CHief Matenge’s Character Sketch Essay Essays

CHief Matenge’s Character Sketch Essay Essays CHief Matenge’s Character Sketch Essay Essay CHief Matenge’s Character Sketch Essay Essay This assignment is based on Bessie Head’s authoritative novel. When Rain Clouds Gather. It gives an appraisal of one of the novel’s chief characters. Chief Matenge and in the procedure exposes him as an undoubtedly corrupt leader. This is supported by the many intertwined facts and citations that portray his character as such a leader and these are selected and presented from the novel. Byrne. Kalua. Scheepers and Kane ( 2012:100 ) provide the foundation for the reader’s understanding that Chief Matenge is a corrupt leader which in bend shapes the whole negative position of his personality when they describe him as stand foring the â€Å"Old Africa† at its worst – moral devolution. Traveling through the whole novel the reader battles and finally loses the conflict in happening anyplace where any positive impressions are associated with Chief Matenge. Bryne et Al ( 2012:100 ) present Matenge as a â€Å"villain. a bad individual who is openly corrupt† . He is beyond doubt the adversary and the adversary of Gilbert Balfour and Makhaya who by and large stand for good in the name of advancement and development in the novel. Head ( 1987:18 ) introduces Chief Matenge as Paramount Chief Sekoto’s â€Å"troublesome and unpopular younger brother† . This already gives the reader an thought of what kind of personality Chief Matenge has. This description of him sets the tone in the whole novel as he is farther described utilizing such adjectives and phrases as â€Å"overwhelming avariciousness† and â€Å"unpleasant personality† . ( Head 1987:18 ) . It shortly becomes evident that Chief Matenge’s brother. Paramount Chief Sekoto does non wish his ain brother. as the statement â€Å"nothing disquieted Chief Sekoto more than a visit from his brother. whom he had long classified as belonging to the insane portion of mankind† ( Head 1987:48 ) clearly shows. Paramount Chief Sekoto is said to hold ever sided with villagers who his brother invariably upset. Head ( 1987:18 ) nowadayss Matenge as holding a â€Å"devil† that drove him and would lessen after some chastising from Chief Sekoto merely to rouse its â€Å"clamouring and howling† a few months subsequently. Matenge’s evil is farther unfolded in the want of Chief Sekoto to destruct him for â€Å"all the household feuds and machinations he had instigated† ( Head 1987:20 ) . Ironically. Paramount Chief Sekoto was non what one would name a shining illustration of morality. Chief Sekoto. â€Å"although he was widely known as a good chief† ( Head 1987:19 ) merely like his brother Matenge â€Å"lived off the slave labor of the hapless and his lands were ploughed free of charge by the hapless. and he was washed. bathed and fed by the poor† ( Head 1987:19 ) . In bend Matenge besides strongly despised his brother Paramount Chief Sekoto. Head ( 1987:42 ) discloses this when she reveals his ideas about his brother who he in secret thought was â€Å"an amicable. pleasant dimwit of a brother in the supreme place. Matenge coveted is brother’s place of Paramount Chief. Matenge is referred to as â€Å"evil† countless times in the novel. Dinorego farther exposes this evilness or corruptness when he confides in Makhaya that he ( Matenge ) was the evil force detaining advancement in the small town. Dinorego reveals Matenge’s intrigues to â€Å"damage† and â€Å"delay† the starting of the farm and the cowss co-operative which are undertakings that are supposed to force development in the small town. Matenge is said to hold peculiarly sabotaged Gilbert Balfour on the cowss co-operative because he was personally profiting from purchasing the hapless villagers’ cowss at a low monetary value and doing immense net incomes by so selling them at a much higher monetary value. Matenge took advantage of the hapless villagers’ inability to engage railroad trucks to transport their ain cowss because they could non afford it. Matenge fought Gilbert Balfour’s cattle co-operative because it would set him out of concern. Matenge’s falsities and cunningness are clearly portrayed when he lies to the villagers that Gilbert wanted to enslave them. â€Å"Was it true they wanted to cognize. that Gilbert had in secret purchased land from the paramount Chief and was utilizing the name co-operative to enslave the people? That was what Chief Matenge had told them† ( Head 1987:35 ) . The reader would non waver to label Matenge as greedy and selfish. Head ( 1987:41 ) reveals that Matenge lived entirely ( before Joas Tsepe joined him ) in a â€Å"big cream-painted mansion† . The other villagers are said to hold lived in little and crude clay huts and were in fact non allowed to construct brick houses without permission from the Chief which was seldom given. if at