WAEC SSCE - Literature In English - 2011 (Drama & Poetry)

Akọwa Nkọwa

"The Soul's Errand" (also known as "The Lie"), attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, is a bitter valediction in which the dying soul is sent out as a messenger to expose the corruption of the world. To each institution the poet delivers a blunt accusation and dares it to "give the lie," that is, to prove him wrong at the cost of its own reputation.

To the Court. The soul is instructed to tell the court that "it glows and shines like rotten wood." The message is that the glittering world of kings, courtiers and royal favour is only a decayed brilliance, attractive on the surface but corrupt within. The court's splendour is a hollow show, and its influence, once tested honestly, cannot answer the charge.

To the Church. The soul must tell the church that "it shows what's good and doth no good." Here the poet's complaint is hypocrisy: the church preaches virtue and points to what is right, yet fails to practise or produce it. Its teaching and its conduct do not match; it is all doctrine and no deed.

To the Potentates (the great and powerful). The rulers and men of high estate are told that "they live acting by others' action," and are "not loved unless they give." The poet strips power of its dignity, showing that the mighty depend on flatterers and are esteemed only for the favours they dispense, not for any true worth.

The poet's message overall. Through these charges Raleigh voices a world-weary, almost Stoic disillusionment. Court, Church and rulers, the pillars of society, are unmasked as false, hypocritical and self-serving. The refrain "give the lie" is a challenge no institution can meet, and the soul's fearlessness comes precisely because, being about to leave the world, it has nothing more to lose and speaks pure truth.

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Miss Prism seems at first a minor figure in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, a prim governess in the country subplot. In fact she is indispensable, for she holds the secret that resolves the entire comedy, and she also serves Wilde's satire on Victorian respectability. Her importance is therefore both structural and thematic.

Guardian of the plot's great secret. Years before the action begins, Miss Prism was the nursemaid in the Moncrieff household. In a moment of absent-mindedness she placed the manuscript of her three-volume novel in the perambulator and the baby in a large handbag, which she then abandoned at the cloakroom of Victoria Station. That lost baby is Jack Worthing. Miss Prism alone carries the knowledge that unlocks his origins, so the whole mystery of identity depends on her.

Agent of the denouement. The play's tangled confusions are untied only when Lady Bracknell recognises Miss Prism and demands the return of the missing infant. Confronted with the very handbag, Miss Prism identifies it, and Jack is revealed to be Lady Bracknell's nephew, Algernon's elder brother, and truly named Ernest after his father, General Moncrieff. Every knot of the plot, Jack's parentage, his right to marry Gwendolen, and the comic truth of the name "Ernest", is loosed through her. Without Miss Prism there is no resolution.

A target of Wilde's satire. Miss Prism embodies the earnest, moralising respectability that Wilde loves to mock. She preaches propriety and duty to her pupil Cecily and condemns the wayward, yet she herself once lost a baby through carelessness and harbours romantic feelings for the clergyman, Dr. Chasuble. The gap between her severe morality and her comic past exposes the hypocrisy of Victorian virtue.

Comic sub-plot and pairing. Her flirtation with Canon Chasuble supplies a gently ridiculous romance among the older characters, balancing the young lovers and adding to the play's web of courtships. Their pairing rounds off the general movement toward marriage.

Conclusion. Miss Prism is far more important than her modest role suggests. As the keeper of the handbag secret she is the mechanism that resolves the plot, and as a moralising governess with a scandalous lapse she embodies Wilde's satire on respectable hypocrisy. She is the small hinge on which the whole comedy finally turns.

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In "The Fence," Lenrie Peters chooses a spare, deliberate diction built around the central image of a boundary in order to dramatise the paralysis of indecision. The very title word, fence, is loaded: a fence is a thing that neither joins nor fully separates, and the poet exploits this middle position throughout.

