WAEC SSCE - Literature In English - 2009 (Prose)

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In Isidore Okpewho's The Last Duty the marriage of Aku and Oshevire stands at the moral centre of the novel. Set during a civil war in the fictional country where Oshevire, an Igabo man, lives among the Simba of Urukpe, their relationship is tested to breaking point by imprisonment, temptation and slander, and Okpewho uses it to explore loyalty, love and the destructive power of war on private lives.

A marriage of genuine love and trust. Before the war Aku and Oshevire share a stable, affectionate home with their young son Oghenovo. Oshevire is an honest, principled rubber trader who loves his wife deeply, and Aku, though of a minority group and therefore vulnerable, is devoted to him. Their bond is presented as sincere and mutually respectful.

The war forces them apart. Oshevire is falsely accused of collaborating with the enemy and thrown into prison, largely through the scheming of his business rival Toje. His long absence leaves Aku isolated, poor and unprotected in a hostile town, a woman alone with a child and no one to defend her.

Aku's loyalty under pressure. Toje, desiring Aku and wanting to keep Oshevire out of the way permanently, uses his wealth and influence to "support" her while pursuing her sexually. Aku resists for a long time out of love for her husband, but her extreme dependence and vulnerability eventually draw her into a compromising situation with Toje and, ironically, with his kinsman Odibo. Her lapse is presented less as betrayal than as the tragic result of helplessness in wartime.

Loyalty in absence. Even so, Aku's heart remains with Oshevire; her thoughts return constantly to him and to the family they had, and she longs for his release. Oshevire, for his part, never stops trusting and loving his wife, believing in her fidelity through his long confinement.

The tragic ending. When Oshevire is finally freed and returns, the strain of war and suspicion has poisoned the reunion. The relationship, though founded on real love, cannot be fully restored, and the novel ends in destruction rather than joyful reunion, underscoring how war shatters even the strongest private bonds.

Conclusion. The relationship between Aku and Oshevire is one of deep love and loyalty placed under intolerable strain by war, poverty and human malice. Okpewho uses it to show that in a corrupt and violent society even innocent, loving people become victims, and that the greatest casualties of war are often ordinary families.

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The love affair between Ona and Nwokocha Agbadi opens Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood and casts its shadow over the whole novel. Though it belongs to the older generation, this passionate, wilful relationship establishes the book's central concerns, produces its heroine, and sets in motion the fate that Nnu Ego will inherit.

It introduces the heroine and the plot. Nnu Ego, the central character, is the child of Ona and Agbadi. Their union is therefore the literal origin of the story. Nnu Ego's temperament, her pride and her lifelong struggle to prove herself as a mother, all descend from this beginning, so the relationship is the seed from which the plot grows.

It dramatises the theme of a woman's independence. Ona is a proud, spirited woman who refuses to become an ordinary wife. Bound by a promise to her father, Obi Umunna, who has no male heir, she will not marry Agbadi and insists on keeping her own will even as his mistress. Her fierce independence, and the tension it creates with Agbadi's masculine pride, introduces the novel's great question: what freedom can a woman have in a patriarchal society? Nnu Ego's later life answers this question tragically.

It exposes the conflict between love and male dominance. Agbadi is a wealthy, arrogant chief who loves Ona precisely because she resists him. Their relationship is a battle of wills, tender yet combative. His public display of lovemaking to humiliate a jealous wife, and Ona's refusal to be owned, reveal both the intensity and the cruelty in relations between men and women, another pattern the novel will trace through Nnu Ego's marriages.

It links the theme of childbearing and the chi. Ona's death after childbirth, and her dying wish that Agbadi allow their daughter to have a life of her own, connect directly to the novel's spiritual framework. Nnu Ego is said to be dogged by the chi of a slave woman wronged in Agbadi's household, and the guilt and passion surrounding Ona and Agbadi feed the sense of an inherited curse that will deny Nnu Ego lasting happiness.

It sets the standard of pride the novel questions. The strong, self-respecting Ona contrasts with the self-sacrificing Nnu Ego, inviting readers to weigh the cost of a woman's pride against the cost of a woman's devotion to motherhood.

