A seven-year-old girl in a Ghanaian village is told, over and over, that her legs are too thin. Not by strangers — by her own grandmother, at meals, in front of her mother, as a settled family fact. Then the same thin legs win a district race, and the woman who complained about them starts carrying the trophy around the neighbourhood. That is The Girl Who Can by Ama Ata Aidoo, and underneath its gentle surface it is one of the sharpest stories in your Treasure Chest.
The difficulty for most students is the narrator. Adjoa is seven, she tells the story in her own hesitant voice, and she does not understand half of what she is reporting. Your job in the exam is to understand what she cannot — and to say so in clear, adult English. This chapter shows you how.
Work through in order the first time, then use the menu for revision.
- Where This Story Sits in Your Syllabus
- What Happens, Step by Step
- Adjoa: The Child Who Sees More Than She Can Say
- Nana: Tradition, and the Courage to Change
- Maami Kaya: The Silence in the Middle
- The Legs and the Cup: Two Symbols
- Themes You Can Build an Answer On
- The Child Narrator and How Aidoo Uses Her
- Model Answers: Short, Mid-Length and Extended
- The Paper and How to Answer It
- Practice Worksheet
Where This Story Sits in Your Syllabus
Literature in English is Paper 2 of your English examination: two hours, 80 marks, with 20 further marks of Internal Assessment awarded by your school. The Class 10 portion consists of Julius Caesar Acts III, IV and V, the five prescribed Treasure Chest short stories and the five prescribed Treasure Chest poems.
The Girl Who Can by Ama Ata Aidoo is the third of the five short stories. Aidoo was a Ghanaian writer, and the story is set in Hasodzi, a village in Ghana. You do not need outside research on the author; everything the examiner can ask is inside the text.
The Council’s instruction for prose is that questions will be central to the text and that you must respond in your own words. With this story that has a particular consequence: never imitate Adjoa’s childish sentence patterns in your answer. Report her voice, analyse it, but write your own answer in clear standard English.
If you are revising the whole Treasure Chest prose section, the same close-reading method is used in our notes on The Elevator.
What Happens, Step by Step
There is very little external action, so learn the emotional sequence rather than a list of events.
1. A child who cannot make herself heard. Adjoa, aged seven, opens by admitting how hard it is at her age to know whether a thought has actually been spoken aloud or only turned over in the head. Adults are difficult to interrupt, and she is never certain her opinions have reached anyone. This is the frame for everything that follows.
2. The complaint about the legs. Her grandmother Nana returns constantly to one subject: Adjoa’s legs are too thin. In Nana’s view a woman needs solid legs with proper calves to carry the hips that will carry children. Thin legs are therefore not a matter of appearance but a warning about the girl’s whole future as a woman.
3. The pressure on Maami Kaya. The complaint is never only about Adjoa. It is directed past her at her mother, with the implication that Kaya has somehow failed. Kaya mostly says nothing, and there are moments when Adjoa notices her mother in tears.
4. School. Adjoa goes to school in the village and likes it. Nana is not against schooling exactly, but she does not obviously see the point of it for a girl whose legs are her real problem.
5. The race. Adjoa is picked to run for her school at the district games, because she is fast. The child everyone has been discussing as a body with a defect turns out to have a body that can do something remarkable.
6. The cup. She wins, and the school takes a trophy. Her speed is publicly recognised across the district.
7. Nana changes. This is the heart of the story. Nana takes charge of the cup and, exactly as women carry a baby, straps it to her back with a piece of cloth to show it off to the neighbours with open pride. She also says the thing nobody expected her to say — that thin legs can be good for something after all, that some legs are made for running. Kaya, who has borne years of criticism in silence, is left smiling and overcome.
Do not write that Nana is “a cruel grandmother” who is “punished” or “proved wrong”. Aidoo does nothing so crude. Nana loves Adjoa throughout — her worry about the legs is a form of love, expressed through the only framework she knows. The story’s achievement is that it lets her change without humiliating her, and answers that miss this miss the story.
Adjoa: The Child Who Sees More Than She Can Say
She is seven, and she knows it. Aidoo keeps her narrator honestly childish. Adjoa loses the thread, repeats herself, admits confusion and cannot always tell speech from thought. Never mistake this for weak writing; it is carefully constructed.
