WAEC SSCE - Literature In English - 2007 (Prose)

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Superstition and traditional belief play a significant part in Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, shaping the lives, decisions and self-understanding of the characters. Emecheta shows how such beliefs both give meaning to experience and, at times, bind women to suffering.

The chi and the slave woman. The most important superstitious element is the belief in the personal god or chi. Nnu Ego's chi is said to be an angry slave woman who was buried alive to accompany her mistress, Nnu Ego's father's senior wife, to the land of the dead. This slave woman's restless, resentful spirit is believed to influence Nnu Ego's fate. The idea that a wronged spirit governs her fertility and fortune runs through the novel and is used to explain her troubles.

Superstition and childbearing. Belief in the spirit world dominates attitudes to fertility. Nnu Ego's early failure to conceive is interpreted in supernatural terms, connected to the offended slave woman, and she consults a dibia, or medicine man, to appease the spirit and secure children. Her worth as a woman is measured against these beliefs, so that superstition directly governs her happiness and her standing in society.

Superstition and daily life. Traditional beliefs guide many decisions in the community, from the interpretation of dreams and omens to reliance on diviners and rituals in times of crisis. Illness, misfortune and success are read as the work of gods, ancestors and spirits rather than of ordinary causes, and characters act accordingly, seeking spiritual remedies for their problems.

Superstition in death and after. Belief in the influence of the dead continues to the end. After Nnu Ego's lonely death, her children build her a shrine and pray to her for children, following the tradition that a departed mother's spirit can grant or withhold fertility. Ironically, it is said that she never answered such prayers, which itself becomes a superstitious explanation for barrenness in the community.

Conclusion. Superstition, embodied above all in the vengeful chi of the slave woman and in the reliance on diviners and spirits, provides the framework through which the characters in The Joys of Motherhood understand fertility, misfortune and fate. Emecheta uses these beliefs to deepen her portrait of Igbo society while also exposing how they reinforce the burdens placed upon women.

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In George Eliot's Silas Marner, the weaver's life is divided into two contrasting phases and settings: his early life in the town of Lantern Yard and his later life in the rural village of Raveloe. Eliot uses this movement to trace Silas's spiritual death and eventual rebirth, and the two communities function as moral and social opposites.

Similarities. In both places Silas lives largely as a solitary figure defined by his trade as a linen weaver. In each community he is at first an outsider regarded with a mixture of suspicion and awe, partly because of his cataleptic fits, which the ignorant interpret as something uncanny. In both settings he is also, initially, a man whose emotional life is narrow and whose deepest attachment is misplaced, first in his faith and friend, later in his hoarded gold.

• Faith and religion. Lantern Yard is a narrow, intense, Nonconformist chapel community in which Silas's whole identity is bound up in his religious faith and his standing among the brethren. Raveloe, by contrast, is a sleepy, easygoing Anglican village where religion is a matter of custom, feasting and the Rainbow Inn rather than fervent conviction.
• Betrayal versus acceptance. In Lantern Yard Silas is destroyed by betrayal: his friend William Dane frames him for theft, the drawing of lots falsely condemns him, and his fiancee Sarah abandons him. In Raveloe, though he begins in isolation, he is gradually drawn into the human community, especially after he adopts Eppie, and the villagers come to accept and even cherish him.
• Loss of faith versus restoration of faith. The injustice of Lantern Yard causes Silas to lose his faith in both God and man; he flees a place that has shattered his trust. In Raveloe, through the love of the child Eppie, his faith in providence and human goodness is slowly restored.
• Isolation versus community. His Lantern Yard life ends in exile and alienation. His Raveloe life ends in belonging, marriage of his adopted daughter, and a settled place in village life.
• Urban and rural. Lantern Yard is an anonymous town corner which, when Silas returns years later, has vanished without trace, suggesting the impermanence of that world. Raveloe is a rooted, organic rural community with continuity and tradition.

Conclusion. Eliot contrasts the two settings to dramatise Silas's journey from spiritual death to renewal. Lantern Yard represents betrayal, injustice and the collapse of trust; Raveloe, for all its slowness and superstition, becomes the place of healing, human connection and moral rebirth. The movement between the two towns is therefore the moral spine of the novel.

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In Richard Wright's autobiography Black Boy, the relationship between Richard and his father is one of distance, resentment and eventual pity. The father, Nathan, is a largely negative and absent presence, and his failure as a parent has a lasting effect on Richard's understanding of himself and of the world.

