WAEC SSCE - Literature In English - 2006 (Prose)

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In Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, the statement "a man is never ugly" reflects the double standard of a patriarchal Igbo society in which men are valued and excused regardless of their appearance or conduct, while women are judged, used and burdened. Taking this as a starting point, the novel presents the relationship between men and women as deeply unequal, shaped by tradition, economic dependence and the subordination of women.

The saying that a man is never ugly captures the way society privileges men. A man's worth lies in his manhood and status, not in his looks or even his kindness. Women, by contrast, are prized chiefly for beauty, fertility and usefulness. This inequality runs through every relationship in the novel. Men command; women serve. Nnu Ego's whole life is organised around pleasing and serving the men to whom she belongs, first her father Agbadi, then her husbands.

Nnu Ego's first marriage to Amatokwu shows how a woman's value is tied to childbearing. When she fails to conceive, she is despised, demoted to farm labour and replaced by a second wife who bears a child. Amatokwu treats her with contempt and even strikes her. The relationship demonstrates that a wife who cannot fulfil her reproductive role is discarded, however dutiful she may be.

Her second marriage, to Nnaife in Lagos, further exposes the imbalance. Nnaife is physically unattractive and, in Nnu Ego's eyes, unimpressive, doing a woman's work washing clothes for a white family, yet as her husband he holds authority over her. Here the proverb bites: however "ugly" or unheroic Nnaife may seem, he remains the master of the household. Nnu Ego must submit to him, bear him many children, and struggle in poverty to feed them, while he takes decisions, inherits his brother's wives and asserts his rights. The marriage shows women bearing the labour and sacrifice while men retain the power and the privileges.

The custom of polygamy and the inheritance of a dead brother's wives, seen when Nnaife takes over Adaku and others, treats women as property passed between men. Adaku, childless of sons, eventually rebels and leaves to fashion an independent life, one of the few women to resist the system, highlighting by contrast how thoroughly the others are bound by it.

The relationship of Agbadi and Ona in the opening of the novel establishes the pattern early. Ona is a spirited woman, but she remains subject to the will of her father and to Agbadi's desire; her independence is limited by the demands men make upon her. The proud chief Agbadi keeps many wives and mistresses, and women compete for his favour.

The novel exposes the heavy price women pay in these relationships: endless childbearing, unremitting toil, self-sacrifice and emotional neglect. Nnu Ego pours her whole life into her children and husband, yet dies poor, lonely and unrewarded by the roadside, having gained none of the personal fulfilment the ideal of motherhood promised. The bitter irony of the title underlines the novel's protest: the "joys" of motherhood, in a society ordered for men's benefit, bring women mostly suffering.

Conclusion. Beginning from the proverb that a man is never ugly, Emecheta portrays male-female relationships governed by inequality: men hold power, status and privilege regardless of merit, while women are valued only for beauty, fertility and service, and bear the burdens of sacrifice and toil. Through Nnu Ego's tragic life the novel indicts this patriarchal order and questions the value society places on womanhood.

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Fate, understood as the working of chance and providence, plays a central part in shaping the plot of George Eliot's Silas Marner. Again and again unforeseen events, accidents and coincidences determine the direction of the story, and Eliot uses them to explore her belief that unlooked-for happenings can bring both ruin and redemption, and that a moral order underlies apparent chance.

The drawing of lots at Lantern Yard

The first great stroke of fate is the drawing of lots. While Silas keeps watch over the dying deacon, he is seized by one of his cataleptic fits, and during that helpless trance the church's money vanishes. His penknife, which he had lent to his friend William Dane, is found near the empty bag, and suspicion falls on him. Trusting that God will vindicate the innocent through the sacred casting of lots, Silas submits to the ordeal, only for the lot to fall against him. This apparently blind chance destroys his faith, ruins his good name, breaks his engagement to Sarah, and drives him into exile. The whole subsequent plot flows from this moment in which fate seems cruelly to condemn the innocent.

The theft of the gold

Chance again governs the theft of Silas's hoard in Raveloe. Dunstan Cass, wandering home in the fog after recklessly killing his brother's horse, happens upon Silas's lonely cottage while the weaver is briefly absent, steals the bag of gold, and then falls to his death in the Stone-pit, so that the crime remains unsolved for years. The accidental convergence of Silas's absence and Dunstan's passing strips away the gold that had become the whole meaning of his life, emptying his existence and preparing him for what is to come.