Diction of division and neutrality. The recurring language of borders and edges, the man who lives "between two lands," and the phrase "no man's land" fix the persona in a barren middle ground that belongs to nobody. These are not decorative words; they are chosen for their associations with war, disputed territory and sterility, so that indecision is made to feel dangerous rather than merely uncomfortable.

Diction of light and darkness. Peters sets "day" against "night" and "light" against "darkness" to present the two opposed choices the persona refuses to make. The plain, elemental vocabulary keeps the contrast stark and moral: to sit on the fence is to reject both the good of the day and the honesty of the night.

Simplicity and finality. The diction is monosyllabic and unadorned, and the poem moves toward the blunt word die. By ending on death, the poet's word choice delivers the warning that fence-sitting is not a safe neutrality but a slow self-destruction; the man perishes precisely because he commits to nothing.

Figurative economy. Words like "seed," "grow" and "harvest" (the natural vocabulary of productivity) are used ironically, for nothing grows in the neutral strip. The lean diction therefore mirrors the theme: just as the words are stripped and bare, so the fence-sitter's life is empty of achievement.

In sum, Peters' diction, plain, dualistic and quietly menacing, enacts the poem's message that indecision and cowardly neutrality lead only to waste and death.

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The suffering of women in war is the very subject of Femi Osofisan's Women of Owu. After the Yoruba kingdom of Owu falls to the allied armies of Ijebu, Ife and Oyo, the men are slaughtered and the surviving women are left to face slavery, grief and violation. Through them Osofisan exposes the peculiar cruelty that war visits upon women, who become the helpless spoils of a quarrel they did not begin.

Reduced to war booty. The central horror of the women's plight is that they are shared out among the conquerors as property. Noble wives and princesses of Owu are allotted like goods to the victorious generals, stripped of freedom and dignity. Their humanity is denied; they are simply prizes of victory.

The agony of the queen mother. Erelu Afin, once the proud mother of Owu, embodies collective suffering. She has lost her husband, her sons and her kingdom, and must now watch her daughters and grand-children destroyed or enslaved. Her laments give voice to the boundless grief of all the women.

Violation and madness. Her daughter Orisaye, a consecrated virgin and prophetess, is doomed to become the concubine of a conqueror, her sacred vocation defiled. Driven half-mad by suffering and vision, she foretells further ruin. Her fate shows how war profanes even what is holy in a woman's life.

The murder of the child. The most heart-rending blow falls on Adumaadan, whose young son, the heir of Owu, is torn from her and killed so that no future avenger may survive. A mother is forced to surrender her child to slaughter, the ultimate cruelty of a conquest that fears even infants.

The scapegoating of the beautiful woman. Iyunloye, the woman blamed for the war, faces the fury of the other women, who would make her pay for their losses. Her plight reveals how women turn upon one another under the pressure of shared misery, and how one woman is made to bear guilt for the greed of men.

Innocent victims of men's wars. Throughout, Osofisan stresses that the women took no part in the politics, trade rivalry or ambition that caused the war, yet they endure its worst consequences, bereavement, rape, enslavement and exile. They are the true casualties of male aggression.

Conclusion. The plight of women in Women of Owu is one of unrelieved suffering: enslavement, grief, violation, the loss of children and homeland. By centring the tragedy on them, Osofisan protests against the timeless injustice by which women bear the heaviest burden of wars made by men.

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The relationship between the Petkoff family and their two servants, Nicola and Louka, is one of the richest strands in Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man. Through it Shaw examines class, ambition and the shifting social order of Bulgaria, and he uses the servants to puncture the pretensions of their supposed betters.

Masters proud of a shaky superiority. Major Paul Petkoff and his wife Catherine are eager to be thought aristocratic and modern. They boast of their library, their electric bell and their newly acquired "civilisation", and they expect deference from their servants. Yet Shaw exposes the thinness of their gentility; their claims to rank are as much a pose as Raina's romanticism.