Early fear and estrangement. In Richard's earliest memories his father is a harsh, intimidating figure who demands quiet and sleeps by day because he works at night. The famous incident of the kitten captures the emotional gulf between them: when the noisy kitten disturbs the father's sleep, he irritably tells Richard to kill it, and the boy, taking the words literally and partly out of spite, hangs the animal. The episode reveals Richard's fear of his father, his rebellious anger, and the lack of any tender bond between them.

Abandonment and its consequences. The central fact of the relationship is that Nathan deserts the family for another woman, leaving Richard, his mother and his brother in grinding poverty. This desertion is the source of much of the hunger and hardship that dominate Richard's childhood. Richard comes to associate his father with betrayal and with the physical suffering of near-starvation. When the mother takes Nathan to court for support, he lies and gives almost nothing, deepening Richard's contempt.

The final meeting. Years later Richard meets his father again, now an aged, worn sharecropper on a plantation, ignorant and reduced by a lifetime of toil. Instead of hatred, Richard feels a complex mixture of estrangement and pity. He recognises that the two of them, though father and son, now belong to utterly different worlds: Richard has grown intellectually and spiritually beyond the peasant existence that has trapped his father. He sees his father as a man crushed and dulled by the soil, a stranger with whom he shares blood but nothing else.

Significance of the relationship. The failed father-son bond is important in several ways. It intensifies the poverty and hunger that shape Richard's character and drive his rebellion. It contributes to Richard's early sense of isolation and self-reliance, since he learns he cannot depend on the adults around him. And it becomes, in the final meeting, a measure of how far Richard has travelled: his father remains rooted in ignorance and the land, while Richard has been shaped by imagination, reading and the will to escape.

Conclusion. The relationship between Richard and his father is defined by fear, abandonment and emotional distance, softening at last into detached pity. Nathan's failure teaches Richard early lessons about hunger, betrayal and self-reliance, and stands as a marker of the enormous distance Richard puts between himself and the world of his origins.

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Superstition is one of the pervasive social forces in George Eliot's Silas Marner, and it operates most strongly in the rural community of Raveloe. Eliot uses it to characterise the ignorance and simplicity of the villagers, to shape the way they interpret events, and to underline the moral and spiritual themes of the novel.

Superstition and Silas's fits. Silas suffers from catalepsy, a condition the villagers do not understand. When he falls into a trance, the people of both Lantern Yard and Raveloe read it as a sign that his soul leaves his body or that he is in league with dark powers. This misreading makes him an object of fear and keeps him isolated for fifteen years.

Superstition and his skills. Silas's knowledge of herbs and simple remedies, learned from his mother, leads the villagers to suspect him of possessing uncanny or diabolical powers. His weaving, his solitariness and his hoarded gold all feed their belief that he is strange and possibly dangerous. Rather than approach him, they invent explanations rooted in fear.

Superstition at the Rainbow Inn. Eliot dramatises village superstition comically in the discussion at the Rainbow Inn, where the men debate ghosts and the supernatural. When Silas rushes in to announce the theft of his gold, the drink-befuddled company half-believe he is an apparition. The scene shows how deeply supernatural belief colours the villagers' view of reality.

Superstition and the arrival of Eppie. When Silas discovers the golden-haired child on his hearth after his gold has been stolen, his first bewildered impression links the child to his lost coins, and in the villagers' minds the mysterious appearance of the child carries an almost providential, wondrous quality. Superstitious wonder here shades into a genuine sense of the miraculous, marking the turning point of Silas's redemption.

The drawing of lots. In Lantern Yard, the community's reliance on drawing lots to determine Silas's guilt is itself a form of superstition dressed as piety. Trusting the outcome to chance rather than evidence, the brethren wrongly condemn an innocent man, and this false verdict destroys Silas's faith.

Function and significance. Superstition in the novel serves several purposes. It realistically depicts an unlettered rural community at the turn of the nineteenth century. It deepens Silas's isolation and thus makes his eventual reintegration more moving. And Eliot subtly contrasts blind superstition with true moral insight: the villagers' fears are shown to be groundless, while the genuine mystery of the novel, the redeeming power of love, works quietly beneath their notice.

Conclusion. Superstition is both a source of gentle comedy and a serious thematic device. It reveals the ignorance and warmth of Raveloe, isolates Silas, and throws into relief the novel's real concern with providence, love and moral regeneration.