The arrival of Eppie

The supreme intervention of fate is the coming of the child. On a snowy New Year's night, Molly Farren, Godfrey Cass's secret wife, sinks down and dies in the snow while carrying her infant toward Raveloe. The golden-haired child, drawn by the firelight, wanders through Silas's open door and falls asleep on his hearth at the very moment he stands motionless in one of his trances. By pure chance the child arrives at the cottage of the very man who has lost everything, and her golden hair seems to Silas to replace his stolen gold. This fateful accident gives him a reason to live and begins his redemption. Eliot underlines the mystery of it: the loss of the gold and the gift of the child are bound together by an unseen design.

The revealing of the Stone-pit

Years later the draining of the Stone-pit by chance uncovers Dunstan's skeleton and Silas's long-lost gold. This discovery pricks Godfrey Cass's conscience and prompts him at last to confess that Eppie is his own daughter. Once more a chance event exposes hidden truth and drives the plot toward its resolution, when Eppie chooses to remain with Silas rather than claim her wealthy father.

Fate as moral providence

Eliot does not present fate as mere blind chance. The accidents of the plot carry a moral logic: the gold is taken from the miser and a living child given in its place; the man who wronged no one is finally restored, while Godfrey, who denied his child, is left childless when Eppie refuses him. What looks like fate works, in Eliot's vision, as a kind of moral providence that rewards love and duty and punishes selfishness and evasion.

Conclusion

Fate drives the plot of Silas Marner at every turn: the drawing of lots exiles Silas, the chance theft empties his life, the accidental coming of Eppie redeems him, and the draining of the pit reveals the truth and completes his restoration to the community of Raveloe. Yet Eliot shapes these chances into a moral pattern, so that fate becomes the instrument through which love triumphs and hidden justice is at last fulfilled.

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In Isidore Okpewho's The Last Duty, the civil war between Nigeria and the breakaway region of Simba has a profound and destructive effect on the ordinary people of the small garrison town of Urukpe. Though the great battles happen elsewhere, the war reaches into every household, poisoning relationships, spreading fear and inflicting suffering on the innocent.

The war fills Urukpe with an oppressive climate of suspicion. Neighbours watch one another for signs of disloyalty, and anyone can be denounced as a saboteur or enemy sympathiser. The people live under military occupation, subject to curfews, searches and the constant threat of arrest. This atmosphere corrodes the ordinary trust on which community life depends.

The war inflames ethnic division. Aku, the wife of Oshevire, is an Igabo woman married into the Simba community. Because her people are associated with the enemy, she becomes an object of suspicion and hostility. Isolated, watched and vulnerable, she suffers loneliness and social rejection, and is finally driven into a compromising relationship with Odibo. The war thus turns a settled wife into a suspected outsider and destroys her peace and reputation.

The war creates conditions in which the unscrupulous prey on the weak. Chief Toje uses the machinery of wartime security to ruin his business rival Oshevire, falsely branding him a saboteur so that he is imprisoned without genuine evidence. The people of Urukpe learn that in wartime justice can be bought and truth twisted, and that private greed can hide behind patriotic pretence.

The occupation and the disruption of normal life bring economic distress. Trade is dislocated, movement is restricted, and the people struggle to make a living under the shadow of the soldiers. Toje's rubber business and the wider commerce of the town are all shaped and distorted by the war economy.

The most poignant effect is the suffering of the guiltless. Oshevire's young son Oghenovo is neglected and frightened, and at the novel's violent close the child is wounded and blinded. His injury stands as a bitter symbol of how war maims the innocent and mortgages the future of a whole generation.

Beyond physical harm, the war damages the inner lives of the people. It breeds guilt, desperation and moral compromise, seen in Toje's scheming and impotence, in Aku's fall, and in the general erosion of decency. The community's moral fabric is worn thin by fear and self-interest.