Nicola: the model of calculating servility. Nicola, the manservant, embodies the old servile ideal. He preaches the "soul of a servant", teaching Louka that the way to prosper is to please one's employers, keep their secrets and never presume above one's station. His submission, however, is shrewd and self-interested; he hoards knowledge of the family's affairs and plans to use his savings to open a shop and be served in turn. His deference is a business strategy, not humility.

Louka: the rebel against class barriers. Louka, the maid, is Nicola's opposite. Proud, ambitious and defiant, she resents servitude and refuses to accept that birth must fix her place. She is contemptuous of Nicola's cringing and openly challenges the family's superiority. She knows their secrets, mocks their affectations, and aims to rise.

The collapse of the class barrier. The most striking feature of the relationship is that the barrier between master and servant finally breaks down. Louka, once engaged to Nicola, sets her sights on Major Sergius himself and wins him, so that a maidservant marries into the officer class. Nicola, far from being jealous, gracefully releases her and shifts to the role of a shrewd future tradesman. Shaw thereby shows the rigid social hierarchy giving way to a new order in which ability and boldness, not birth, decide one's fortunes.

Servants as agents of satire. Because they know the family intimately, Nicola and Louka see through the Petkoffs' vanity and the officers' false heroism. Their clear-eyed comments deflate their masters and reinforce the play's realism.

Conclusion. The Petkoff-servant relationship moves from apparent deference to open transgression of class lines. Nicola's calculating servility and Louka's ambitious rebellion together dramatise Shaw's theme that the old aristocratic order is a pretence, and that a new, self-made class is quietly overturning it.

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Raina Petkoff is the heroine of Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man, and her character carries the play's satire on romantic illusions about love and war. She begins as a self-dramatising idealist and ends as a woman who has learned to prefer honesty to pretence, so that her development mirrors the play's central argument.

A romantic idealist. At the start Raina is intoxicated by noble ideals. She worships her betrothed, Major Sergius Saranoff, as a storybook hero and thrills to the news of his reckless cavalry charge. She speaks of a "higher love" and strikes noble attitudes, treating war and romance as grand and beautiful. Shaw presents this idealism as charming but false, a pose learned from opera and romantic novels.

Given to poses and pretence. Raina is fond of playing a part. She adopts lofty tones and heroic gestures, and she is not above deceit: she admits she has told "only two lies" in her life, and she plants her photograph, inscribed to her "chocolate cream soldier", in Bluntschli's coat. Her theatricality is gently mocked throughout.

Compassionate and brave. Beneath the poses she has real warmth and courage. When the fugitive Swiss soldier Bluntschli climbs into her bedroom, she shelters and protects him at some risk, hiding him from the pursuing soldiers. Her humanity is genuine even when her manner is affected.

Capable of growth and honesty. Raina's importance lies in her capacity to change. Bluntschli's blunt realism, his admission that he carries chocolates instead of cartridges and that soldiers fear death like anyone else, gradually punctures her illusions. She comes to see the falseness of her "higher love" for Sergius, who is himself flirting with the maid Louka. By the end she drops her poses, acknowledges her real feelings, and accepts the practical, truthful Bluntschli.

A vehicle for Shaw's satire. Through Raina, Shaw ridicules the romantic glorification of war and the artificial idealism of conventional courtship, replacing them with common sense and sincerity. Her final choice of the realistic soldier over the theatrical hero embodies the triumph of realism over romance.

Conclusion. Raina Petkoff is a spirited, imaginative and warm-hearted young woman whose early affectation and romantic idealism give way, under the influence of Bluntschli's realism, to honesty and self-knowledge. Her growth from poseur to sincere lover makes her the living illustration of the play's message.

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Mr. Onyimdze is the moral and intellectual centre of Kobina Sekyi's satirical comedy The Blinkards. Amid a society of Fanti people scrambling to ape English manners, he stands out as the sane, self-respecting African, and Sekyi uses him as the mouthpiece for his own attack on cultural imitation.

