Questions
Read the passage and ANSWER ALL the QUESTIONS
On December 26, 2014, nature stunned us. It was like a black day; the world had ended. Nature blinded us by unleashing the demon named Tsunami, which came to life through a gigantic earthquake in the Indian Ocean. It affected countries from Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, India, Bangladesh, the Maldives and even France, Kenya and Somalia. The worst in four decades, it battered an endless coastline of south and south-east Asia, with the toll nearing some 2,00,000, of which some 11,500 deaths are in India alone. The word 'Tsunami' comes from the Japanese words 'Tsu' (harbour) and 'Nami' (wave). About 80% of all tsunamis occurred in the Pacific Ocean, and Japan has suffered many times.
Tsunamis could be better described as a wave train, or series of waves, caused in a sea or ocean by submarine earthquakes. These killer waves of nature, which occurred on the fateful Sunday, could be generated when the water was disturbed by the uplift or subsidence of the sea floor. Cape Lopakta in Siberia witnessed the highest tsunami ever recorded in 1737. The wave rose 210 ft. above sea level. Another demoniac tsunami waves more than seven stories tall, engulfed whole villages along Sanriku, Japan in 1896, drowning almost 26,000 people. We can only pray to Mother Nature not to show this cruelty to us.
Answer the following questions:
a) In a few words, give a suitable title to the passage.
b) What is the main issue that the writer is trying to reveal in the passage?
c) Using your own words, explain the meanings of the underlined words in the passage.
d) The expression "it was like a black day" is an example of what figure of speech?
e) What does Tsunami mean according to the passage?
SECTION B: NON-AFRICAN NOVEL (25 marks)
George Orwell: 1984
2) What is characterisation? Discuss the roles of four characters in George Orwell's 1984.
Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis
3) Discuss the relevance of Kafka's novel The Metamorphosis to modern society.
Michael Anthony: The Year in San Fernando
4) Describe the setting of San Fernando and explain its significance in The Year in San Fernando.
- Compare and contrast the characters of Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis and Winston Smith in 1984 in terms of their response to their societies.
SECTION C: AFRICAN NOVEL (25 marks)
Sembene Ousmane: God's Bit of Wood
6) Examine Ousmane's portrayal of colonial oppression and exploitation in the novel God's Bit of Wood.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o: A Grain of Wheat
7) Using ample instances, discuss Ngugi's use of flashback in A Grain of Wheat.
Ifeoma Onyemelukwe: Beyond the Boiling Point
8) Describe the character of Ezinne in Ifeoma Onyemelukwe's Beyond the Boiling Point.
- Compare and contrast the novels God's Bit of Wood by Sembène Ousmane and A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.
ANSWERS
Comprehension Passage
a) Title: "The Deadly Tsunami" (or "Nature's Fury: The Tsunami")
b) Main issue: The writer is revealing the devastating, uncontrollable destructive power of tsunamis as natural disasters — using the 2014 Indian Ocean tsunami as a central example — and highlighting how such events have repeatedly caused massive loss of life across history (Siberia 1737, Japan 1896, and the 2014 disaster).
c) Meaning of underlined words (in own words):
- unleashing — releasing or letting loose (something powerful and uncontrollable)
- fateful — having important, often disastrous, consequences; decisive
- engulfed — completely covered or overwhelmed
- drowning — dying by suffocation under water
- cruelty — extreme harshness or suffering inflicted without mercy
d) Figure of speech ("it was like a black day"): This is a simile — a direct comparison using "like," comparing the day to something dark/ominous ("black") to convey tragedy and gloom.
e) Meaning of Tsunami: According to the passage, the word "Tsunami" comes from the Japanese words "Tsu" (meaning harbour) and "Nami" (meaning wave) — so literally, "harbour wave."
SECTION B: NON-AFRICAN NOVEL
2) Characterisation and four characters in 1984
Definition: Characterisation is the literary technique writers use to create, reveal, and develop the personality, motivations, and traits of characters in a narrative — achieved through direct description, dialogue, action, thought, and the reactions of other characters.
Four characters and their roles:
-
Winston Smith — the protagonist, a low-ranking Party member working at the Ministry of Truth who secretly rebels against the totalitarian Party by keeping a diary, pursuing a forbidden love affair, and seeking truth. He represents the individual human spirit's resistance to oppressive collective control, and his eventual psychological breaking by the Party dramatizes the terrifying completeness of totalitarian power.
-
Julia — Winston's lover, a younger Party member who rebels not through ideology but through personal pleasure-seeking and sexual freedom, symbolizing a different, more instinctive form of resistance to the Party's suppression of individual desire. Her eventual betrayal of Winston under torture underscores the novel's bleak view of the Party's power to destroy human bonds.
-
O'Brien — an Inner Party member who poses as a fellow rebel/ally to Winston but is actually an agent of the Thought Police. He orchestrates Winston's arrest, torture, and re-education in Room 101, representing the intellectual and psychological machinery of totalitarian control, and articulating the Party's philosophy of power for its own sake.
