WAEC SSCE - Literature In English - 2009 (Drama & Poetry)

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The "death" of Sizwe Bansi in Athol Fugard's Sizwe Bansi is Dead is not a physical death but the giving up of his name and identity so that he may survive under apartheid. This symbolic death is the central event of the play and carries its whole meaning.

What happens

• Sizwe Bansi has come to Port Elizabeth to look for work, but his passbook is not in order and he is ordered to return to King William's Town, where there is no work.
• Out with Buntu one night, they find the corpse of a man, Robert Zwelinzima, in a back alley. His passbook carries a valid work-seeker's permit for the city.
• Buntu persuades Sizwe to switch the photographs and take over the dead man's identity. From then on Sizwe Bansi is "dead", and he must live as Robert Zwelinzima.

Significance of the death

• Survival under an inhuman system. Sizwe can only stay and work in the city by killing off his real self. Apartheid forces a man to choose between his name and his livelihood.
• Loss of identity and dignity. The passbook, not the person, decides whether a black man may live and work. A human being is reduced to a number and a stamp; individual identity is worthless without the right papers.
• Protest against the pass laws. The episode is a bitter indictment of a regime that makes a man's own name a death sentence and forces him to become someone else to eat.
• Symbol of the black condition. Sizwe's dilemma stands for the plight of all black South Africans, robbed of self and freedom by unjust laws.

The moral question

• Sizwe at first resists, clinging to the pride of his own name and manhood: "How do I live as a ghost?"
• Buntu's harsh logic, that a name is worth nothing if it cannot buy bread for one's family, finally persuades him. Survival demands the sacrifice of self.

Conclusion

The significance of Sizwe's "death" lies in its exposure of apartheid's cruelty. To live, a black man must die to his own identity and wear the papers of a dead stranger. The symbolic death dramatises the system's denial of human dignity and gives the play its powerful protest.

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In I Will Pronounce Your Name, Leopold Sedar Senghor celebrates the beloved, Naett, by piling up figures of speech that turn her name into a feast for the senses. The poem is less an argument than an incantation, and its figurative language is the source of its music and sensuous beauty.

Apostrophe. The whole poem is a direct address to an absent beloved, "Naett". This apostrophe gives the lines the intimacy of a lover speaking, and the promise to "pronounce your name" frames the poem as a devotional act.

Simile. Senghor defines the beloved's name through a chain of comparisons introduced by "like". The name is "mild like cinnamon" and likened to the fragrance of a lemon grove and to the sweetness of ripe fruit. These similes appeal directly to taste and smell, making abstract affection physically vivid.

Metaphor. Naett is repeatedly identified with natural forces and precious things. Her name becomes "sugar", a "dry tornado", the "clap of lightning", pure gold and shining coral. By fusing the woman with sweetness, storm and treasure, the metaphors present her as both tender and elemental, gentle yet overpowering.

Imagery. The poem is dense with sensory imagery: the perfume of spices and citrus (smell), the taste of sugar and fruit (taste), gold, coal and coral (sight and touch). This synaesthetic mixing of the senses conveys the total, overwhelming effect the beloved has on the poet.

Personification and hyperbole. Natural elements are given life and emotion, and the beloved's qualities are magnified beyond ordinary measure, so that her name commands storms and shines like precious metal. The exaggeration expresses the intensity of adoration.

Repetition and refrain. The recurring naming of "Naett" and the repeated pattern of definition act like a chant. This repetition builds rhythm and reinforces the ritual, almost sacred, tone of the tribute.

Contrast. Senghor balances soft images (cinnamon, sugar, fragrance) against hard, violent ones (tornado, lightning, coal), suggesting that the beloved unites tenderness with fierce power.

Conclusion. Through apostrophe, simile, metaphor, rich sensory imagery, personification, hyperbole and hypnotic repetition, Senghor transforms a single name into a sensuous hymn. The figures of speech are not decoration but the very means by which the poet makes the reader taste, smell and feel his love.

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William Wordsworth's The Solitary Reaper is built on the Romantic conviction that nature and human feeling belong to one another. The poem watches a Highland girl reaping and singing alone in a field, and it uses the natural world both to frame her and to measure the power of her song, so that man and nature are shown to be deeply and beautifully connected.

