Final Exam (45 mins)

A. Please attribute the following excerpts:

1. "When the first question was asked in a direction opposite the customary one, it was a signal that the revolution had begun."

2. "It's not hard to find an old soldier in Africa. ... What is harder to find are old soldiers who will talk about their war with strangers."

3. "There are Russian mines, Cuban, South African, and Chinese mines. Some carry instructions engraved by the manufacturer to ensure proper placement: 'This side toward the enemy.' The most dangerous are the Chinese plastic mines."

4. "He was a good father, though. Don't get me wrong. He put a roof over our heads, he fed us three sqauer meals a day, he sent us to school, and he beat us regularly for the shit we did. You can't ask for more than that."

5. "Unknowingly, Angolans mourned before an empty casket. ... I could have explained to the policeman that it wasn't the wall I had on my roll; I had photographed only the lie."

6. "My fellow bus travelers included several Zimbabweans who were trying to look as if they always brought the kitchen sink with them when they cam on 'holiday' to Zambia but whose shaking hands and sweating faces at the police roadblock gave them away as political refugees."

7. "Everybody wanted to develop himself! Everyone thought about developing himself, and not simply according to God's law that a man is born, develops, and dies. No, each wanted to develop himself extraordinarily, dynamically, and powerfully, to develop himself so that everyone could admire, envy, talk, and nod his head. where it came from, no one knows."

8. "The shock is too much, the contrast too raw. We should sail or swim or walk from Africa, letting bits of her drop out of us, and gradually, in this way, assimilate the excess and liberties of the States in tiny, incremental sips, maybe touring up through South America and Mexico before trying to stomach the land of the Free and the Brave."

9. "Those Angolans engendered sovereign sons in metropolitan beds as wide as the crucifix made of Cabinda wood. But the houses themselves were merely an act of occupation. The greater conquest was to inhabit the memories of their former owners."

10. "No, my dear friend, you cannot expose the people to such disastrous freedom. There can only be one sun. Such is the order of nature, and anything else is a heresy."

11. "I survive by discipline, in a religion of unimportant gestures, an effort at attachment to life: the metallic arch of cold water on my back, under the outdoor shower; washing my hands before eating; brushing my teeth before going to bed; shaking my boots well before putting them on. Through my skin I reassure myself of my body. It must be the prisoner's way."

12. "The space between the court and the university increasingly resembled a battlefield on which the fate of the Empire was being decided."

13. "We know very well that you people have a right to your land. Our coming here led to bloodshed. Our leaving will also be costly; closure means bloodshed. Did you people think all you had to do was pick up a broom, and we were gone? That can't be. We have to end the story the same way we began it: by killing."

14. "What made the Rhodesian war almost unique among wars for independence in Africa was that both sides - white and black - considered themselves indigenous to the land."

15. "And then, yes, then, for the first time, I thought to myself that everything was coming to an end."

B. Choose three of these excerpts (one per author) and place them in the context of the narrative.

C. Discuss the following (short essay, 10-12 sentences). Please include a definition of literary reportage in your essay.

"Despite Kapuscinski’s vigorously anti-colonialist stance, his writing about Africa is a variety of latter-day literary colonialism, a kind of gonzo orientalism, a highly selective imposition of form, conducted in the name of humane concern, that sacrifices truth and accuracy, and homogenises and misrepresents Africans even as it aspires to speak for them. ... What this account of African history does reveal is a telling indication of Kapu?ci?ski’s own narrative aspirations. Here in the domain of myth, in a realm untouched by literacy, where the subject never answers back, a reporter is freed from the constraint of dates and data, the tedium of checking and cross-checking, the tyranny of documents and records. Here facts are no longer sacred; we are at play in the bush of ghosts, free to opine and to generalise about “Africa” and “the African” – and invent - without criticism from scholars, or indigenes, or self-appointed guardians of facticity. For Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski, it seems, this is the heart of the continent. Here, in place of fact, there is mutability; in place of reportage, relativism. From this place, deep in an imaginary Africa, the writer may return with any tale he pleases."