She observes accurately and interprets partially. This is the key to her. She notices exactly the right things — Nana’s repeated complaint, her mother’s silence, the tears — but she cannot assemble them into an explanation. The reader does that work, and the gap between what she reports and what we understand is where the story lives.
She is not resentful. She does not rage against Nana. She is puzzled by adults rather than angry with them, which keeps the story warm and stops it becoming a complaint.
She proves herself without arguing. Adjoa never wins a debate about her legs. She simply runs, and the running settles a question that years of talk could not. There is a quiet lesson in that structure.
Adjoa par question aaye to “innocent” ya “sweet” jaise shabdon par mat rukiye. Ek line likhiye jo yeh dikhaye: wo cheezein theek dekhti hai lekin unka matlab poora nahin samajh paati — aur lekhak isi khaali jagah mein apna asli message rakhta hai. Yeh ek line aapko top band mein le jaati hai.
Nana: Tradition, and the Courage to Change
Nana is the most interesting character in the story and the one most often written about badly.
She speaks for an inherited system. In Nana’s world a woman’s worth is measured by her capacity to bear and raise children, and the body is read as evidence about that future. Thin legs are a bad sign. She is not inventing this standard; she has received it, lived by it, and is passing it on because she believes it protects her granddaughter.
Her criticism is anxiety, not dislike. Read her repetition as worry. She keeps returning to the legs because she genuinely fears for a girl she believes is badly equipped for the only life she can imagine for her.
She is hard on her own daughter. The complaint lands on Kaya as much as on Adjoa, which tells you something important: this is a system in which women police other women, generation after generation.
She changes, publicly. The ending gives her the story’s finest moment. Confronted with evidence that contradicts a lifetime’s belief, Nana does not sulk or explain it away. She carries the cup around the neighbourhood, shows it off and says out loud that thin legs can be for running. Changing your mind at that age, in front of everyone, is not a small thing, and Aidoo clearly admires her for it.
The story does not attack tradition; it asks tradition to look at new evidence. Nana keeps her love and her authority and simply widens her idea of what a girl’s body is for. If your answer presents the ending as tradition being defeated, you have missed Aidoo’s point. It is tradition being persuaded.
Maami Kaya: The Silence in the Middle
Adjoa’s mother says the least and carries the most.
She absorbs the criticism. She rarely answers back. Adjoa notices her tears but cannot explain them; the reader can — Kaya is being blamed, in her own home, for her daughter’s body.
She is caught between two generations. She cannot openly reject her mother, and she cannot defend her daughter without doing so. Silence is what is left.
Her release comes at the end. When Nana finally accepts Adjoa, Kaya’s reaction is one of the most moving moments in the story, precisely because she has said so little for so long. Mention her in any answer about the ending; most candidates forget she is there.
The Legs and the Cup: Two Symbols
The legs. Adjoa’s thin legs stand for the way a girl’s body is assessed by others before she has any say in the matter. They are discussed constantly in front of her, as if she were not present. The story’s turn comes when the same legs are re-read — not as a defect in a future mother, but as an ability in a present child. Nothing about the legs changes. Only the question being asked about them changes, and that is Aidoo’s real subject.
The cup. The trophy is public, portable proof. It matters that Nana takes it around the neighbourhood rather than keeping it in the house: the correction has to happen in front of the same community whose standards produced the complaint, with Nana in tears of pride as she shows it off. She carries it strapped to her back with a piece of cloth, exactly as women carry a baby — a striking irony, since the trophy those “unfit” legs produced is now cradled the way the child Nana once feared Adjoa would never carry.
Symbol wale question mein hamesha teen cheezein likhiye: symbol kya hai, kahani mein uska matlab kaise badalta hai, aur us badlaav se lekhak ka kya point banta hai. Sirf “legs symbolise strength” likhna aadha jawab hai.
Themes You Can Build an Answer On
How society judges a girl’s body. The central theme. Adjoa’s legs are public property, discussed in her hearing, measured against a single purpose. Aidoo shows how early this begins — the girl is seven — and how completely it can define a child before she has any voice in it.