all. Head ( 1987:41 ) goes on to advert that the cardinal small town where Matenge’s sign of the zodiac was situated contained â€Å"one really hapless general dealer’s store which supplied the villagers with the â€Å"bare necessities† wish sugar. tea and â€Å"cheap stuffs and shoes† among other points. The location of Matenge’s â€Å"big mansion† was besides in propinquity to a â€Å"three-roomed shack† which serves as the small town primary school. The jarring contrast of Matenge’s apparently epicurean life manner and his milieus nauseates the reader and speaks aloud of his hoggishness and selfishness. The reader can safely impeach Matenge of being a tribalist. Byrne et Al ( 1987:100 ) describe tribalism as the pattern of progressing one’s ain folk above others and judging other people on the footing of their tribal beginnings. Matenge is described as a â€Å"die difficult traditionalist† ( Head 1987:42 ) . He wanted things to stay the same. He is said to hold understood tribalism and that it was â€Å"essentially the regulation of the illiterate adult male who when he was in the bulk. feared and despised anything that was non a portion of the abysmal darkness in which he lived† . ( Head 1987:65 ) further portrays his disgust for other folks when he is said to hold dismissed Dinorego’s recognizing at some point with a â€Å"slight gesture of the caput which contained in it an heritage of centuries of disdain for the ordinary adult male. † His shaky and timeserving relationship with Joas Tsepe is another disclosure of Matenge’s lopsided and corrupt character. Joas Tsepe was besides corrupt and this is revealed in the patron that was shrouded in enigma who supplied him with money which enabled him to stay unemployed and to go every six months by air as a really of import individual. Matenge besides has xenophobic inclinations. His want to trail Makhaya out of the small town really much smelt of this. This is revealed when George Apple-by confides in Makhaya that Matenge wants him â€Å"removed† from the small town because he is a refugee. Refugees were by and large non liked in Botswana at the clip of the book’s puting when many came from South Africa running off from Apartheid. but Matenge’s peculiar hatred for Makhaya as a refugee and all like him comes out when he referred to him as a â€Å"South African swine who ever needs to run after his master† ( Head 1987:66 ) . mentioning to Makhaya’s shut association with Gilbert Balfour. To state Makhaya was exhaustively offended by this is an understatement for unbeknown to Matenge. he in secret formed ideas of slaying him. In decision Head ( 1987:43 ) could non hold summed up Chief Matenge’s character better when she described him as â€Å"the prototype of darkness with his long gloomy. melancholy. leery face and his ceaseless machinations. acrimonious green-eyed monster and hatred† . Makhaya besides equates him to several unsavory points such as a â€Å"lout. darnel. Canis familiaris and swine and he reckoned the â€Å"Matenges everyplace got themselves into a place over the poor† ( Head 1987:136 ) The reader agrees with Mma Millipede when she softly but unsuspectingly accurately predicts Chief Matenge’s death. She tries to quiet Makhaya after his dramatic brush with Chief Matenge where he is labeled a South African swine and says. â€Å"People who err against human life like our Chief and the white adult male ( mentioning to Apartheid in South Africa ) do so merely because they are more blind than others to the enigma of life. Some clip life will catch up with them and set them off for good or alteration them† ( Head 169:137 ) . In Chief Matenge’s instance. he was luckless to non endure the later of these anticipations. but the former. After he comes back from a instead long absence from the small town. he instantly gets back to what he knows best and biddings Pauline and six small town seniors to be tried. Unbeknown to him. the whole small town was excited that the twenty-four hours had arrived that they would confront their â€Å"persecutor of many years† ( Head 169:184 ) . Because Matenge was non anticipating a crowd. he panics. retreats into the house. and instead than confronting the crowd. commits suicide. and the reader discovers another concealed character that was skulking in Matenge all along. cowardliness. Not even his retainers stand by him at his clip of demand ; they beat a headlong retreat and leave him to cover with his issues entirely and his eyes are opened and possibly he eventually sees himself for the monster that he is. The saddest portion is non even his brother is quiet disappointed by his death. Chief Sekoto’s digestion is said to hold been â€Å"upset the whole day† by Matenge’s decease. Head ( 1987:189 ) . The reader is certain it is non because he is sorrowing for his brother but he is unappreciative of the dither and incommodiousness that the decease causes. Such is the destiny of the adversary of When rain clouds gather. The reader applauds Bessie Head on successfully making a fitting scoundrel who one can non assist but detest. SOURCES CONSULTED Byrne. D. Kalua. F A ; Scheepers. R. 2012. Foundations in English Literary Studies. Merely analyze Guide for ENG1501. Capital of south africa: University of South Africa Head. B. 1987. When Rain Clouds Gather. Heinemann.

