Meet the Prices: Leah Trivia Quiz

Answer: Orleanna

Nathan hears Methuselah say 'damn' (as it turns out, he's learned far worse from Brother Fowles!) and scolds the three older girls for teaching an animal to swear, assuming it was one of them. Rachel apologises and all three girls are given the Verse (Numbers 29:34) as punishment.

However, Leah reveals that it was Orleanna who used the word, and the girls are covering for their mother; she said it repeatedly when she found out that the cake mix the family had brought to the Congo had dried out in the heat.

She was planning to make a cake for Rachel's sixteenth birthday, but the cake mix was too hard to use.

Answer: A tablecloth

The Price girls are given embroidery equipment for Christmas and Orleanna suggests they start making items for hope chests in their free time. Rachel works on several items, such as monogrammed guest towels and crocheted collars, Leah works on a cross-stitch tablecloth, and Adah mocks the whole project by outlining handkerchiefs in black and making other weird items.

As Leah says later in the novel, the hope chests turn out to be representative of the girls' love lives: Rachel has several failed marriages, Leah stays married to the same man and has children with him, and Adah never marries at all. Ruth May, the only one who did not have a hope chest, never lives long enough to be married.

Answer: Patrice Lumumba

Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is mentioned several times in the earlier part of the book; Nathan dismisses him as an uneducated postal worker and a Communist, but Anatole admires him and Leah is impressed on hearing him speak, saying Lumumba made her want to believe in every word.

She and Nathan fly out to Leopoldville when the Congo becomes independent, and watch the various speeches, along with the Underdowns, Belgian Mission League representatives who later leave the country. Lumumba is assassinated on the same day that Ruth May is killed by a snake; Eeben Axelroot tells Rachel beforehand that Lumumba is going to be killed, though Rachel is too ignorant to really understand.

Answer: Daniel

Tata Ndu does not approve of the Prices bringing Christianity to Kilanga as it is potentially turning people away from the local religion and angering the local gods. Nathan is reading from the Book of Daniel, a book of the Apocrypha, a story which Leah likes (and which later inspires the girls and Nelson, a local boy who does odd jobs for the Prices, to set a trap for Tata Kuvudundu, the local witch doctor, outside the Prices' henhouse). Tata Ndu interrupts the service to declare that he is holding an election to decide whether Jesus should be accepted as the village's personal god.

Despite Nathan's protests, Tata Ndu overrules him and calls for a vote, Congolese style, with stones thrown into pots to cast votes. Jesus loses by forty-five votes.

Answer: She wants to hunt with the men.

Nelson teaches Leah how to hunt with a bow and arrow, and when Tata Ndu organises a village hunt after Kilanga is ransacked by ants, Leah wants to hunt with the men rather than fan the fire with the other women. This not only angers Tata Ndu and many of the men in the village, but also Nathan, who thinks she is being disobedient. Tata Ndu orders a vote to decide whether Leah should be allowed to hunt with the men and she wins the vote, but Tata Kuvudundu threatens to make the Prices pay for Leah going against the natural order of things, and warns the village that she will bring disaster upon them. Leah walks out of the house and Nathan chases after her with his belt, but she hides in the jungle while Orleanna and the girls barricade themselves in the house.

At the hunt, Leah kills an impala. Tata Ndu's son Gbenye tries to claim the kill, but Nelson defends Leah. Tata Ndu hacks off a hindquarter and throws it at Leah, who rejects it. The villagers begin to fight over the dead animals. Nelson refuses to sleep in the henhouse, fearing that he has seen something there, and he and the Price girls scatter ashes around the henhouse to catch potential intruders by making them leave tracks. He spends the night at Anatole's house. Sure enough, Nelson and the girls later find a snake in the henhouse and a six-toed footprint, confirming that Tata Kuvudundu put it there. The snake attacks Ruth May and bites her, killing her.

Answer: Bulungu

Leah turns against Nathan when he seems more bothered about Ruth May dying without being baptised, than the fact she died at all. Mama Lo, the local hairdresser, and a group of other women are going to Bulungu and Orleanna and her surviving daughters join them on the walk, leaving Nathan behind. On the way to Bulungu, they stay in Kila with Mama Boanda's family. On the third day of the journey, the Prices become ill with malaria and Leah is too ill to continue travelling, so she stays in a hut belonging to one of Anatole's former pupils.