Conclusion. The Ona-Agbadi relationship is significant because it generates the heroine, launches the plot, and announces the novel's abiding themes of female independence, the clash of love and male power, and the burden of childbearing. It is the source from which Nnu Ego's tragedy flows.

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Obi Umunna, Ona's father, never dominates the action of Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, yet his influence on his daughter is decisive. Through the claim he lays upon her, he shapes Ona's whole way of living and, indirectly, the destiny of her daughter Nnu Ego.

He binds her with the duty of an heir. Obi Umunna is a proud man of Umunna who has no son to continue his line. He therefore makes Ona, his only and much-loved child, promise that she will not belong wholly to any husband, but will bear a son to be named after him and to inherit his lineage. This vow is the single most powerful force in Ona's life.

He is the cause of her refusal to marry Agbadi. Because of her father's claim, Ona will not consent to become Nwokocha Agbadi's wife, even though she loves him and lives as his mistress. Her repeated refusals, which so wound Agbadi's pride, spring directly from her loyalty to Obi Umunna. Her father's wish thus governs the most important relationship of her life.

He shapes her proud independence. Obi Umunna has raised Ona to be spirited and self-respecting, more like a treasured companion than a submissive daughter. This upbringing helps make her the strong, wilful woman who insists on keeping her own will in a society that expects women to yield. Her celebrated independence is in part his making.

His influence reaches beyond his death. Even as Ona lies dying after childbirth, the tension between her father's claim and her love for Agbadi persists, and it is resolved only when she frees her daughter to belong to Agbadi's house. The struggle over lineage and belonging that Obi Umunna set going passes, like an inheritance, into the next generation, colouring Nnu Ego's own anxieties about children and continuity.

Conclusion. Obi Umunna influences Ona chiefly through the promise of an heir that he exacts from her. That promise dictates her refusal to marry Agbadi, reinforces her proud independence, and sets up the conflict over lineage that echoes into Nnu Ego's story. His quiet claim proves one of the shaping forces of the novel's opening.

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Toje is one of the most powerfully drawn figures in Isidore Okpewho's The Last Duty, and the war is the making and the unmaking of him. A wealthy rubber merchant of Urukpe, Toje exploits the conflict for his own ends, but the same war that gives him power also exposes his weakness and drives him to ruin.

The war gives him opportunity and influence. The breakdown of normal order allows Toje to rise. As a leading citizen he wins a place on the local council and cultivates the military administrator, so that his word carries weight with the authorities. The war turns him from a mere businessman into a man of dangerous influence.

He uses the war to destroy a rival. Toje's chief motive is to eliminate his business competitor, Oshevire, the other big rubber trader in the town. Exploiting the wartime fear of collaborators, he engineers the false accusation that Oshevire has aided the enemy, and he works to keep him imprisoned indefinitely. Thus the war becomes Toje's weapon for settling a private commercial grudge.

He uses the war to pursue Aku. With Oshevire safely locked away, Toje sets out to possess his rival's wife. He uses his wealth to make the destitute Aku dependent on him and presses his lust upon her. The war, by making Aku vulnerable and alone, hands Toje the chance to satisfy his desire.

The war exposes his impotence. Here lies the deep irony of his story. For all his power and scheming, Toje is sexually impotent, and his attempt to take Aku ends in humiliation. He is reduced to using his simple kinsman Odibo, which only compounds his shame and jealousy. The war strips away his mask of strength to reveal a frustrated, diminished man.

The war brings about his moral and physical downfall. Toje's greed, lust and abuse of power set in motion the tragedy that engulfs the whole community. His machinations collapse; the violence he helped to unleash rebounds upon himself and those around him, and he ends broken rather than triumphant. His fate embodies Okpewho's judgement that those who profit from a nation's suffering are finally consumed by it.

Conclusion. The war transforms Toje from a jealous businessman into a corrupt power-broker, giving him the means to imprison his rival and prey upon Aku, yet it also lays bare his impotence and drives him to destruction. Through Toje, Okpewho shows how war rewards greed and cruelty only to punish them, and how the true casualties of conflict include the schemers themselves.