A been-to who refuses to be blinded. Like several characters in the play, Onyimdze is Western-educated, a lawyer trained in England. Unlike the "blinkards" around him, however, he has not been dazzled by European ways. He returns proud of his own culture, choosing to speak Fanti, wear native dress and live by African values. His example proves that education need not mean self-contempt.

The voice of reason and satire. Onyimdze functions as the raisonneur, the character through whom the author comments on the folly on stage. With calm wit and irony he exposes the absurdity of those, like the Borofosems and Mr. Okadu, who imitate English clothes, speech, courtship and etiquette without understanding them. His ridicule turns their pretensions into comedy and guides the audience's judgement.

A cultural nationalist. He believes that Africans should develop along their own lines rather than become poor copies of Europeans. He defends traditional customs, including proper Fanti marriage rites, and argues that dignity lies in remaining true to one's heritage. In him Sekyi dramatises the early nationalist conviction that blind imitation is a form of slavery.

Sensible and level-headed in action. Onyimdze is practical as well as principled. He supports the young couple's union conducted in the customary way, and he handles those around him with patience and good humour rather than rancour. His steadiness contrasts sharply with the excited foolishness of the imitators.

A foil to the blinkards. Structurally, Onyimdze exists to measure the others. Set against Mrs. Borofosem's ridiculous Anglomania and Mr. Okadu's affected "been-to" airs, his rootedness highlights their emptiness. Every scene he shares with them deepens the satire.

Conclusion. Mr. Onyimdze is the wise, cultured and patriotic African who resists the craze for English imitation. As reasoner, satirist and cultural nationalist, he embodies Sekyi's own message: that self-respect and progress lie in loyalty to one's own culture, not in blind mimicry of the coloniser.

Akọwa Nkọwa

Mrs. Borofosem is the chief comic target of Kobina Sekyi's The Blinkards, and she is very largely a blind imitator of English ways. Her very transformation from a contented Fanti wife into a fussy, over-anglicised lady dramatises the satire announced in the play's title, though Sekyi also allows moments that qualify the picture.

The extent of her imitation is great.

• Dress and appearance. She abandons comfortable native clothing for tight, unsuitable European fashions, corsets and hats, suffering discomfort in order to look "civilised". Her insistence on English attire, even where it is impractical in the climate, marks the depth of her mimicry.
• Language and manners. She strains to speak English and to observe imported rules of etiquette, correcting others and putting on airs. Her artificial gentility is precisely the kind of empty imitation the play mocks.
• Customs and social life. She adopts English forms of courtship, entertaining and household conduct, treating everything African as inferior and everything English as the mark of refinement. Her whole scale of values has been turned upside down by the craze for foreign ways.
• Rejection of her own culture. In her eagerness to be English she looks down on traditional practices and companions, showing the self-contempt that Sekyi identifies as the disease of the "blinkards".

Some qualification. Mrs. Borofosem's Anglomania is partly learned from her husband, Mr. Borofosem, the returned "been-to" who first brings English tastes into the home; she imitates to please and match him. There are also moments when her native temperament breaks through the borrowed manners, and her comic discomfort in European dress betrays that the imitation is a costume rather than a true conversion. To that limited degree she is a follower carried along by fashion rather than a deliberate schemer.

Overall judgement. Nevertheless, these qualifications do not rescue her from the charge. Her adoption of English dress, speech, manners and values, and her scorn for her own culture, are thorough and unreflecting. She copies without understanding, discomfort and absurdity notwithstanding.

Conclusion. To a very large extent Mrs. Borofosem is a blind imitator of English ways. Sekyi makes her ridiculous precisely so that the audience may laugh at, and be warned against, the mindless mimicry of the coloniser that she embodies.

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In Ambassadors of Poverty the poet turns a bitter, satirical eye on the very people who ought to lift society out of want, the self-styled "patriots" who rule and the privileged "elite" who dominate. The title itself is ironic: instead of ambassadors of progress, these classes carry poverty abroad as their message and their legacy. The poem shows in detail how each group deepens the misery of the common people.