Nature as the setting that shapes the human figure. The reaper is not seen in a town or crowd but "single in the field", cutting and binding the grain among the Highland vale. Her solitude and her labour are inseparable from the rural landscape. Wordsworth insists that we behold her in this natural setting, so that the girl and the field become a single image of rustic life.

Nature as the standard for measuring her song. To convey the beauty of her melody the poet reaches instinctively for nature. Her voice is more welcome than the nightingale's to weary travellers in an Arabian desert, and more thrilling than the cuckoo-bird breaking the silence of the seas among the far Hebrides. These comparisons show that human art is best understood through natural images, and that nature supplies the very language of praise.

Harmony between the human voice and the natural scene. The girl's song seems to flow out of the valley itself; the vale "overflowing with the sound". Her music does not disturb nature but merges with it, filling the landscape as naturally as birdsong. Man and nature are thus in concord rather than conflict.

Nature and the working of memory. True to Romantic doctrine, the experience of the reaper in her natural setting sinks into the poet's mind and lives on: he bears the music in his heart "long after it was heard no more". Nature, through the reaper's song, becomes a lasting source of inner nourishment, echoing Wordsworth's belief that scenes of natural beauty feed the spirit in later life.

The dignity of rural humanity. By making a humble labouring girl the centre of the poem, Wordsworth expresses his faith that ordinary people living close to nature possess a natural nobility and emotional depth worthy of high poetry.

Conclusion. In The Solitary Reaper the relationship between man and nature is one of harmony, reflection and enrichment. Nature frames the reaper, lends images to celebrate her song, blends with her voice, and preserves the moment in memory. The poem is a quiet testament to the Romantic belief that human feeling reaches its fullest beauty in communion with the natural world.

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In Agbor Dancer, J. P. Clark watches a village girl dancing to the traditional drums and, in admiring her, becomes painfully aware of how far his own Western education has cut him off from that rootedness. The poem presents cultural alienation as the gap between the dancer's effortless belonging and the speaker's yearning distance.

The dancer as an image of cultural wholeness. The Agbor dancer moves in perfect harmony with the community drums, "her lithe limbs" carrying the rhythm of the tribe. She is spontaneous, unselfconscious and completely at one with her heritage. Clark presents her as the embodiment of an intact traditional culture, dancing "to the beat of the drums" as naturally as breathing.

The speaker as the alienated observer. Against her belonging the speaker sets his own exclusion. He watches from outside the circle, admiring but unable to join. The refrain-like longing, that he wishes he could "lose" himself in that rhythm as she does, exposes a man estranged from the very culture that should be his own. His alienation is dramatised as a spectator's distance from a dance he can appreciate intellectually but not enter instinctively.

The cause: Western education. The poem implies that the speaker's book-learning and colonial schooling are responsible for his estrangement. His self-consciousness, the very habit of standing back to analyse, is what separates him from the dancer's unthinking freedom. Clark thus makes cultural alienation the price of a foreign education that trains the mind away from the community's living traditions.

Contrast as method. The theme is built almost entirely on contrast: instinct against intellect, participation against observation, the rooted dancer against the uprooted watcher, freedom against inhibition. Every image of the girl's easy grace deepens the reader's sense of the speaker's loss.

Tone of yearning and regret. The mood is wistful. The speaker does not despise his learning, but he mourns what it has cost him. His admiration is tinged with envy and a nostalgic desire to recover a lost innocence and belonging.

Conclusion. Through the striking opposition between the self-forgetful Agbor dancer and the self-aware, educated onlooker, Clark presents cultural alienation as the tragic distance a Western-schooled African feels from his own roots. The poem is a lament for the wholeness that formal education has taken away.

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Mr James Ofosu is the father at the centre of Joe de Graft's Sons and Daughters. He is a hard-working, well-to-do businessman whose attitude to his children's future drives the main conflict of the play, the clash between parental ambition and the young people's own artistic dreams.

His character

• A loving but controlling father. Ofosu genuinely cares for his children and wants the best for them, but he insists on choosing their careers, believing he knows what is respectable and secure.
• A believer in conventional professions. He wants his son George to become a lawyer and his other children to enter established, money-making professions such as law and medicine. He looks down on art, painting and dancing as unserious and unprofitable.
• Hard-working and self-made. Having toiled to build his wealth, he expects his children to value education and to pursue solid careers rather than risky artistic ones.
• Capable of change. Though stubborn at first, Ofosu is not a tyrant. By the end he softens and comes to accept his children's true talents.