-
Big Brother — the possibly fictional, god-like figurehead of the Party, omnipresent through posters and telescreens ("Big Brother is watching you"). He functions less as an individual character than as a symbol of surveillance, absolute authority, and the cult of personality that sustains totalitarian rule.
Conclusion: Through these characters, Orwell dramatizes different responses to and instruments of totalitarian control — rebellion (Winston), personal escapism (Julia), state enforcement (O'Brien), and symbolic authority (Big Brother).
3) Relevance of The Metamorphosis to modern society
- Alienation and dehumanization: Gregor Samsa's transformation into an insect symbolizes the dehumanizing effect of modern capitalist labour — he is valued by his family and employer only for his earning capacity, and once he can no longer work, he becomes literally repulsive and disposable. This resonates strongly with modern anxieties about being reduced to one's economic productivity.
- Family and social abandonment: The gradual withdrawal of familial love and care as Gregor becomes a "burden" reflects ongoing modern concerns about how illness, disability, or unemployment can erode support systems and family relationships.
- Corporate/capitalist critique: Gregor's guilt-driven devotion to his job, even in his final human moments, mirrors modern overwork culture and the psychological toll of workplaces that treat employees as replaceable units.
- Identity and isolation: The novel's portrayal of Gregor's isolation despite living within his family speaks to modern experiences of loneliness, mental health struggles, and feeling "unseen" even among those closest to us.
- Bureaucratic absurdity: Kafka's broader concern with impersonal, absurd systems (also seen in The Trial) anticipates modern critiques of bureaucratic dehumanization in institutions, workplaces, and state systems.
Conclusion: The Metamorphosis remains relevant because its core anxieties — economic dehumanization, familial abandonment, workplace alienation, and existential isolation — are arguably intensified, not diminished, in contemporary capitalist society.
4) Setting of San Fernando and its significance
Setting: The Year in San Fernando by Michael Anthony is set in the Trinidadian town of San Fernando, where the young protagonist Francis is sent from his rural home village (Mayaro) to live and work as a helper in the household of the wealthy, ailing Chandles family.
Significance:
- Contrast with rural home: San Fernando's urban, unfamiliar environment intensifies Francis's homesickness and highlights the novel's coming-of-age theme — his displacement from familiar rural life to an unfamiliar town forces rapid emotional maturation.
- Class and social awareness: Living in the Chandles' relatively affluent household exposes Francis to class differences, illness, death, and adult relationships he would not have encountered at home, broadening his social and emotional understanding.
- Structural framework (the "year"): The town setting anchors the novel's seasonal/temporal structure, with Francis's year in San Fernando mirroring his psychological journey from childlike dependence to a more mature, if still incomplete, understanding of loss, mortality, and adult complexity.
- Symbol of transition: San Fernando functions symbolically as a liminal space between childhood and encroaching adulthood, and between rural innocence and urban experience — central to the novel's Bildungsroman (coming-of-age) structure.
5) Gregor Samsa vs. Winston Smith — response to their societies
Similarities:
- Both are ordinary men crushed by oppressive systems larger than themselves — Gregor by exploitative family/capitalist expectation, Winston by totalitarian state control.
- Both experience profound alienation and isolation as their respective societies strip them of autonomy and humanity.
- Both ultimately fail to escape or overcome their oppressive circumstances — Gregor dies rejected by his family; Winston is broken and made to genuinely love Big Brother.
Differences:
- Nature of oppression: Gregor's oppression is familial/economic and largely passive — he doesn't rebel, but simply endures and eventually gives up, dying quietly. Winston's oppression is political/ideological, and he actively resists — keeping a diary, having an affair, seeking out the Brotherhood — before being crushed.
- Response — passivity vs. active resistance: Gregor never fights his transformation or family's rejection; he internalizes guilt and fades away. Winston actively seeks truth and rebellion, embodying a more conscious, if ultimately futile, resistance.
- Symbol of transformation: Gregor's change is physical/literal (into an insect), symbolizing dehumanization through the body. Winston's transformation is psychological (his final "re-education"), symbolizing the destruction of inner thought and belief — arguably a more totalizing form of control.
- Ending: Gregor's death offers a kind of quiet, tragic release; Winston's "survival" as a broken, compliant subject who loves Big Brother is arguably bleaker, since he continues to exist but without his former selfhood.
Conclusion: Both novels use the individual's crushing by an oppressive system to critique modern life, but Kafka emphasizes economic/familial dehumanization through passive suffering, while Orwell emphasizes political dehumanization through active resistance ultimately annihilated.
SECTION C: AFRICAN NOVEL
6) Ousmane's portrayal of colonial oppression and exploitation in God's Bit of Wood
- Economic exploitation of African labour: The novel, based on the 1947–48 Dakar–Niger railway strike, portrays African railway workers subjected to unequal pay, harsh working conditions, and denial of basic benefits (family allowances, pensions) enjoyed by French workers doing the same jobs.