A Briefer History of Time Report

A Briefer History of Time Report Free Online Research Papers At the end of the first chapter, Hawking ends with a thought provoking statement; â€Å"Someday these answers may seem as obvious to us as the Earth orbiting the sun – or perhaps as ridiculous as a tower of turtles. Only time (whatever that may be) will tell.† He illustrates the elusive ambiguity of science – what we are determined to prove true today, we may laugh at tomorrow. In the first two chapters, Stephen Hawking describes what we live in to be a â€Å"strange and wonderful universe,† introducing his topic with contrast to the old fashioned theory of the flat world resting upon a tower of turtles, quoted earlier. What can we really prove, and how can we determine if the theories we have today are legitimate or if they are as ridiculous as a pile of turtles? He brings up and then disproves various past ideas of the world and the galaxy, like the world being flat; if the world was flat, the Greeks had reasoned, you would see a ship to appear first as a dot and then, as it got closer, you would gradually be able to make out more detail. However, the first thing you see are the ship’s sails, and then later you see it’s hull, and â€Å"the fact that a ship’s masts, rising high above the hull, are the first part if the ship to poke up horizon is evidence that the Earth is a ball.† He also introduces Newton’s la ws, his ideas of gravity, and the elliptical orbits of the planets. In the third chapter, Hawking defines the nature of a scientific theory, and the process of abandoning or modifying these theories. He gives us a brief understanding of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, while explaining that the two theories are inconsistent with each other; they cannot both be correct. The fourth chapter, entitled â€Å"Newton’s Universe,† talks about how gravity is proportional to mass. Although an object with twice the weight will have twice as much gravity pulling it down, it will also have twice the mass, thus it will only have half the acceleration per unit force. These two effects cancel each other out; therefore, every object has the same acceleration when falling. Another idea introduced in this chapter was the ambiguity of time and space. Hawking uses the example that if a person were on a train, bouncing a ping-pong ball, it would appear to them as if it was going straight up and down, whereas someone standing besi de the track would see the two bounces as forty meters apart, because the train would have raveled that far down the track between the bounces. In the fifth chapter, the fact that light travels at a very high yet finite speed is explained. Danish astronomer Ole Christensen Roemer observed that the eclipses of Jupiter’s moons were not evenly spaced. If Jupiter remained the same distance from the Earth at all times, the delay would be uniform for every eclipse. Because light has a farther distance to travel when Jupiter moves away from the earth, the light we would normally see is late. In addition, when Jupiter is closer to the earth, and the â€Å"signal† from each eclipse has les distance to travel, it arrives earlier. Ether is defined as a substance present everywhere, even in the vacuum of â€Å"empty† space. It is believed that light waves go through ether as sound waves do through air, and that, although different observers could see light coming toward them at different speeds, the light’s speed relative to the ether remains fixed. Hawking explains that â€Å"we must accept that time is not completely separate from and independent of space but is combined with it to form an object called space-time.† It is understood that position is relative; it is nothing unless compared to something else. In chapter six, a geodesic is explained as the shortest (or longest) distance between two points. The shortest distance between two points on the globe is along a great circle, or a circle around the globe (one of the largest circles you can draw on the globe) whose center coincides with the center of the earth. Therefore, although a straight line would be considered the shortest distance between two points, a curved geodesic is actually the shortest distance between two points on the globe. Some interesting topics in this chapter are the predictions of general relativity. General relativity predicts that gravitational fields should bend light. This means that the light