His role in the play

• Source of the central conflict. His opposition to George's wish to be a painter and Maanan's love of dancing sets up the generational struggle the title announces.
• Victim of a false friend. Ofosu trusts the lawyer Bonu to look after his affairs and his children while he is away, but Bonu proves treacherous and self-serving. This exposes Ofosu's misplaced faith and advances the plot.
• Agent of resolution. When Ofosu at last recognises Bonu's wickedness and the sincerity of his children's callings, he relents and allows them to follow their artistic gifts, bringing the play to a hopeful close.

Significance

• Through Ofosu, de Graft dramatises the theme of parents imposing careers on children versus letting them pursue their natural talents.
• His final change of heart delivers the play's message: that children should be free to develop their own gifts.

Conclusion

Mr James Ofosu is a loving yet overbearing father whose insistence on conventional careers creates the play's conflict. His misplaced trust in Bonu and his eventual acceptance of his children's artistic dreams make him the pivotal figure through whom de Graft explores the tension between parental control and youthful self-fulfilment.

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Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress is a witty seduction poem whose argument is carried by a series of powerful images. The speaker urges his hesitant beloved to yield to love now, and he builds his case through vivid pictures of vast time, of death and decay, and of energetic passion. Three of these images are especially memorable.

1. The image of boundless time and space. In the opening movement the speaker imagines what their courtship could be if only they had "world enough, and time". He pictures himself loving her by the exotic Ganges while she refuses by the English Humber, and declares that his "vegetable love" would grow "vaster than empires and more slow", praising her for hundreds and even thousands of years. This hyperbolic image of endless, slowly ripening love flatters the mistress while gently mocking the leisurely pace her coyness would demand. It establishes the ideal against which the harsh reality of the second movement will strike.

2. The image of time as a pursuing chariot and of the grave. The mood darkens with the famous lines that at his back he "always hear[s] time's winged chariot hurrying near", while before him stretch the "deserts of vast eternity". Time is personified as a relentless charioteer, and eternity as an empty, lifeless desert. This is followed by a chilling picture of the tomb: her beauty will be lost, worms will "try" her long-preserved virginity, her "quaint honour" will "turn to dust", and his desire to "ashes". These grim images of death and physical decay press the argument that beauty and chastity are worthless once life is over, and so urge immediate love.

3. The image of vigorous, devouring passion. The final movement bursts with images of energy. The lovers are urged to behave like "amorous birds of prey" that "devour" time rather than languish in its "slow-chapped power". They should roll all their "strength" and "sweetness up into one ball" and tear their pleasures "with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life". These violent, athletic images of seizing and consuming life turn love-making into a triumphant act of defiance against time, and they close the poem with a surge of passionate urgency.

Conclusion. Marvell moves his argument from flattering vastness, through the terror of death, to fierce action. The three images, of limitless time, of the pursuing chariot and the grave, and of devouring passion, together dramatise the poem's carpe diem theme: because time is short and death certain, the lovers must seize their pleasure now.

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The account of the preparations for Mr Ford's visit comes in Styles's long opening monologue in Athol Fugard's Sizwe Bansi is Dead. Styles recalls his days as a worker at the Ford motor assembly plant in Port Elizabeth, and his story is a comic yet biting satire on the way black workers were treated.

The announcement

• The foreman, Mr Bradley, gathers the workers and excitedly tells them that Mr Henry Ford the Second, the great owner of the company, is coming all the way from America to visit their plant.
• Bradley treats the visit as if a god were descending, and the news throws the whole factory into a panic of preparation.

The frantic cleaning

• The workers are ordered to scrub, clean and polish the entire plant. Floors are washed, windows cleaned, machines wiped and greased until everything shines.
• The place is repainted; even the grass and surroundings are tidied so that the factory will look perfect.
• The men are given brand-new overalls to wear so that they too will look neat and impressive for the visitor.

The instructions to the workers

• The bosses coach the men on how to behave: they must look busy, happy and hard-working, and must show no sign of grievance.
• Styles is even called upon to act as interpreter, translating the white bosses' instructions to the black workers, and he mockingly reshapes the message to expose its dishonesty.