The 'patriots' who betray the nation. The word "patriots" is used with heavy irony for the political leaders who claim to love their country while ruining it.

• Corruption and looting. They plunder public wealth and divert to themselves the resources meant for schools, hospitals and roads, so that national treasure becomes private fortune and the people are left destitute.
• False promises. They win power with grand promises of development and prosperity, then abandon the masses once in office. Their patriotism is a mask for greed.
• Misrule and neglect. By mismanaging the economy and ignoring the needs of the poor, they turn a potentially rich land into a place of hunger, presenting to the world an image of a suffering people, hence "ambassadors of poverty".

The 'elite' who exploit the masses. The educated and wealthy upper class, who could use their knowledge and means for the common good, instead entrench poverty.

• Self-interest and greed. The elite pursue personal luxury and accumulation, hoarding opportunity and wealth while the majority scrape by. Their comfort is built on the deprivation of others.
• Collusion with the rulers. Rather than challenge misgovernment, the elite ally themselves with the corrupt "patriots", sharing the spoils and protecting the unjust system that keeps them on top.
• Contempt for the poor. They look down on the ordinary people, exploiting their labour cheaply and denying them a fair share, so that the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider.

Combined effect. Together the plundering patriots and the self-serving elite form a partnership of oppression. One loots from above through political power, the other exploits from within through economic privilege, and between them they manufacture the poverty that the poet condemns. The masses, robbed of both leadership and opportunity, are the victims.

Tone and purpose. The poem's tone is angry, ironic and accusatory. By naming these classes "ambassadors of poverty", the poet exposes their hypocrisy and calls for a reckoning, protesting on behalf of the suffering ordinary people.

Conclusion. The patriots contribute to poverty through corruption, false promises and misrule, while the elite contribute through greed, collusion and exploitation. The poem indicts both as the true makers of the deprivation they pretend to lament.

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Although William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" ("Daffodils") is celebrated as a poem of joy, loneliness is the very condition out of which that joy grows, and the poet treats it in two contrasting forms: the loneliness of isolation and the fruitful loneliness of solitude.

Loneliness as the opening state. The poem begins with the persona in a mood of aimless isolation, comparing himself to a single cloud floating "lonely" and high above the valleys and hills. This simile establishes detachment and drift; the speaker is cut off, wandering without company or purpose. Loneliness here is a real emotional emptiness that the natural world will answer.

Nature as companion. Against this human solitude Wordsworth sets the "crowd" and "host" of daffodils, a joyful multitude that contrasts sharply with the single lonely wanderer. The flowers, the waves and the breeze are personified as dancing companions, so that nature fills the vacancy that human society has not. The lonely man is not left comfortless; the landscape becomes his society.

Solitude transformed into joy. The final stanza redefines loneliness. When the persona lies "in vacant or in pensive mood," that same aloneness now becomes a creative solitude: the remembered daffodils "flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude," and his heart "dances with the daffodils." What began as barren isolation is thus converted into a rich inner companionship through memory and imagination.

The Romantic argument. Wordsworth's treatment of loneliness therefore carries a Romantic thesis: solitude in the presence of nature is healing, and the impressions gathered in such moments sustain the mind long afterward. Loneliness is not merely lamented; it is shown to be the necessary ground of reflection, memory and lasting happiness.

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In Women of Owu, Femi Osofisan reworks Euripides' Trojan Women to dramatise the fall of the Yoruba kingdom of Owu, destroyed by the allied armies of Ijebu, Ife and Oyo. While the play's fiercest sympathy lies with the suffering women, it also insists, through the gods and through the events recalled, that Owu's ruin is partly of its own making. The assertion that the people of Owu are the architects of their own destruction can therefore be firmly justified.