Tradition meeting new possibility. Nana’s standard is not wicked, merely narrow, and it was formed in a world with fewer options. School and sport open a door that did not exist for her, and the story watches an old woman walk through it.
The child’s voice. Adjoa opens by telling us she cannot get her thoughts heard. By the end she has not become more articulate — she has been heard anyway, through what she did. Aidoo is interested in the many ways a person can be silenced, and the ways they can answer.
Education and opportunity. School is where Adjoa is measured by what she can do rather than by how she looks. It gives her a race to run and a result nobody can argue with.
Three generations of women. Nana, Kaya and Adjoa form a chain, and the story is about how the chain is altered without being broken. There is no father in the foreground; this is a world of women shaping each other.
For a very different first-person voice — an adult narrator playing his own discomfort for comedy, rather than a child reaching past her vocabulary — compare the narration in With the Photographer.
The Child Narrator and How Aidoo Uses Her
First-person child narration. Everything reaches us through a seven-year-old. The prose is deliberately hesitant and repetitive, doubling back and losing its thread, because that is how a child of that age actually thinks.
Dramatic irony. The engine of the story. Adjoa reports her mother’s tears without knowing why they fall; the reader knows. Whenever you can name a moment where you understand more than the narrator does, you have a ready-made point for a technique question.
Repetition. The legs come back again and again, in almost the same words, which does two things at once: it reproduces a child’s circling thought, and it shows the reader how relentless the criticism has been.
Circular structure. The story begins with legs and ends with legs. Nothing physical has altered; the meaning has. Ending where you began, with everything changed, is a technique worth naming by its effect.
Understatement. The most significant moments — Kaya’s tears, Nana’s admission — are given briefly and without commentary. Aidoo trusts the reader, and the restraint is why the ending moves people.
Model Answers: Short, Mid-Length and Extended
Copy the structure, not the sentences.
Question: Why does Nana object to Adjoa’s legs?
Model answer: Nana believes a woman needs thick, sturdy legs with proper calves in order to carry the hips required for bearing children. Adjoa’s thin legs therefore strike her not as a matter of looks but as a sign that her granddaughter is poorly equipped for a woman’s expected future.
Why it scores: It gives the belief and the reason behind it — exactly what a short sub-question wants, and no more.
Question: How does Nana change by the end of the story, and what causes the change?
Model answer: For most of the story Nana treats Adjoa’s thin legs as a defect and returns to the subject relentlessly, blaming her daughter Kaya by implication. The change is caused by evidence she cannot argue with: chosen to run for her school at the district games, Adjoa wins, and the school takes a cup. Nana’s response is not grudging. She takes charge of the trophy and carries it around the neighbourhood to show the other women, and states openly that thin legs can be good for something — that some legs are made for running. The change matters because it is public and because it costs her something: an elderly woman revises a lifelong belief in front of the community that taught it to her.
Why it scores: Before, cause, after, significance — four clean movements, one developed point each.
Question: How does Ama Ata Aidoo use a seven-year-old narrator to make her point in The Girl Who Can?
Plan first: the voice → what Adjoa sees → what she cannot interpret → the reader’s work → why an adult narrator would fail.
Model answer: Aidoo hands the story to Adjoa, a girl of seven, and keeps the voice honestly childish. The narration circles, repeats itself and loses its thread; Adjoa even tells us she is not always sure whether she has spoken a thought or merely had it. This is not looseness in the writing but a precise imitation of how a young child thinks, and it establishes at once the story’s first concern — a person who cannot make herself heard.
What that voice does supremely well is observe. Adjoa records exactly the right details: her grandmother’s endless return to the subject of her thin legs, the way the complaint is aimed past her at her mother, and the fact that Maami Kaya sometimes weeps. Nothing important escapes her notice.
What she cannot do is interpret. She does not know why her mother cries, or that a whole system of belief about women’s bodies lies behind Nana’s worry, or that the criticism of her legs is also an accusation against Kaya. The reader assembles all of this from evidence the narrator has faithfully delivered without understanding it. That gap between reporting and comprehension is where the story does its real work, and it makes the reader an active participant rather than a recipient of a lecture.