Conclusion. The war visits upon the people of Urukpe fear and suspicion, ethnic hatred, injustice and exploitation, economic hardship, the suffering of innocent children, and deep moral and psychological damage. Okpewho shows that even far from the front line, war shatters ordinary lives, and its wounds, like the blinded child's, cannot easily be healed.

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In George Eliot's Silas Marner, the friendship between Silas Marner and William Dane belongs to the early Lantern Yard phase of Silas's life. It is a friendship of apparent closeness that turns to betrayal, and it is the event that shatters Silas's faith and drives him into the long isolation from which the rest of the novel rescues him.

In Lantern Yard, Silas and William Dane are bosom friends within their strict Nonconformist chapel community. They are so inseparable that the brethren jokingly call them David and Jonathan, after the famous biblical friends. Silas is trusting, sincere and devout, and he looks up to William, believing him to be an even more spiritually assured Christian than himself. Silas's faith in his friend is complete and unsuspecting.

Eliot quietly signals that William is not what Silas believes him to be. He is self-righteous, censorious and inwardly cold, given to a smug confidence in his own salvation. Beneath the pious exterior lies envy and calculation. His character stands in sharp contrast to Silas's simple, honest devotion.

The friendship is destroyed by William's treachery. When the deacon whom Silas is nursing dies, the church's money is found to be stolen, and suspicion falls on Silas. William, who is engaged to no one at first, has actually coveted Sarah, Silas's fiancee, and he engineers Silas's downfall. Evidence, Silas's own knife found in the dead man's drawer, is used against him, and it is strongly implied that William himself planted it and committed the theft. The brethren draw lots to determine guilt, and the lots fall against Silas.

The betrayal is total. Silas is branded a thief and expelled from the community he loved. William then marries Sarah, the woman Silas was to wed, completing his triumph. Silas, betrayed by his closest friend and abandoned by his betrothed, loses his faith in both God and man. The false verdict, arrived at through the drawing of lots, convinces him that there is no just God, and he flees Lantern Yard a broken man.

The friendship and its betrayal are the hinge of the whole novel. They explain Silas's flight to Raveloe, his withdrawal from human society, and his descent into miserly gold-hoarding as a substitute for the love and faith he has lost. The treachery of a trusted friend is what deadens his heart, so that the later restoration of that heart, through the child Eppie, becomes the moral centre of the book. William Dane's cruelty also introduces Eliot's concern with the difference between hollow, self-righteous religion and genuine goodness.

Conclusion. The friendship between Silas Marner and William Dane begins as an intimate bond likened to David and Jonathan but ends in the cruellest betrayal, as William frames Silas for theft and steals his betrothed. This treachery destroys Silas's faith and sends him into the isolation that shapes the rest of the novel, making the false friend the instrument of Silas's long spiritual death.

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In Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, Nnu Ego's marriage to her first husband Amatokwu occupies only the opening movement of the novel, yet it functions as the engine that sets the entire plot in motion. Everything that follows in Lagos grows directly out of what happens, and fails to happen, in Amatokwu's house.

Establishing the central theme of fertility as a woman's worth

Nnu Ego arrives as a proud young bride, daughter of the great chief Nwokocha Agbadi, sent off with so many personal possessions that both Ibuza and Umu-Iso remember it, and welcomed back with six full kegs of palm wine because she was found a virgin. The couple's early happiness is real but short-lived, for as the months pass Nnu Ego cannot conceive. This barrenness introduces the novel's controlling idea, that a woman's entire value is measured by her ability to bear children. That single assumption drives every choice Nnu Ego makes for the rest of the story, so the Amatokwu episode plants the seed of the plot's main concern.

Her humiliation, demotion and the spiritual explanation of her barrenness

Amatokwu is understanding at first but soon loses patience, leaving Nnu Ego to carry the shame alone as she visits one dibia after another in secret. The diviners tell her that her chi, the slave woman dedicated to a river goddess before Agbadi seized her, has refused her a child in revenge. Meanwhile Amatokwu declares that he has no time to waste his precious male seed on an infertile woman, takes a second wife who conceives at once, and pushes Nnu Ego aside into hard farm labour and even physical contempt. This degradation deepens her desperation for motherhood and prepares us for the extraordinary lengths to which she will later go, and the suffering she will endure, in her quest to be a mother.

