View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What did Absalom do with the revolver after the murder?
(a) He hid it at the home of a friend.
(b) He sold it.
(c) He buried it in a plantation.
(d) He threw it in a river.

2. How does the agricultural demonstrator think the farming improvements will affect the future of Ndotsheni?
(a) He has a scientist’s experimental attitude and wants to wait and see what happens.
(b) He thinks they will lead to the rebuilding of tribal life.
(c) He thinks young people will continue to go to the city because there will still not be enough work or food in the village.
(d) He thinks they will allow blacks to be self-sufficient and raised out of poverty.

3. What other weapon was carried by one of the two accomplices?
(a) A second revolver.
(b) An iron bar.
(c) A knife.
(d) A bat.

4. When does the Jarvis boy tell Kumalo he will be leaving for Johannesburg?
(a) When his grandmother’s illness ends.
(b) When the new year begins.
(c) When his mother and grandfather find them a new house to live in.
(d) When his grandfather returns from Pretoria.

5. How does Kumalo’s wife react to the addition of Absalom’s wife and Gertrude’s child to the family?
(a) She worries ceaselessly about the increased financial burden they will engender.
(b) She curses Gertrude for shirking her only responsibility as a mother.
(c) She embraces them both as her own children.
(d) She has a difficult time swallowing Absalom’s wife’s promiscuous and immoral past.

Short Answer Questions

1. Which sacrament is performed immediately following the sentencing in the prison?

2. Before the murderer is caught, who is suspected of the crime of killing Arthur?

3. What word for God does Kumalo use when praying?

4. What final feeling does the novel have about the future of Africa?

5. Which character unexpectedly appears in Ndotsheni with the village chief and magistrate?

Short Essay Questions

1. Compare and contrast the ways the novel ends “happily” versus the way it ends “unhappily.”

2. Describe Barbara Smith’s response to Kumalo’s question about her servant, and explain the significance of James’ translation of this answer to Kumalo.

3. What surprises James Jarvis most about people’s reaction to his son’s death?

4. What does Absalom give as his defense for owning a gun when the Judge asks him about it?

5. Summarize the main events of the meeting between James Jarvis and Kumalo at the house of Jarvis’ kinswoman Barbara Smith.

6. Describe the build-up, events, and results of the black mining strike.

7. Describe how Kumalo reacts when the Bishop tells him he wants to remove Kumalo from Ndotsheni.

8. Explain the metaphorical usage of the rainstorm that occurs in Book Three, Chapter 3.

9. Describe how Napoleon Letsitsi comes to be in Ndotsheni.

10. Briefly summarize Arthur Jarvis’s argument about the responsibility of whites to blacks in the papers James Jarvis reads.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,233 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample