Unit 6: Selection Vocabulary 2

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

Freedom and power bring responsibility. The responsibility rests upon this Assembly, a sovereign body representing the sovereign people of India.

That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today.

It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity.

And to India, our much-loved motherland, the ancient, the eternal and the ever-new, we pay our reverent homage and we bind ourselves afresh to her service.

Have you ever wondered why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants?

The people like me, finally, after years and years of agitation, made deeply moving and eloquent speeches against the wrongness of your domination over us...

But then again, perhaps as you observe the debacle in which I now exist, the utter ruin that I say is my life, perhaps you are remembering that you had always felt people like me cannot run things...

...people like me will never grasp the idea of Gross National Product, people like me will never be able to take command of the thing the most simpleminded among you can master, people like me will never understand the notion of rule by law, people like me cannot really think in abstractions...

...people like me cannot be objective, we make everything so personal.

There was an uncertainty about him, a diffidence that seemed alien, very unlike the man who so easily got people to act.

I felt that Ikenna deserved to be told more, or maybe that the tension had not quite abated...

I shook my head in that slow, side-to-side way that my people have perfected when referring to things of this sort, as if to say that the situation is, sadly, ineluctable.

It was a tacit agreement among all of us, the survivors of Biafra. Even Ebere and I, who had debated our first child’s name, Zik, for months, agreed very quickly on Nkiru: what is ahead is better.