UME ENGLISH LANGUAGE 2004 QUESTION PAPER TYPE R We knew in our life that the atmosphere in our home is was different from that in many other homes where husbands and wives quarrel and where there was the drunkenness, laziness or indifference things we never saw in our family. We chafed and grumbled at the strictness of my father’s regime. We went to hide whenever we broke the rules too visibly. We knew, nevertheless that our parents wanted good things for us. Some of these, such as insistence on our going to school and never missing a day, we accepted readily enough although like most other children we occasionally yielded the temptation to play truant. However in other such cases such as their effort to keep us out of contact with difficult life the drinking and fighting and beer brewing and gambling their failure was inevitable. They could not keep us insulated by the time we moved about we were already seeing things with their eyes and judging things by the standards we had absorbed from them. It was bome in on me and my brothers at a very early age that our father was an uncommon man. For one thing in most African families, work around the home was women’s work. So we were vastly impressed by the fact that whenever my mother was away, my father could and did do all her jobs cooking, cleaning, and looking after us. We lived in this way in a community in which housework was regarded as being beneath male that the mother carried a greater and greater burden of work in our family, nevertheless the boys did girls work and my father did it with us. One of the prime chores of life in the family was fetching of water from the pump down the street, some two hundred metres from our door. Since the pump was not unlocked until six in the morning and there was always crowding, a system had developed whereby you got out before dawn placed your twenty –litre in tin line, and then went home returning latter to take your place. Often of course, tins would be moved back in line and others moved ahead. This could be corrected if none of those in front were too big a challenge. When taps were substituted for the pumps, the first one installed was nearly a kilometer away from our house and we had to make the trek with water tins balanced on our heads and indignity because this was the way girls, not proud males carried their burdens. All the children in the neighborhood knew we did women’s work and I can still hear their derisive laughter. We did our jobs doggedly, that notwithstanding because our father and mother expected it of us. Out of choice our father did everything we did including fetching water on occasion and commanded us by sheer force of his example