Owu's past aggression and expansion. Owu had grown into a proud, warlike power that conquered and oppressed its neighbours. It had earlier destroyed other towns and lorded it over the region, sowing resentment that the allied coalition later harvested. The very enemies now at its gates are settling old scores. A kingdom that lived by conquest is undone by conquest.

The seizure of the Apomu market. Owu had forcibly taken control of the great Apomu market and the lucrative trade that passed through it. This greed for commercial dominance gave the allies both motive and pretext, for they claim to be liberating the market. Owu's economic aggression thus helped to invite the war that consumes it.

Complicity in the slave trade. Osofisan pointedly notes that Owu, like its attackers, had profited from selling human beings. The allies march under the hollow banner of abolishing slavery, but the charge exposes Owu's own guilt. Having dealt in the misery of others, Owu now tastes enslavement itself as its women are shared out as spoils.

The pretext of the abducted woman. The war is also linked to Iyunloye, the beautiful woman whose abduction gives the coalition its excuse, much as Helen does in the Greek original. Owu's entanglement in this quarrel draws it into ruin.

The verdict of the gods. The ancestral deity Anlugbua and the divine framework of the play make plain that Owu is being punished for its own excesses. The gods do not save Owu, for its arrogance, cruelty and pride have earned this reckoning. Divine judgement confirms the human evidence.

A necessary qualification. Osofisan does not excuse the invaders, whose greed and brutality are savage and whose noble slogans are lies. Guilt is shared. Yet the play repeatedly turns the mirror on Owu itself, so that its citizens cannot claim to be wholly innocent victims.

Conclusion. Owu's expansionism, its seizure of Apomu, its trade in slaves and its arrogance all helped to summon the catastrophe that destroys it, a judgement sealed by the gods. To a large and telling extent, then, the people of Owu are indeed the architects of their own destruction, even as the play mourns the innocent women who pay the price.

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Deception is the mainspring of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and no one practises it more artfully than Algernon Moncrieff. His inventions and impostures drive much of the comedy and embody Wilde's satire on the double lives of respectable Victorians.

The invention of Bunbury. Algernon's masterpiece of deception is the imaginary invalid friend "Bunbury", whose perpetual ill-health provides Algernon with an excuse to escape tiresome social duties whenever he pleases. Whenever a dull dinner threatens, Bunbury conveniently falls dangerously ill in the country. Algernon proudly defends this "Bunburying" as a necessary art, revealing him as a habitual and unrepentant deceiver.

Detecting Jack's own deception. Algernon's sharp eye for pretence is shown when he uncovers his friend Jack's double life. From the inscription in Jack's cigarette case, he deduces that the sober "Ernest" of town is the "Jack" of the country, and that Jack has invented a wicked brother Ernest as his own excuse for escaping to London. Algernon is thus both a deceiver and an exposer of deception.

Impersonating Ernest. Algernon's boldest fraud is to travel down to Jack's country house and present himself as the fictitious brother Ernest Worthing. Under this false name he courts Jack's young ward, Cecily Cardew, winning her affection through a lie about his very identity. He deceives both host and beloved for his own pleasure.

Deception in small things too. His appetite for trickery extends to trifles: he devours the cucumber sandwiches meant for his aunt while pretending they are unavailable, and coolly denies the evidence. His dishonesty is a settled habit of a charming, idle young man.

The point of his deceptions. Wilde uses Algernon's cheerful lying to satirise a society obsessed with appearances, in which respectable people lead secret double lives. Yet the play's irony is that Algernon's deception turns out well; his assumed name "Ernest" becomes, absurdly, almost true, and his courtship of Cecily ends happily.

Conclusion. Algernon is a witty, engaging and thoroughly deceptive character whose Bunburying, false identity and casual dishonesty propel the plot and voice Wilde's mockery of Victorian hypocrisy. His deception is presented not as villainy but as the delightful cunning of a young man who finds truth a great deal too dull.