The anticlimax

• After all the labour and anxiety, the great Mr Ford sweeps through the plant in a matter of minutes, scarcely glancing at anything, and is gone.
• The mountain of preparation is wasted on a visit that lasts only a moment.

Significance

• The episode satirises the servility forced on black workers and the hollow show put on to please a powerful white boss.
• It exposes the indignity and exploitation of black labour, foreshadowing the play's larger attack on apartheid.

Conclusion

The preparations for Ford's visit, the frantic cleaning, painting, new overalls and rehearsed smiles, all for a visit of a few minutes, form a memorable comic set-piece that lays bare the humiliation of black workers and sets the satirical, protesting tone of the play.

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Joe de Graft's Sons and Daughters does contain a clear story of friendship betrayed, but that betrayal is only one strand of a play whose main concern is the conflict between parents and children over careers. The question is best answered by weighing both sides.

The play is about friendship betrayed, to a real extent

• James Ofosu places deep trust in his friend, the lawyer Bonu, treating him as a confidant and relying on him to advise and watch over his household and affairs.
• Bonu repays this trust with treachery. He is greedy and self-serving, more interested in his own advantage than in Ofosu's welfare.
• His most shameful betrayal is his lust for Ofosu's daughter Maanan, whom he tries to take advantage of, abusing the very confidence her father has reposed in him.
• Bonu's hypocrisy and disloyalty show how a trusted friend can become a serpent within the home, and his exposure is one of the play's key turning points.

But the play is chiefly about something larger

• The central conflict is the generational struggle between Ofosu and his children over their futures. He wants them to become lawyers and doctors, while George longs to be a painter and Maanan to dance.
• The title itself, Sons and Daughters, points to this theme of parental control versus the young people's right to follow their own talents.
• The play also explores education, ambition, and the freedom of the younger generation to choose their own path, themes wider than the single betrayal by Bonu.

How the two connect

• Bonu's betrayal serves the larger theme: his falseness opens Ofosu's eyes, helping the father to see his children's sincerity and to relent about their careers.
• Thus the betrayed friendship is a means to the play's resolution rather than its whole subject.

Conclusion

The play is about friendship betrayed only to a limited extent. Bonu's treachery against Ofosu is important and dramatically effective, but it is subordinate to the main theme of the clash between parents and children over the freedom to pursue one's own dreams. The betrayal deepens and helps resolve that larger conflict rather than standing as the play's central concern.

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Deception is the engine that drives Gogol's The Government Inspector. The whole action springs from a single mistake, and every character then either practises deceit or is deceived by it, so that the play becomes a comic anatomy of a corrupt society that lives by pretence.

The founding deception: mistaken identity. The Mayor receives a warning that an inspector is coming from St. Petersburg, travelling incognito. The frightened officials seize on Hlestakov, a penniless clerk stranded at the inn because he has gambled his money away, and mistake him for the dreaded inspector. Hlestakov never seriously claims the title at first; the officials deceive themselves through guilty fear. This self-deception is the play's central irony: the swindlers are swindled by their own bad consciences.

Hlestakov as impostor. Once he grasps his luck, Hlestakov actively plays the role. He accepts bribes as "loans", boasts monstrously of dining on soup shipped from Paris, of writing works attributed to famous authors, and of running government departments. His lying grows so extravagant that it exposes the gullibility of his hosts, who swallow every absurdity because they are desperate to please the man they believe can ruin them.

Deception among the officials. Every official is himself a fraud. The Judge takes bribes in the form of greyhound puppies; the Charity Commissioner Zemlyanika lets patients die and slanders his colleagues; the Postmaster opens private letters; the schools and hospitals are shams dressed up for inspection. Their whole administration is a performance staged to hide rot, so deception is not accidental but the normal condition of their public life.

Deception in love and ambition. Hlestakov deceives both the Mayor's wife Anna and his daughter Marya, flirting with mother and daughter in turn before hastily proposing to Marya. The Mayor, already dreaming of a general's rank and a house in the capital, is deceived into believing his family's fortune is made.

The unmasking. The deceptions collapse in two devastating strokes. The Postmaster intercepts Hlestakov's letter to his friend Tryapichkin, in which he mocks each official by name and reveals he is a nobody. The self-deceivers are exposed to one another in a scene of humiliation. Then the Gendarme announces that the real Inspector has arrived, freezing the cast in the celebrated dumb show. The pretenders are trapped by the very machinery of surveillance they had tried to cheat.