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In Isidore Okpewho's The Last Duty, Oshevire is the tragic figure whose ruin the novel traces, and Toje Onovwakpo is the chief architect of that ruin. Driven by envy, business rivalry and lust for Oshevire's wife, Toje exploits the confusion of the war to destroy an innocent man.

Toje engineers the false accusation. The tragedy begins with a lie for which Toje is responsible. Oshevire, a Simba man loyal to his community, is falsely accused of collaborating with the enemy during the civil conflict. Toje, a leading citizen and Oshevire's business rival in the rubber trade, is behind the fabricated charge. By having Oshevire branded a saboteur and imprisoned, Toje removes his commercial competitor and clears the way for his own designs. Oshevire's long, unjust detention, the root of his suffering, is thus Toje's doing.

Toje's motive of commercial rivalry. Toje's envy of Oshevire's success in business is a powerful motive. With Oshevire out of the way, Toje hopes to dominate the local rubber trade. His pursuit of wealth and influence makes him willing to sacrifice an innocent man, and this greed directly prolongs Oshevire's imprisonment and the destruction of his livelihood.

Toje's designs on Aku. Toje also lusts after Oshevire's beautiful wife, Aku. Under the pretence of protecting and providing for her while her husband is in detention, he attaches himself to the vulnerable, isolated woman and seeks to possess her. His scheming exploitation of Aku's helplessness, and the involvement of Odibo in the household, poisons Oshevire's home and honour. The threat to Aku's fidelity and the shame it brings deepen the family's tragedy.

The wider ruin Toje causes. Because of Toje's machinations, the whole Oshevire family is shattered. Oshevire languishes wrongly imprisoned, Aku is left exposed and compromised, and their young son Oghenovo grows up in a broken, fearful home. The tragedy that finally engulfs the family, ending in violence and death, flows from the situation Toje created for his selfish ends.

Conclusion. Toje contributes to Oshevire's tragedy by fabricating the treason charge that imprisons him, by pursuing the business rivalry that motivates his cruelty, and by preying on the defenceless Aku. Okpewho presents Toje as the self-seeking villain whose envy and lust turn the chaos of war into the destruction of an innocent man and his family.

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Irony is one of Buchi Emecheta's chief tools in The Joys of Motherhood. The very title is ironic, and throughout the novel Emecheta uses situational, verbal and dramatic irony to expose the painful gap between the ideals of motherhood in Igbo society and the harsh realities a woman like Nnu Ego actually endures.

The irony of the title. The most pervasive irony is in the title itself. The Joys of Motherhood leads the reader to expect a celebration of maternal happiness, yet Nnu Ego's experience of motherhood is dominated by suffering, sacrifice, poverty and neglect. She toils and starves herself to raise her children, only to be abandoned in her old age. The promised joys turn out to be sorrows, and the title becomes a bitter comment on the false rewards society dangles before women.

The irony of Nnu Ego's fertility and barrenness. There is deep irony in Nnu Ego's reproductive history. In her first marriage to Amatokwu she is cast off as barren and worthless because she bears no child, which nearly destroys her. Yet in Lagos, married to Nnaife, she becomes the mother of many children, and this very fruitfulness brings not ease but greater hardship, as she struggles to feed and educate them in poverty. Whether barren or fertile, she suffers, which exposes the impossible expectations placed on women.

The irony of children as investment. Nnu Ego believes, as her society teaches, that children, especially sons, are a mother's security and reward. She sacrifices everything for her son Oshia's education, trusting he will care for her in old age. Ironically, the educated children scatter and neglect her; Oshia goes abroad and does not return in time, and she dies alone by the roadside, unattended by the very children for whom she gave her life. Her lifelong investment yields nothing.

The irony of her death and posthumous honour. The final irony is that Nnu Ego, who longed all her life for love and recognition, dies lonely and unmourned, yet is honoured with a costly funeral and even made into a shrine by her children. She is denied peace and comfort in life but glorified in death, and the tradition holds that her spirit is reluctant to grant fertility to others, a last bitter twist on the idea of the joyful mother.

Conclusion. Through the ironic title, the reversal of barrenness and fertility, the betrayal of the mother's investment in her children, and the emptiness of posthumous honour, Emecheta uses irony to dismantle the romantic ideal of motherhood and to protest the sacrifices unjustly demanded of women in a changing society.

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In Richard Wright's Black Boy, the conflict between Richard and his Aunt Addie is one of the sharpest of his many clashes with his family. It arises from a combination of religious rigidity, misunderstanding, injustice and Richard's own fierce independence.

