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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. In what year is Elizabeth born?

2. From what country is Val?

3. How does the narrator gloss the term “ambuyas” in the memoir?

4. In which country do Sam and Jane meet?

5. Which of the following schools had Elizabeth hoped to attend?

Short Essay Questions

1. What initially gives Elizabeth doubts as she arrives in London?

2. What contributions to the war effort does Gogo note women made?

3. What does Gogo take with her when she leaves Elizabeth to go assist people in another village?

4. For what reason does Elizabeth call the road through her village “the Danger-Danger road” (30-31)?

5. What reasons does Elizabeth give for keeping her room at the London hostel despite initial misgivings?

6. What barrier to communication does Elizabeth experience when she arrives at the hostel in London?

7. What is the primary rhetorical appeal (pathos, ethos, logos) of the final section of Chapter 1—from “I will never forget this moment” to the end (8)? Why and how is it the primary rhetorical appeal?

8. What is Chimurenga in the memoir?

9. What message does Amai leave for Elizabeth when Sam takes her?

10. What reason is given for Gogo having raised Elizabeth?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Much is made in the memoir of the rural African origins of the narrating protagonist. How would the work change were the narrator of a different racial / ethnic background? Why would it change in those ways?

Essay Topic 2

Explicate the significance of the protagonist’s name.

Essay Topic 3

Again, typically, an epigraph is expected to speak to or set the tone for the work it introduces. Taken together, do the epigraphs of individual chapters in I Am a Girl from Africa do so for the memoir as a whole? How or how not?

(see the answer keys)

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