Uganda certificate of education

2. Camara Laye: The African Child
Of all the kinds of work my father performed, none fascinated me so much as his skill with gold. No other occupation was so noble, no other needed such a delicate touch; and , morever , this sort of work was always a kind of festival: it was a real festival that broke the monotony of ordinary working days.

So if a woman, accompanied by a go – between, crossed the threshold of the workshop, I would follow her in at once. I knew what she wanted: she had brought some gold and wanted to ask my father to transform it into a trinket. The woman would have collected the gold in the placers of Siguiri, where, for months on end , she would have crouched over the river, washing the mud and patiently extracting from it the grains of gold. These women never came alone: they were well aware that my father had other things to do than to make trinkets for all and sundry! And even if the making of jewellery had been his main occupation, they would have realized that they were not his first or his only customers and that their wants could not be immediately attended to.

Generally these women required the trinket for a certain date, either for the festival of Ramadan or for the Tabaski ,or for some other family festivity, or for a dance ceremony.

QUESTIONS
a) What other kinds of work does the father perform? (2 marks)
b) What preparations does the father make before he works in gold? How does he know before hand that someone is going to bring gold? (5 marks)
c) What is the function of the go – between? (3 marks)
d) Outline briefly the main stages in the father’s way of working with gold.
(6 marks)
e) Compare the attitudes of Camara Laye and his mother towards the father’s work as a goldsmith. (4 marks)


SUB – SECTION (ii)
Select one question from this section. If you answered a play in subsection A(i), now choose a novel; if you choose a novel in subsection A(i) , now select a play.