from a distant star that passes near the sun would be deflected, appearing in a different position to someone on the Earth. Another prediction of general relativity is that time should appear to run slower near a massive body, such as the Earth. This prediction was tested in 1962 with a pair of very accurate clocks, mounted to the top and bottom of a water tower. The clock at the bottom was found to run more slowly, in exact agreement with general relativity. Our biological clocks are equally affected by this change in the flow of time. Throughout this chapter, the idea of absolute time was disproved. Chapter seven contains another discovery about the universe, that it is the same in every direction. It also introduces the method of parallax, using the change in relative position to plot locations. It was not possible to use this method for Edwin Hubble because the distances he was trying to find appeared fixed, because they were too far away. Instead, he catalogued the brightness of each star, dependant on the luminosity. The same types of stars have the same luminosity, and the types and luminosities of nearby stars could be determined, so Hubble was able to calculate the distance to that galaxy, eventually working out nine different galaxies. After this, he spent his time tracking where the galaxies were moving to, as most people expected them to be moving around quite randomly. He was surprised to find that every galaxy was moving away from us. This means that the universe could not be static or unchanging in size, rather it is expanding. This can be described by the e xpanding balloon model: â€Å"The situation is rather like a balloon with a number of spots painted on it being steadily blown up. As the balloon expands, the distance between any two spots increases, but there is no spot that can be said to be the center of the expansion. Moreover, as the radius of the balloon steadily increases, the farther apart the spots on the balloon, the faster they will be moving apart. For example, suppose the radius of the balloon doubles in one second. Two spots that were previously one centimeter apart will now e two centimeters apart (as measured along the surface of the balloon.)† In chapter eight, the big bang is explained, using reference to extreme temperatures, like one second after the big bang, when â€Å"the universe would have expanded enough to bring its temperature down to about ten billion degrees Celsius. This is about a thousand times the temperature at the center of the sun.† In addition, a black hole is explained as a collapsing star with a gravitational field so strong that light cannot escape. Therefore, these â€Å"black holes† are just black voids in space, stars massive enough where the escape velocity is higher than the speed of light. According to the theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. Therefore, if light is not able to escape, how could anything else be able to? Black holes are very common – one satellite discovered fifteen hundred black holes in just one small area of the sky. If an astronaut was on the surface of a collapsing star, the change in gravity between his feet and the one o r two meters up to his head would literally â€Å"stretch him out like spaghetti or tear him apart before the star had contracted to the critical radius at which the event horizon formed.† Sometimes, when a very massive star collapses, parts of the star may be blown off in an explosion called a supernova. A supernova explosion is so gigantic that it can radiate more light than all the other stars in its galaxy combined. In chapter nine, quantum mechanics are used to describe the unavoidable element of unpredictability or randomness into science. The particles in this uncertainty behavior behave in some respects like waves. They do not have a definite position but are â€Å"smeared out† with a probability distribution. A nice way of visualizing this wave/particle duality is the â€Å"sum over histories† introduced by Feynman. Instead of a particle moving in one single path, it is supposed to go from point A to point B by every possible path. With each path between point A and point B, Feynman associated a couple of numbers – one represents the size of a wave, the other represents the position in the cycle. Quantum theory has been an outstandingly successful theory and underlies almost all of modern science and technology. Chapter ten, titled â€Å"Wormholes and Time Travel,† touches on the science-fiction aspects of true science. It is stated that traveling to the future is possible, if one accelerates to the speed of light. The first indication that traveling to the past might be possible was when Gà ¶del discovered a new solution to Einstein’s equations; that is, â€Å"a new space-time allowed by the theory of general relativity.