Conclusion. Through layer upon layer of deceit, self-deception, imposture and unmasking, Gogol shows that a community built on bribery and hypocrisy is peculiarly easy to deceive, because it is already deceiving itself. Deception is therefore both the comic mechanism and the moral target of the play.

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The claim that Sir Thomas More is naive invites us to weigh his conduct in Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons. On the surface his refusal to compromise, and his fatal trust in the protection of the law, can look like innocence of the way power really works. On a closer view, however, More is not naive at all but a supremely shrewd lawyer who understands his danger perfectly and chooses principle with his eyes open.

The case that More is naive.

• He believes that his silence on the King's divorce and supremacy will keep him safe, trusting that the law cannot punish a man for what he has not said. Events prove this hope misplaced.
• He relies too far on old friendships and on the King's affection for him, underestimating Henry's ruthlessness once his conscience is crossed.
• He is generous and unsuspecting toward Richard Rich, giving him counsel and even a silver cup, failing to guard against the ambition that will later perjure him to death.
• His faith in the integrity of the courts is betrayed when Rich's false testimony, rewarded with the office of Attorney-General for Wales, secures his conviction.

The stronger case that he is not naive.

• More is the finest lawyer in England and knows the danger exactly. He retreats into silence precisely because he understands that the law protects a man who says nothing, and he defends that position with brilliant legal reasoning.
• He warns Rich plainly, telling him to be a teacher rather than seek advancement at court, showing that he reads Rich's character clearly and simply hopes to save him.
• He arranges his affairs, resigns the Chancellorship, and cuts himself off from dangerous conversation, all deliberate acts of a man managing a mortal threat.
• His stand is a matter of conscience, not ignorance. He would rather die than swear an oath he believes false, valuing his integrity above his life. This is moral courage, not simplicity.

Conclusion. More miscalculates the reach of tyranny and the depth of Rich's treachery, and to that limited extent he can seem naive. But Bolt presents him as a man who sees his peril more clearly than anyone and still refuses to betray his "self". His downfall comes not from foolish innocence but from an uncompromising conscience in a corrupt age. He is better described as principled and tragically steadfast than as naive.

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Hlestakov and the Mayor, Anton Antonovich, are the two poles around which Gogol's comedy turns. They are opposites in station and temperament, yet they mirror each other in vanity and dishonesty, and it is the meeting of these two frauds that produces the play's satire.

Points of contrast.

• Rank and experience. The Mayor is a seasoned, middle-aged provincial official who has governed the town for years and boasts of outwitting three previous governors. Hlestakov is a young, low-ranking clerk from St. Petersburg, inexperienced and irresponsible.
• Cunning versus foolishness. The Mayor is genuinely shrewd; he calculates, manages bribes and stage-manages the town for inspection. Hlestakov is a scatter-brained wastrel who lies from empty vanity rather than design and hardly understands his own good fortune.
• Motive. The Mayor's dishonesty is deliberate and self-serving, aimed at protecting his position and enriching himself. Hlestakov's dishonesty is impulsive and childish, driven by hunger, gambling debts and a hollow craving to appear grand.
• The reversal. The Mayor, for all his cunning, is finally the greater fool, undone by the empty-headed clerk he tried to bribe and flatter. The clever man is duped by the fool.

Points of comparison.

• Vanity. Both are ruled by pride. The Mayor dreams of a general's sash and a mansion in the capital; Hlestakov boasts of Parisian soup, famous friends and running whole ministries. Each is intoxicated by the illusion of greatness.
• Dishonesty. Both live by deceit. The Mayor extorts and covers up; Hlestakov cheats and lies. Neither has any moral scruple about taking what is not his.
• Opportunism. Each seizes the moment. The Mayor exploits his office; Hlestakov exploits the officials' terror, accepting "loans" from everyone in sight.
• Self-deception. Both are blinded by what they wish to believe: the Mayor that his fortune is secured through Marya's marriage, Hlestakov that he truly is the great man he pretends to be.

Conclusion. Gogol pairs a crafty official with a foolish impostor to show that they are moral kin. Their contrast in rank and cleverness makes the comedy, but their shared vanity and corruption make the satire, and the Mayor's downfall at the hands of Hlestakov exposes how a rotten society is at last cheated by the very emptiness it worships.