Like Nii, I-Put-it-to-me survives the danger by sheer ingenuity, and both men escape arrest for the offence. Their shared cunning under the same threat quietly links the two characters.

The irony and significance of the encounter. The meeting is deeply ironic. This same I-Put-it-to-me later cheats Nii's own sister: on Mama Orojo's flight to Ghana he sells her a fake gold ring, so the man Nii once brushed past at his door turns out to be a swindler who exploits his family. The Daga group to which he belongs is also the group in which Joe, the man connected to Mama Orojo, works and dies in the mines. The encounter therefore does more than show two men outwitting a curfew; it exposes a society in which survival depends on trickery and deceit, where the same sharp wits that save a man from soldiers are turned to cheating others.

Conclusion. Nii's brief encounter with I-Put-it-to-me shows the resourcefulness forced on people by military repression and hardship, and, through its later irony, it binds Nii's story to his sister's and underlines the atmosphere of insecurity and dishonesty that pervades the world of the novel.

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