The choice also protects the story’s warmth. Because Adjoa is puzzled rather than bitter, Nana is never reduced to a villain; her anxiety reads as a narrow form of love, and her change of heart at the end can therefore be generous rather than humiliating. An adult narrator would almost certainly have judged, argued and explained — and the moment a story explains its own theme, the theme stops working.
Aidoo’s child narrator therefore achieves two things at once: she embodies the silencing the story is about, and she forces the reader to supply the understanding she lacks. The point is made more powerfully for never being stated.
Why it scores: Five short paragraphs, one idea each, and a final line that answers the question asked rather than summarising the plot. This is the length of the extended sub-question, not of a school essay.
Is kahani ka sabse bada trap: answer likhte waqt Adjoa ki bhasha copy kar lena — toote hue vaakya, baar-baar repetition. Examiner ise aapki kamzor English samjhega, Aidoo ki technique nahin. Uski voice ko describe kijiye, uski nakal mat kijiye.
The same discipline — stay inside what the text actually shows — is what earns marks in the drama answers in Julius Caesar Act V.
The Paper and How to Answer It
Literature in English is a two-hour, 80-mark paper, with 20 marks of Internal Assessment awarded by your school. The Class 10 portion is Julius Caesar Acts III to V, the five prescribed short stories and the five prescribed poems, and the Council prescribes all of them.
Prose questions are set centrally to the text, frequently from an extract, and you are required to show understanding and to respond in your own words. For this story, the habits below will protect your marks.
Track the emotional sequence, not events. Very little happens externally. What moves is Nana’s attitude — complaint, then evidence, then public acceptance. If an extract question asks what has changed, that is the line you follow.
Name what the narrator cannot see. Any question about Adjoa, irony or narration is really asking you to identify the gap between what she reports and what you understand. Say so directly.
Be fair to Nana. Examiners reward balance. An answer that recognises her love, her narrowness and her courage in changing will always outscore one that simply calls her unkind.
Know the shape of the prose questions. CISCE’s own competency-focused question set for Literature in English Class X shows two kinds of item. There are multiple-choice questions worth one mark each, and there are extract-based questions — a passage from the text followed by several sub-questions — carrying sixteen marks in total. The sub-questions are not equal: the early ones test straightforward understanding in a sentence or two, while the later ones ask for analysis and need a developed paragraph.
Match the length of your answer to the weight of the sub-question. Roughly one developed point per mark is a safe guide. A short comprehension sub-question needs two or three sentences, not a paragraph; the extended analytical sub-question at the end needs a planned response of about a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty words. Writing an essay where a sentence was wanted costs you time you will need later in the paper.
80 marks, 120 minutes — lagbhag ek mark per minute, aur 15–20 minute reading, planning aur checking ke liye. Character question mein hamesha ek line balance ki daaliye (“however…”). Examiner ke liye wahi ek line saabit karti hai ki aapne soch kar likha hai, ratta maar kar nahin.
Practice Worksheet
Ten questions, rising in difficulty. Write your answer first, then check.
Pehle khud kijiye, phir answer kholiye.
Q1. Who is Adjoa, and where does the story take place?
Show Answer
Adjoa is a seven-year-old girl who narrates the story. She lives in Hasodzi, a village in Ghana, with her mother Maami Kaya and her grandmother Nana.
Q2. What difficulty does Adjoa describe at the very beginning of the story?
Show Answer
She explains how hard it is at seven to be sure whether she has actually spoken a thought aloud or only had it in her head. Adults are difficult to interrupt and she is never certain her opinions have been heard. This establishes the theme of the unheard child before any events begin.
Q3. Why, in Nana’s view, are thin legs a problem for a girl?
Show Answer
Because she believes a woman needs strong legs with proper calves to support the hips that will bear children. To Nana the legs are not about beauty at all; they are evidence about whether Adjoa will be able to live the life expected of a woman.
Q4. How does Maami Kaya respond to Nana’s criticism, and why?
Show Answer
She mostly stays silent, and Adjoa sometimes notices her in tears. She is caught between two people she cannot oppose — she cannot contradict her mother without disrespect, and she cannot defend her daughter without doing so. Silence is the only position left to her.