The break-up of the marriage and the move to Lagos

The failure of the marriage forces a new beginning. Agbadi arranges a second match, this time to Nnaife in far-off colonial Lagos. This transition is the true hinge of the plot: it lifts Nnu Ego out of the traditional village world and drops her into the colonial city, where the central action, her long struggle to raise her children in poverty, will unfold. Without the collapse of the Amatokwu marriage, the Lagos narrative that forms the body of the novel could never begin.

Motivation and character development

The Amatokwu experience permanently shapes Nnu Ego's psychology. Having been scorned as childless, she clings all the more fiercely to her children once she finally has them, investing her whole identity in motherhood and willingly sacrificing health, wealth and personal happiness, especially for her sons. The pattern of male entitlement she meets in Amatokwu also recurs in Nnaife, who takes another wife despite her many children, so the first marriage teaches both her and the reader how women are treated as property to be disposed of as men please.

Foreshadowing and irony

The suffering Nnu Ego endures for the lack of children in Amatokwu's house ironically foreshadows the greater suffering she will endure because of children in Lagos. The plot moves from the sorrow of barrenness to the crushing burdens of fruitful motherhood, and the Amatokwu section sets up this bitter irony that culminates in her lonely, unmourned death, a fate thrown into sharper relief by Adaku, the one woman who breaks free of the household to assert her independence in trade.

Conclusion

Nnu Ego's experiences in Amatokwu's house advance the plot by establishing fertility as the measure of a woman's worth, by humiliating her into an all-consuming hunger for children, and by dissolving her first marriage so that she is sent to Lagos, where the main story unfolds. The episode supplies the emotional motivation for her character and foreshadows the ironic tragedy that shapes the rest of the novel.

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In Isidore Okpewho's The Last Duty, Major Ali is the commanding officer of the federal troops stationed in Urukpe. As one of the several first-person narrators, he offers an outsider's, soldier's view of the town, and his role is important both to the plot and to the novel's moral vision.

Major Ali represents the presence of the state and the army in the occupied town. It is his duty to keep order, guard against saboteurs and hold Urukpe for the federal side. Through him the reader sees the burdens and dilemmas of command in a civil war, the difficulty of distinguishing genuine threats from private feuds dressed up as security matters.

Amid the corruption and scheming that surround him, Major Ali stands out as comparatively principled and thoughtful. He is a professional soldier who tries to act justly and to see through the manipulations of local men like Chief Toje. Unlike those who exploit the war for gain, Ali is troubled by his responsibilities and reflects seriously on questions of duty, loyalty and fairness. His narration reveals a conscientious mind wrestling with the moral confusion of war.

Toje attempts to use the military to serve his private vendetta against Oshevire and to protect his own interests. Major Ali becomes the point at which these schemes must either succeed or fail. His growing awareness of the intrigues in the town, and his scepticism toward the accusations against Oshevire, position him as a potential check on injustice, even if the machinery of war has already done its damage.

Ali is also given a personal and psychological dimension. As a Muslim northerner commanding a mainly southern town, he is himself a kind of outsider, and he ponders his own position, his professional detachment and his human sympathies. His reflections deepen the novel's exploration of how war tests individual conscience.

As one of the multiple narrators, Major Ali widens the novel's perspective beyond the domestic tragedy of the Oshevire family. His voice supplies the official, military angle on events and allows Okpewho to show the war from the standpoint of those charged with waging and controlling it. This multiplicity of viewpoints is central to the novel's method and meaning.

Conclusion. Major Ali functions as the military authority in Urukpe, a comparatively upright and reflective soldier who resists the manipulations of the corrupt, embodies the moral dilemmas of command in wartime, and, as one of the narrating voices, broadens the novel's perspective. Through him Okpewho balances the greed and injustice of the town with a figure of conscience, enriching the novel's meditation on duty and war.

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In Richard Wright's Black Boy, the childhood experiences Richard undergoes within his family reveal much about the boy he is and the man he will become. His clashes with parents and relatives bring out his fierce independence, his questioning intelligence, his sensitivity and his instinct for survival.