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Richard Wright's Black Boy is above all the record of a self-determined spirit. From earliest childhood the narrator Richard refuses to be moulded by the hunger, violence, family tyranny and racial oppression that surround him, and it is his stubborn will to define himself that gives the autobiography its power.

Early rebellion against authority. As a small boy Richard questions and resists every attempt to control him. He defies his grandmother's rigid Seventh-Day Adventist household, refuses to accept religion merely because it is imposed, and rejects the beatings and prayers meant to break his independence. His insistence on thinking for himself sets him apart from all around him.

Hunger for knowledge. Denied books and formal encouragement, Richard determines to educate himself. His imagination is first lit by the story of Bluebeard, and he pursues reading against every obstacle. The famous episode in Memphis, where he forges a note and borrows a white man's library card to obtain the works of H. L. Mencken, shows him defying the whole system that forbids a black boy to read. Through literature he consciously builds his own mind.

Refusal to accept his "place". The white South demands that a black boy be servile, grinning and dishonest about his feelings. Richard cannot perform this role. He loses jobs, angers employers and endangers himself because he will not play the humble "nigger" expected of him. His inability to submit is not mere clumsiness but a deep refusal to surrender his selfhood.

Independence within his own community. His self-determination isolates him even from other black people, who fear that his pride will bring trouble. Yet he refuses to dampen his spirit to win their approval, choosing solitude over conformity.

The decision to leave. The supreme act of self-determination is his choice to escape the South. Saving his money and steeling his will, Richard migrates North to Chicago in search of the freedom to become a writer and a full human being. This flight is the logical outcome of a life spent asserting the right to shape his own destiny.

The vocation of writing. Underlying everything is his resolve to become a writer, to give voice to his own truth despite a world that offers him no encouragement. Writing becomes the ultimate expression of a self that insists on existing on its own terms.

Conclusion. Richard is self-determined in his rebellion against family and religion, his self-education, his refusal to accept racial subservience, his acceptance of loneliness, and his final escape to the North. His unbreakable will to define himself, against poverty and prejudice alike, is the central force of Black Boy.

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Although he appears only briefly and never comes to Raveloe, William Dane is the hidden hinge of George Eliot's Silas Marner. His single act of treachery in Lantern Yard determines the shape of Silas's entire life, so that the whole story of exile, miserliness and eventual redemption flows from what William Dane does at the beginning.

He is Silas's trusted friend. In the narrow religious community of Lantern Yard, William Dane is Silas Marner's closest companion, so intimate that the brethren call them David and Jonathan. Silas admires and confides in him completely, which makes the coming betrayal all the more devastating.

He frames Silas for theft. When the dying deacon's money disappears, suspicion falls on Silas because his pocket-knife is found by the empty cash-box. It is William Dane who has stolen the money and planted the evidence, hiding the empty bag in Silas's own dwelling to complete the frame. The trusted friend deliberately destroys the innocent man.

He exploits Silas's faith to condemn him. The congregation, refusing worldly proof, resorts to drawing lots, believing God will reveal the truth. The lots fall against Silas, and William Dane's guilt is masked by this false verdict. Silas is declared a thief, his belief in a just God is shattered, and William Dane self-righteously denounces him.

He steals Silas's betrothed. The injury goes further: Silas's engagement to Sarah is broken by the disgrace, and William Dane soon marries her himself. Thus Dane robs Silas not only of his good name and his faith but also of his intended wife and his future happiness.

He drives Silas into the exile that shapes the novel. Crushed and disillusioned, Silas leaves Lantern Yard for the strange village of Raveloe. Every later development, his lonely weaving, his obsessive hoarding of gold, the theft by Dunstan Cass, and the redeeming arrival of Eppie, grows out of this uprooting. William Dane's treachery is therefore the ultimate cause of both Silas's long spiritual death and his final rebirth.

Conclusion. William Dane affects the fortunes of Silas Marner absolutely: he betrays his friend, engineers his false conviction, destroys his faith and his engagement, and forces him into the exile from which the novel's action unfolds. A minor character in stage-time, he is a major cause in the moral scheme, the dark beginning against which Silas's eventual regeneration shines.