While Orleanna and Adah fly back to the USA and Rachel leaves with Axelroot, Leah stays on in the Congo and Anatole looks after her. Anatole asks her if she wants to leave, but she has fallen in love with him and decides to stay with him, as that's where she's happiest.

Answer: Soeur Liselin

Once Leah has recovered from malaria, she and Anatole are forced to leave Bulungu as the presence of a white woman puts not only Anatole at risk, but the entire town. Tata Boanda arrives in Bulungu, bringing news of Nathan and the village, and the Prices' leftover possessions. Leah and Anatole travel to Stanleyville, as Lumumba still has support there, but her whiteness still makes her a target and Anatole has to smuggle her into the Central African Republic, where she takes refuge in a convent in the jungle. She takes on the name of Soeur Liselin while staying in the convent. Anatole works with local Lumumba supporters, but is arrested and tortured by Mobutu's police.

While staying in the convent, Leah works in the clinic and acquires medical knowledge, as well as learning to speak Lingala. She also hunts and kills the odd animal for the nuns.

Answer: Nelson

Anatole and Leah are married in 1961, after moving to Bikoki Station, where his aunt Elisabet lives. Anatole teaches in a local school while Leah works in a clinic, and Brother Fowles and his wife Celine come to visit and bring news from Kilanga.

Thirteen years later, Leah and her family are living in Kinshasa, in what is now known as Zaire, and Elisabet and her daughter, who is working as a prostitute, come to join them due to the unstable situation in Bikoki. Her three boys are named for Patrice Lumumba, Pascal - an old friend of Leah's from Kilanga who was shot dead by the Army - and Martin Luther King. Under Mobutu, several places have had their names changed as part of the 'authenticité' policy; the 'Rumble in the Jungle' is also due to take place in a stadium where prisoners are locked up underground, much to Leah's disgust. She has had her children vaccinated in the USA while visiting Adah and Orleanna. She gets a temporary job teaching English to American engineers working on the doomed Inga-Shaba power line, but has enough and quits after two terms. In 1981, Anatole is arrested and imprisoned again when the Ngemba family return from the USA. He is released in 1984.

Answer: A truck

Leah and Anatole's fourth son, Nataniel, is born in the back of a Land Rover in 1986. While the Ngemba family are leaving Kinshasa and travelling to a farm in Kimvula, Leah goes into labour and gives birth to Nataniel in the truck. He is a sickly baby and is unable to nurse in his first week, making both Leah and Anatole fear for his life, but pulls through. In Kimvula, Leah and Anatole work with local farmers on a soya bean project in the hope of establishing a co-operative. Pascal, now an adult, is studying petroleum engineering in Luanda. All four of Leah's children remind her of herself and her sisters; Pascal chases girls and is outgoing like Rachel, Patrice is serious and into politics like Leah, Martin-Lothaire is moody and loves poetry like Adah, and Nataniel is small and delicate like Ruth May.

Rachel and Leah are now on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Rachel, who has grown increasingly conservative and racist over the years, accuses Leah of having been brainwashed by communism because of her support for Agostinho Neto, the first President of Angola. Leah also reveals that she made a globe out of a calabash gourd while in the convent, just as she promised Anatole she would back in Kilanga.

Answer: Angola

During their time on the soya bean farm, Leah and Anatole are hoping to move across the border into Angola, which became independent in 1975. Anatole had previously been invited on two occasions to work for the new government there, but the first time he was reluctant to leave his home country, and the second time, he was in prison.

Leah and Anatole eventually do move to a former palm oil plantation turned agricultural station in Sanza Pombo, a town close to the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and multiple families come to live on the co-operative's land. The Land Rover in which Nataniel was born is the co-operative's only vehicle. Leah tries to teach the local women about nutrition and sanitation, but many of them are too used to living life on the run to get into the habit of planting trees. She and Anatole often talk about Angola's past and the history of the Kongo people, before the Portuguese colonisers came.