From his earliest years Richard resists authority. He sets fire to the curtains and burns down part of the house out of restless curiosity; he defies his grandmother's rigid religion; he quarrels with Aunt Addie and Uncle Tom. These episodes reveal a boy who will not submit blindly to rules he does not understand. His individualism sets him apart from a family that demands obedience and piety, and it foreshadows the writer who will later rebel against the whole system of Southern racism.

Richard is intensely curious and eager to understand the world. He asks awkward questions, teaches himself to read and count, and hungers for knowledge in a home that offers little. His precocious mind, shown when he learns to read the newspaper and later devours books, reveals the gifted intelligence that will make him a writer. His family, unable to nourish this hunger, becomes something he must escape.

The boy is deeply sensitive and imaginative, prone to fear, wonder and vivid emotion. His reactions to his mother's illness, to violence, and to the cruelty around him show a rich inner life. This sensitivity is the raw material of his later art, but it also makes his childhood painful, since he feels every injustice keenly.

Richard's family life is dominated by hunger after his father deserts them and his mother falls ill. The constant gnawing of hunger shapes his character, breeding both desperation and a hard determination to survive. It teaches him early that he cannot rely on the adults around him and must fend for himself.

Richard will not lie, will not betray others, and will not accept punishment he has not earned, as in the walnut episode with Aunt Addie. His stubborn insistence on fairness reveals a strong moral core and a proud spirit that refuses to be broken, even by beatings.

Above all, the family experiences reveal a boy increasingly isolated from those around him. Neither his relatives' religion, nor their fear, nor their acceptance of Southern life satisfies him. This alienation, born in the family, drives his lifelong search for a wider, freer world.

Conclusion. Richard's childhood experiences with his family reveal a rebellious, intelligent, sensitive and proud boy, shaped by hunger and injustice into a self-reliant individualist who cannot accept the narrow world offered him. These qualities, forged in the family, explain both his suffering and his eventual escape into the life of the mind and the vocation of the writer.

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Violence is a recurring and pervasive presence in Richard Wright's Black Boy. Wright presents violence as woven into every level of the world he grows up in, and traces it to a range of interlocking causes, chiefly racism, poverty, fear and a harshly repressive upbringing.

The deepest cause of violence in the novel is the racist social order of the American South. Black people live under the constant threat of white violence, from casual humiliation to beatings and lynchings. Richard hears of a black boy killed by whites, learns of the lynching of an acquaintance's brother, and is himself beaten and threatened at work for small breaches of racial etiquette. The whole system is enforced by terror, so that violence, or its threat, becomes the ordinary condition of black life.

Grinding poverty breeds violence. Hunger, desperation and the struggle to survive sharpen tempers and drive people to cruelty. Richard's own fights, including the street fights his mother forces him into so that he will not be robbed of the grocery money, grow directly out of the harsh economic conditions of his childhood.

Within the family, violence is the normal instrument of discipline. Richard is beaten savagely, once almost to unconsciousness, by his mother for the curtain fire; he is whipped by his grandmother, threatened by Uncle Tom, and attacked by Aunt Addie. The adults, themselves shaped by a violent world, rule the children through fear and physical punishment. This domestic violence teaches Richard early that force governs relationships.

The fanatical religion of the household adds its own coercive pressure. Attempts to force piety and submission upon Richard provoke resistance and conflict, as in his armed confrontation with Aunt Addie. The repression of a rigid, joyless faith turns easily into violence when the boy refuses to conform.

Much of the violence springs from fear. People strike out to protect themselves in a dangerous world. Richard arms himself against Aunt Addie, threatens relatives, and learns to fight because he understands that weakness invites attack. Violence becomes a means of survival and self-assertion in an environment where the vulnerable are preyed upon.

Wright also shows how the violence of the wider racist society is internalised and turned inward, so that black people, denied power and dignity, sometimes vent their frustration upon one another and upon their own children. The brutality of the oppressed toward each other is presented as a tragic consequence of the brutality inflicted from above.

Conclusion. The causes of violence in Black Boy are the racism and terror of the segregated South, the poverty and hunger of black life, the harsh fear-driven discipline of the family, the coercions of a rigid religion, and the instinct for self-defence in a dangerous world. Wright presents violence not as random cruelty but as the product of an unjust social order that brutalises those who live under it.