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Money and gold are more than possessions in George Eliot's Silas Marner; they are the measure of Silas's inner life. The novel traces his spiritual journey through his changing relationship to gold, from betrayed faith, to miserly obsession, to loss, and finally to the golden-haired child who redeems him. Gold thus organises the whole moral pattern of the book.

Gold and his early betrayal. In Lantern Yard Silas is a devout young weaver with little thought of money. His faith is shattered when his friend William Dane frames him for the theft of the congregation's money, and Silas, wrongly convicted, loses his church, his betrothed and his God. Money enters his life first as an instrument of injustice, driving him into exile at Raveloe.

Gold as a substitute for love and faith. Cut off from human fellowship and belief, Silas turns to his loom and to the coins it earns. Hoarding becomes his religion. He counts and caresses his growing pile of guineas night after night, loving the very faces of the coins. The gold fills the emptiness left by lost faith and friendship, but it also dries up his heart, shrinking him into a lonely, insect-like miser feared by the villagers.

The loss of the gold. When Dunstan Cass steals the hoard, Silas is plunged into despair, for his god has been taken from him. Yet this loss is the turning point of his life. Bereft of the gold that shut him off from others, he is forced out of his isolation to seek help, and the villagers' sympathy begins, faintly, to reconnect him with humanity.

Gold transformed into the golden-haired child. On the night of the theft's aftermath, the toddler Eppie wanders into his cottage, and in the firelight her golden curls seem to Silas at first to be his returned gold. This substitution is the novel's central symbol: living gold replaces dead metal. In caring for Eppie, Silas's shrivelled heart reopens; love, community and faith are restored to him.

The final judgement on money. When the stolen hoard is at last recovered, it no longer means anything to Silas, for Eppie has given him riches that coins cannot buy. And when Godfrey Cass, Eppie's natural father, offers wealth to reclaim her, she chooses her poor foster-father over money. Eliot thus insists that human affection is worth immeasurably more than gold.

Conclusion. In Silas's life, gold marks each stage of his fall and redemption: it betrays him, then possesses him, then, in its loss and its transformation into a child, saves him. Through it Eliot teaches that money hoarded for its own sake corrupts and isolates, while love turns true riches into a blessing.

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Ella, Richard's mother, is one of the most important influences in Richard Wright's autobiography Black Boy. Though poverty and illness reduce her to a shadow of her former self, she shapes Richard's mind and character and comes to symbolise, for him, the whole suffering of black life in the American South.

She is the parent who remains. After Richard's father abandons the family for another woman, Ella is left to raise Richard and his brother alone. She becomes the single fixed point in a childhood of constant upheaval, moving from Natchez to Memphis to Arkansas in search of survival.

She awakens his imagination. It is Ella who first opens the world of words to Richard. As a young schoolteacher she reads him the tale of Bluebeard, and the story fires his imagination and gives him his first hunger for literature. This early exposure plants the love of reading and storytelling that will later become his means of escape and self-expression.

She struggles heroically against poverty. Ella works as a cook and takes any labour she can find to keep her children fed, often going hungry herself. Her endless struggle teaches Richard the harsh reality of want; the gnawing hunger that haunts the book is bound up with his memory of his mother's inability, through no fault of her own, to provide.

She disciplines and toughens him. Ella is a strict mother who beats Richard severely when he sets fire to the house and forces him to confront the dangers of the streets, once sending him out to fight so that he will not be bullied. Her harsh lessons, born of love and fear, help forge his resilience and self-reliance.

Her illness becomes a symbol. Ella's health collapses; she suffers a stroke and long paralysis, becoming an invalid dependent on relatives. Her prolonged, undeserved suffering fills Richard with a lasting sense of the injustice of life. He writes that her suffering became for him a symbol of the meaningless pain endured by the poor and the black, and it deepens his rebellious, questioning spirit.

Conclusion. Richard's mother nurtures his imagination, embodies the family's grinding poverty, toughens him through hardship, and, in her broken health, comes to represent the wider suffering that shapes his outlook. She is central both to Richard's personal growth and to the book's vision of black endurance under oppression.