Religious fanaticism. Aunt Addie is a devout Seventh-Day Adventist and a teacher in the religious school Richard is made to attend. Her faith is narrow, joyless and severe. She expects unquestioning obedience and piety, but Richard, a natural sceptic who cannot swallow doctrine he does not understand, resists her attempts to force religion upon him. This fundamental clash of temperament, her dogmatism against his questioning mind, poisons their relationship from the start.

The injustice over the walnuts. The decisive quarrel breaks out in Addie's classroom. Smelling walnuts and seeing shells on the floor near Richard, she accuses him of eating in class. In fact the culprit is another boy sitting in front of him, but Richard refuses to inform on his classmate. Addie, convinced of his guilt, tries to beat him. Richard, knowing himself innocent, feels the injustice keenly and resists. The false accusation and the unfairness of being punished for another's offence turn dislike into open hostility.

The confrontation with the knife. Later Addie attempts to whip Richard at home for the same supposed offence. This time Richard fights back, seizing a knife to defend himself and warning her not to touch him. The violence of this confrontation shows how deep the antagonism has grown. Richard's willingness to arm himself against an adult relative reveals both his desperation and his refusal to submit to what he regards as tyranny.

Richard's independence and pride. Underlying the specific incidents is Richard's unbreakable sense of self. He will not lie, will not betray a classmate, and will not accept punishment he has not earned. His pride and his hunger for fairness make him incapable of the meek submission Addie demands. To her, this is arrogance and wickedness; to Richard, it is simple justice.

Conclusion. The problems between Richard and Aunt Addie spring from her harsh religious fanaticism, the injustice of the walnut accusation, her attempts to beat him for an offence he did not commit, and Richard's proud, independent refusal to submit or to betray others. The conflict is one more example in the novel of how Richard's individuality sets him at war with a family and a society that demand conformity.

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Isidore Okpewho's The Last Duty is set against the backdrop of the Nigerian Civil War, though the conflict is transposed into the fictional struggle between Nigeria and the breakaway region of Simba. War is not merely a background event in the novel; it is the engine that drives the plot, exposes human weakness, and destroys individual lives and communal trust in the small garrison town of Urukpe.

War as a pretext for private greed and betrayal. The most striking treatment of war in the novel is Okpewho's demonstration that national conflict becomes a cover for personal ambition. Chief Toje Onovwakpo exploits the war economy to eliminate his business rival, Mukoro Oshevire, by falsely accusing him of being a saboteur who supplies the enemy. The war provides the machinery of arrest, detention and suspicion that allows a private grudge to be pursued as though it were a patriotic duty. Through Toje, Okpewho shows that war corrodes moral judgement and rewards the unscrupulous.

War and the suffering of the innocent. The Oshevire family is shattered by a conflict they did not start. Oshevire is imprisoned without genuine evidence; his wife Aku, an Igabo woman married into a Simba community, is left isolated and vulnerable, watched with suspicion because of her ethnicity; their young son Oghenovo is neglected and eventually wounded. The child's blinding at the close of the novel is Okpewho's bitter emblem of how war maims the future and the guiltless.

Ethnic suspicion and the breakdown of trust. War inflames ethnic hatred. Aku is treated as an enemy within because of her origins, and the whole community of Urukpe lives in an atmosphere of fear, rumour and denunciation. Neighbours become informers; loyalty is measured by tribe rather than character. Okpewho exposes how war reduces complex human beings to ethnic labels.

The moral corruption of authority. The soldiers stationed in Urukpe, notably in the person of Major Ali, must navigate the temptations that war creates. Toje attempts to bribe and manipulate the military; the machinery of security is turned toward private ends. Yet Okpewho balances this with figures of integrity, so that war becomes a test that some pass and many fail.

The psychological toll. Through the multiple first-person narrators, Okpewho lets us hear the inner disintegration that war produces: Toje's impotence and desperation, Aku's loneliness and guilt after her affair with Toje's kinsman Odibo, Oshevire's dignified but broken faith in justice. War is shown to wound the mind as deeply as the body.

Conclusion. In The Last Duty, war is portrayed not as heroic combat but as a moral catastrophe that unleashes greed, ethnic hatred, injustice and the suffering of the innocent. Okpewho's final vision is deeply pessimistic: even when Oshevire is released and attempts to rebuild, the damage, symbolised by his blinded son and the violence at the novel's end, cannot be undone. War, the novel insists, leaves no true victors.