The Short Story; A Silent Song and Other Stories Children may suffer immensely when their parents exert a lot of pressure on them

 Introduction

Rondo, Rwafa’s son goes through a lot of pain as a result of the pressures that the father exerts on him.

(Accept any other relevant introduction) 2marks ILLUSTRATIONS

P (i) Rondo has fear planted in him when his father destroys the guitar an uncle had bought him when he was still young. To Rwafa, his son would not be a musician because according to him musicians have no clear destiny. That fear made him pee on himself. “No son of Rwafa has ever been a rolling stone…” P. 31

P (ii) When Rondo innocently strays into the neighbour’s mango farm and found by the neighbour, he pulls him down by the leg and thrashes him thoroughly using a peach green switch. His mother having heard his howls comes to plead his case by even lifting her skirt in the man’s face and calling him a child murderer, he doesn’t stop. Instead, he calls Rondo a “woman’s child”. Rwafa comes to the neigbour’s yard with a thick elephant hide and without bothering to find out proceeds to thrash Rondo even further.

Several years later, Rondo is affected by the picture of his mother dragging herself on her knees back and forth begging him to spare her only son this he has kept to himself and not even shared with his wife due to the trauma. P. 40.

P (iii) Rondo lives under his father’s shadows something that has been noticed by his wife Selina. After the accident, the feeling begins to nag him. He thinks he has just been afraid of a shadow after all and that Selina might have been right- that he was not his own man. Selina had mocked him that if she were him. She could do better in his pants. He regrets having lived in his father’s shadows. .P. 28

P (iv) Rondo lives a life of pain because of what his father referred to as an “ignominy”. He feels that Rondo is not man enough to have married into a muDzviti family. It pained Rondo when his father frowned and even spat at the sight of Selina. The muDzviti- Zezuru- Karanga rivalry had left in him indelible scars and would not forgive. P. 31

P (v) Rondo suffers pain at the loss of his two daughters, Yuna and Rhoda to a stage-managed accident by his father simply because they were girls with a muDzviti blood yet he wanted a son to inherit his vast wealth. To accentuate the pain, the father tells him, that his pain “will pass away like dew in the morning sun.” That he would remember and thank him for what he did. He tells him that he he young and would have other children P. 28

P (vi) As a way of looking useful, Rwafa who calls Rondo a slob, picks him up and gives him a job a t the Clarion- a journalistic job the father knows he knows nothing about. “Time you earned your own keep”. At the Clarion he becomes an object of derision- a laughing stock of sorts. They laughed at him yet held him in a kind of awe. They only used him to get favours such as loans and advances at the “thin times of the month.” P. 32

P (vii) Since Rwafa always derided Rondo in the language he used, Rondo felt that there are times when they were not intimate with Selina, she too regarded him in the same light like his father. This is because “none of the words he used to address Rondo had any respect in them” He used words like “slob”. P. 32

P (viii) When Rondo is unable to handle the father’s pressures, he gets a gun from Shoko and hands it to the father to kill him too because that is what he knew how to do best. He has lost his feeling and ready to face anything. “Rondo could have been a rock for all he felt. It was not courage. Just numbness.” The pain he had felt made him unfeeling towards his father. P. 26, p. 41

(Accept any 4 well-illustrated points. Mark 4;4;4;4.