Q5. What opportunity does school give Adjoa?
Show Answer
School measures her by what she can do rather than by how her body looks. Because she runs fast she is chosen to represent her school at the district games, which gives her a chance to be recognised publicly for an ability rather than judged for a supposed defect.
Q6. Describe Nana’s behaviour after Adjoa wins. What does it reveal?
Show Answer
She takes charge of the cup and straps it to her back with a piece of cloth, exactly as women carry a baby, displaying it to the neighbours with tears of pride, and she says openly that thin legs can be good for something — that some legs are meant for running. It reveals both her pride and, more importantly, her willingness to revise a lifelong belief in public when the evidence contradicts it.
Q7. “Nothing about Adjoa’s legs changes in this story.” What does change, then?
Show Answer
The question being asked about them. Throughout the story the legs are assessed against one standard — fitness for childbearing — and found wanting. After the race they are assessed against a different standard and found excellent. Aidoo’s point is that the girl was never deficient; the measurement was.
Q8. How does Aidoo use dramatic irony in the story? Give one clear example.
Show Answer
She lets Adjoa report things she cannot interpret, so the reader understands more than the narrator. The clearest example is Kaya’s weeping: Adjoa records the tears without knowing their cause, while the reader recognises that Kaya is being blamed in her own home for her daughter’s body. The gap between report and understanding carries the story’s meaning.
Q9. Is Nana a sympathetic character? Give a balanced answer of about 80 words.
Show Answer
Yes, on balance. Her constant criticism is genuinely wounding, both to Adjoa and to Kaya, and she voices a standard that reduces a girl to her usefulness as a future mother. But her anxiety is a form of love, formed in a world that offered women no other future, and she is not defending it out of malice. What settles the question is the ending: she accepts new evidence publicly and gladly, and revising a lifelong belief at her age takes real courage.
Q10. “The Girl Who Can is about the different ways a person can be silenced — and the ways they can still be heard.” Discuss in about 200 words.
Show Answer
Agree, and organise around three silences. First, Adjoa’s. She opens by telling us she cannot be sure her thoughts ever reach anyone; she is discussed in her own presence as though she were absent, her body assessed by adults who never consult her. Second, Kaya’s. Trapped between mother and daughter, she absorbs years of implied blame without reply, and her tears are the only expression she permits herself. Third, the silence imposed by the standard itself: a framework that judges a girl by one function leaves no room to say anything else about her. Then turn to how each silence is broken. Adjoa never wins an argument — she runs, and the result speaks where she could not. The cup is public, portable evidence that no one can talk over. Kaya is released not by speaking but by being vindicated in front of the woman who doubted her. And Nana, who enforced the silence, is the one who ends it, announcing to the neighbourhood that some legs are made for running. Conclude that Aidoo’s quiet argument is that being heard need not mean being articulate; sometimes it means being given one fair chance to show what you can do.
Aage kya? Teen kahaniyan ho gayin — Leacock ki comedy, Sleator ka suspense, aur ab Aidoo ki yeh khamosh, gehri kahani. Aage The Pedestrian aur The Last Lesson hain. Lekin usse pehle ek kaam kijiye: is kahani mein Nana ke teen alag moments dhoondhiye — ek jahan wo criticise karti hai, ek jahan wo chup hai, aur ek jahan wo badalti hai. Teen moments, teen lines. Nana par koi bhi question ab aapke liye aasan ho jayega.
Kaizen: Aaj se roz ek chhota kaam — kisi ek character ke baare mein do line likhiye: pehli line mein uski koi ek kamzori, doosri line mein usi character ki koi ek achhi baat. Roz do line. Yahi balance hai jiske liye examiner sabse zyada marks deta hai, aur do hafte mein yeh aapki aadat ban jaayegi.
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More ICSE Class 10 English Literature chapters — keep the momentum going.
Syllabus details verified from the CISCE prescribed-text list and English syllabus for the ICSE examination, published on cisce.org. All summary, character and theme analysis on this page is written in our own words. No text of the story is reproduced and no publisher’s notes or questions have been used.