† His space-time had the curious property that the universe was rotating. There is a problem, however, with breaking the speed-of-light barrier. The theory of relativity states that the rocket power needed to accelerate a spaceship gets greater and greater the nearer it gets to the speed of light. Particles so far can be accelerated up to 99.99% of the speed of light, but they cannot get them beyond the speed-of-light barrier. There is a possible way out of this predicament – a wormhole, which is a think tube of space-time that connects tw o nearly flat regions far apart. In chapter eleven, force-carrying particles are grouped into four different categories, the first being the gravitational force. This force is universal, and every particle feels the force of gravity according to its mass or energy. The second is electromagnetic force, which interacts with electrically charged particles, and is much stronger than the gravitational force. The third category is called the weak nuclear force. We do not come in direct contact with this force, however it is responsible for radioactivity – the decay of atomic nuclei. The last category, and the strongest of all forces, is the strong nuclear force. This is another force with which we don’t have direct contact, yet it is responsible for holding most of our everyday world together. Without the strong force, the electric repulsion between the positively charged protons would blow apart every atomic nucleus in the universe (except those of hydrogen gas.) This chapter also touches on the str ing theory. In string theories, the basic objects are things that have length but no other dimension, and they either have ends (open strings) or they may be joined up with themselves in closed loops (closed strings.) String theories lead to infinities, but it is thought that in the right version they will all cancel out (though this is not known for certain.) Also, these theories seem only to be consistent if space-time has either ten or twenty-six dimensions instead of the usual four. There are many problems with more than three space dimensions. In four dimensions, the gravitational force would drop to 1/8th, in five to 1/16th, and so on. The orbits of planets around the sun would be unstable. People have searched for the underlying theory, but so far, it has been without success. In Newton’s time, it was possible for an educated person to have a grasp of the whole human knowledge; today that clearly is not true. The goal of science is to get a complete understand ing of the events around us, and of our own existence. Research Papers on A Briefer History of Time ReportThe Hockey GameEffects of Television Violence on ChildrenMind TravelThree Concepts of PsychodynamicCapital PunishmentThe Spring and AutumnHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows EssayRelationship between Media Coverage and Social andUnreasonable Searches and SeizuresLifes What Ifs

Philosophy-human rights Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Philosophy-human rights - Essay Example Examples of human rights are the right to freedom of religion, the right to a fair trial when charged with a crime, the right not to be tortured, and the right to engage in political activity. These rights exist in morality and in law at the national and international levels†( Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2003). On a global scale, militaries by design, were and are formed primarily for the purpose of the preservation of human rights. But to speak specifically about the rights of women, one must examine which human rights specifically, in the past have been overlooked or neglected throughout history as compared to the assumed rights granted to women in Westernized cultures today. It should be noted that the word ‘assumed’ it used purposely to indicate that though many may believe that women are in fact granted equal rights in modern times, this is not always the case and overall is indicative of a still flawed system. One hundred years ago in this very country, a woman was not permitted to vote, she was often not permitted to work or rather hold employment like her male counterparts, and certainly, she was not able to exist on her own due to these regulations in the same capacity that a man might be able to. Some countries to this day still practice arranged marriages where women are essentially assigned a husband who she typically does not even meet until the day she is married. This is a situation where women are really just used as a type of currency for trade or for political or business alliances. It is often the men in non progressive cultures that make the decisions and foster the role of leadership within the home and within the community. Going back to an earlier time of Native American tribes such as the Iroquois which were constituted by the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, the Mohawk and the