Anowa · the purchase debate and the loss of equal decision-making
Analyse how practical language attempts to normalise enslavement · Connect economic and gendered authority without merging them · Test a speaker’s self-description against staged action
Section 2025-P3-A · 2025–2027 · Set-text extract response
Exam scope and assessment notes
0408 preparation for exam year(s) 2025, 2026. The assessment changes in 2028; follow the component and selected texts for your year. Original StudyForA teaching for Anowa, the 2025 and 2026 Paper 3 drama option. Read the complete unabridged centre-selected play; these notes and models do not replace it. The linked 2003 pupils’ edition explicitly contains the complete play, with separate editorial notes and BECE exercises. Its page numbers are reading locators, not Cambridge question numbers; those editorial notes and exercises are not reproduced or used as StudyForA models. Exact wording and pagination may differ from your centre’s edition. The protected play is not reproduced on this site. All questions and models are original self-review, not official Cambridge questions, marks, grades or calibrated full papers. Other well-supported interpretations can be valid. Qualified literature-teacher review remains required. In 2025–2026, Paper 3 is closed book: 90 minutes, one extract question and one whole-text essay, 25 marks each. Anowa is not the 2027 drama option or a revised 2028–2030 Paper 3 prose option. It is excluded from 2025–2026 coursework because it is on that year’s Paper 3 list; private candidates cannot enter 0408.
Before you begin
- Read Anowa’s Prologue and all three phases in the complete centre-selected play. Follow the reading locators before attempting each response.
- Distinguish dialogue, stage directions, recollection, dream and reported rumour. A character’s explanation is not automatically an established cause.
- Use the correct 2025 or 2026 option. Read the whole play before the final whole-text workshop; this sequence does not certify coursework eligibility or a Cambridge grade.
Work on paper. Try each question before revealing help, and explain why your method works.
Quick readiness check
What should support a claim about a literary text?
What you will learn
- Analyse how practical language attempts to normalise enslavement
- Connect economic and gendered authority without merging them
- Test a speaker’s self-description against staged action
Anowa · ethical argument and coercive authority
- Open the complete primary reading in Sources for this lesson, or use your centre’s unabridged play. The protected play is not reproduced here.
- Use the phase and scene locator; printed and PDF page numbers differ. Skip the separate editorial notes and BECE exercises when locating the primary dialogue.
- Write your own developed response before opening the model. Use brief accurate evidence from your copy and explain dramatic effects.
Original self-review, not official Cambridge questions, marks, assessed coursework or a calibrated full paper. The model is one supported interpretation and is not a substitute for the complete play.
Read, argue and reconsider
Read the first purchase debate, printed pp.51–53 (PDF pp.53–55), then the later defence of bondage and shaking, printed pp.59–61 (PDF pp.61–63).
1. How does Aidoo connect the disagreement about buying people with the changing balance of the marriage?
Compare after trying
The first proposal makes purchase sound like practical help, but Anowa questions both its need and its morality. When she recalls her part in beginning the trade, Kofi admits that contribution while asserting a different final authority based on gender. The debate therefore asks who may decide as well as what they decide.
The later seizure and shaking give coercion a visible form. His following claim of restraint and wish to cure her difference can no longer be taken neutrally. I find the connection disturbing because the partnership’s former cooperation becomes conditional on accepting the very practice she has reasoned against.
Why this response fits
- Explain how economic justification and marital authority intersect.
- Test self-description against stage directions rather than repeat it as fact.
Listen to how the proposal is introduced
Kofi hesitates before proposing men who will supposedly help. The wording moves from an apparently practical adjustment to the purchase of people. Cost, convenience and widespread custom become reasons offered for it. Anowa answers partly through their actual circumstances: the pair are not starving and did not need to organise the enterprise this way. Her ethical objection is therefore joined to a challenge to the claimed necessity. A response should expose how an argument works rather than repeat its description of exploitation as neutral assistance.
The dispute is also about who counts as a thinker
Anowa recalls her intellectual and practical contribution to starting the trade. Kofi acknowledges that contribution, then invokes his position as the man to limit her continuing authority. His question about who taught her the objection meets her assertion that people can think for themselves. The exchange joins the right to reason with the treatment of those being bought. That connection does not make her legal or material position identical to theirs. Compare the power to decide about other people with the attempt to silence the person questioning that power.
Staging can contradict a claim of restraint
Later in Phase Two, Kofi defends local bondage as kinder than treatment elsewhere. Anowa disputes the equal standing he implies and asks about suffering that is not openly visible. He seizes and shakes her, then speaks as though he cannot bring himself to touch her violently. That immediate contradiction matters. Do not report his self-description as proof that he has never used force. His wish to cure her difference reframes an ethical disagreement as something wrong with her, narrowing the space in which her reasoning can be heard.
Sources for this lesson
Pause and explain
Can Kofi’s claim that he cannot lay hands on Anowa establish that no physical coercion occurs?
Worked example
Why should “everyone does it, so it is harmless” be challenged as a reading of the debate?
Show the worked solution
- Identify that widespread custom is Kofi’s defence.
- Use Anowa’s objections and the later staged coercion to test it.
Answer The play presents normalisation as an interested argument, not an authorial conclusion that purchase is harmless.
Try a topic test
Choose Easy, Normal or Difficult. Save your answers and open worked review after finishing.
Test this topic →From guided practice to a new situation
Write your answer and reasoning first. Use a hint only if you are stuck. The model solution is for self-checking; your written work is not automatically marked.
How does cost help Kofi present purchase as reasonable?
Give me a hint
Separate convenience to a purchaser from freedom of the people purchased.
Compare my reasoning
- He stresses affordability and easier work.
- Those benefits belong to the owners’ perspective.
The language reduces human beings to an economic solution; identifying that reduction explains the ethical force of Anowa’s resistance.
Look for these in your work
- Attribute the reasoning
- Explain whose benefit it serves
Why does recognition of Anowa’s earlier contribution not settle the dispute?
Give me a hint
Follow the acknowledgement with the claim of authority.
Compare my reasoning
- Kofi admits he could not have begun without her.
- He nevertheless makes gender a reason for his final control.
Acknowledgement of past labour is separated from an equal right to decide the enterprise’s future.
Look for these in your work
- Use both parts of the exchange
- Explain the contradiction
Write a claim using dialogue and a contradictory stage direction.
Give me a hint
Compare the seizure with the later self-description.
Compare my reasoning
- State what is actually staged.
- Explain how it changes an audience’s trust in his claim of restraint.
His account of himself as unable to use force becomes unstable because the audience has just witnessed coercion.
Look for these in your work
- Use an action and a claim
- Avoid inventing an unstaged assault
Common mistakes
- Do not call the bought people voluntary employees.
- Do not treat Anowa’s objection as merely jealousy about losing her husband’s attention.
What can you explain now?
Can Kofi’s claim that he cannot lay hands on Anowa establish that no physical coercion occurs?
Compare with the explanation
No; a nearby stage direction shows him seizing and shaking her.
The audience has evidence beyond what a character says about himself.
After trying it yourself, choose your next review. This is your self-assessment.
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Make it stick
Can Kofi’s claim that he cannot lay hands on Anowa establish that no physical coercion occurs?
If you needed the solution, close it and solve the problem again from a blank page. A correct answer is stronger when you can explain the reason for each step.