- Colonial administrative violence: French colonial authorities and their African intermediaries use police brutality, starvation tactics (cutting off water and food supplies to strikers' families), and intimidation to break the strike, illustrating the coercive machinery underpinning colonial economic exploitation.
- Racial hierarchy: The novel exposes the racial double standards of colonial capitalism — French management view African workers as replaceable, subhuman labour rather than as people deserving equal treatment or dignity.
- Collective resistance as counter-narrative: Against this oppression, Ousmane centers the workers' union solidarity and, crucially, the women's march from Thiès to Dakar, showing collective African agency and resilience as the means of resisting colonial exploitation.
- Multiple community perspectives: Ousmane's use of a broad, communal narrative (following many characters across Bamako, Thiès, and Dakar) reflects his conviction that colonial oppression and the fight against it were experienced collectively, not through a single heroic individual.
Conclusion: Ousmane portrays colonial oppression as a systemic, multi-layered structure of economic exploitation, racial hierarchy, and state violence, but balances this with a powerful depiction of collective African resistance and solidarity as the pathway to liberation.
7) Ngugi's use of flashback in A Grain of Wheat
- Structural device: The novel is set during Kenya's Uhuru (independence) celebrations but continually shifts backward in time to the Mau Mau emergency period, revealing each character's hidden past actions and betrayals.
- Mugo's secret revealed through flashback: Flashbacks gradually expose that Mugo, seemingly a quiet hero, betrayed the revolutionary leader Kihika to the colonial authorities — information withheld from the reader until deep into the novel, creating dramatic irony and suspense.
- Gikonyo and Mumbi's marriage: Flashbacks to Gikonyo's detention and Mumbi's affair with Karanja during his absence explain the couple's present estrangement, giving psychological depth to their strained post-independence relationship.
- Kihika's revolutionary idealism: Flashbacks to Kihika's Mau Mau activities and eventual capture and execution provide the moral and political backbone of the novel, contrasting his sacrifice with the compromises and betrayals of those who survive into independence.
- Thematic purpose: By structuring the novel around interlocking flashbacks rather than linear chronology, Ngugi mirrors the way Kenya's independence is haunted by unresolved guilt, betrayal, and unfinished reckoning with the colonial and Mau Mau past — Uhuru is shown as compromised by hidden histories rather than a clean break.
Conclusion: Ngugi's flashback technique is essential to the novel's meaning, allowing him to build suspense around individual guilt while using fragmented memory to argue that the nation's independence cannot be understood without confronting its buried, compromised past.
8) Character of Ezinne in Beyond the Boiling Point
Ezinne is portrayed as a determined, resilient female character whose experiences reflect the novel's broader concern with women's struggles against patriarchal and societal constraints in a changing African society. She navigates personal, marital, and social pressures with resourcefulness and inner strength, often having to assert her own agency and voice against expectations placed on her as a woman/wife. Her journey highlights themes of endurance, self-discovery, and the tension between traditional expectations and a woman's personal aspirations — she emerges as a figure whose resilience under hardship makes her a vehicle for the novel's feminist and social commentary.
(Note: For a more detailed, textually precise character study, it would help to confirm specific plot details from your course text/lecture notes, since this novel has less widely available secondary literature than the other set texts.)
9) Compare and contrast God's Bit of Wood and A Grain of Wheat
Similarities:
- Both are set against real historical anti-colonial struggles — the 1947–48 railway strike (Senegal/Mali) and the Mau Mau Emergency (Kenya) respectively.
- Both use a multi-character, communal narrative structure rather than focusing on a single hero, reflecting each author's belief that liberation was a collective, not individual, achievement.
- Both interrogate the cost and compromises of the struggle for freedom — showing sacrifice, betrayal, and the uneven distribution of its burdens across gender and class lines.
- Both give significant voice and agency to women — Ousmane through the Thiès-to-Dakar women's march; Ngugi through Mumbi and other female characters navigating loss and moral complexity during the Emergency.
Differences:
- Historical focus: Ousmane's novel centers on a labour/economic strike against colonial capitalism; Ngugi's centers on an armed anti-colonial insurgency (Mau Mau) and its aftermath at the moment of independence.
- Narrative structure: Ousmane's novel is largely linear, following the strike's progression in real time; Ngugi's novel uses extensive flashback and fragmented chronology to reveal buried guilt and betrayal.
- Central tension: God's Bit of Wood focuses on solidarity versus colonial coercion during the struggle itself; A Grain of Wheat focuses on the psychological and moral reckoning after victory (independence), questioning who truly deserves to claim heroism.
- Tone: Ousmane's novel ends on a note of collective triumph (the strike's eventual success); Ngugi's novel ends on a more ambivalent, morally complex note, with independence shadowed by unresolved betrayal and compromised heroism.
Conclusion: Both novels use African historical struggle to explore collective resistance and its human costs, but Ousmane emphasizes solidarity and eventual triumph in an ongoing struggle, while Ngugi interrogates the moral ambiguity and unfinished business of a struggle already "won."