George Alagiah's "A Passage to Africa"

George Alagiah Biography

• Born in Sri Lanka in 1955, moved to Ghana in 1961.
• Educated at Durham University, became a print journalist.
• Joined the BBC in 1989, worked as a foreign correspondent in areas such as Rwanda, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
• Later became a BBC newsreader for main evening programs.

Background of "A Passage to Africa"

• Explores various African countries through Alagiah's journalistic work and childhood memories.
• The extract focuses on Somalia, a predominantly Islamic country in the Horn of Africa.
• Somalia gained independence after World War Two following Italian and British colonial rule.
• In 1991, the ruling government was overthrown by factions, leading to displacement and famine.
• Alagiah visited Somalia between 1991 and 1992, during a period of famine and war.
• The extract narrates events of a single day, highlighting an encounter with a local man.
• Alagiah visits a remote village, witnessing sickness and death.
• Journalists become hardened to suffering, seeking shocking images.
• The people are trying to preserve their dignity.
• Alagiah encounters a man's smile, which is out of embarrassment of his condition.

Analysis

• The passage begins with "I saw," establishing a personal experience.
• The phrase "a thousand hungry, lean, scared and betrayed faces" contrasts with the impact of a single face.
• Moving from past to future tense indicates the lasting impact of the encounter.
• Phrases like "little hamlet" and "back of beyond" may downplay the location's significance.
• The village is described as a "ghost village," creating an image of abandonment and death.
• Journalists seeking striking pictures are described as "ghoulish," implying they feed on misery.
• Journalists' desensitization to suffering is likened to drug addiction through a simile.
• Alagiah admits this desensitization affects the reader's view of reporters.
• Alliteration links "search for the shocking" with "same old stuff," showing desensitization.

Real Events and Descriptions

• The paragraphs begin with "There was," to describe real events
• Amina Abdirahman, is looking for roots to eat, leaving her daughters on the dirt floor.
• Habiba, aged ten, and her sister Ayaan, nine, are "reaching the final, enervating stage of terminal hunger".
• "By the time Amina returned, she had only one daughter."
• "Habiba had died."
• Description of Habiba's death is incomplete, increasing reader discomfort.
• "Half-life" describes Habiba as half-alive and half-dead.
• Another victim is an "old woman" who has been "abandoned by relatives ".
• Alagiah gives a succession of horrifying images.
• The old woman and her rotting wound have become one in the mind of the narrator
• Use of the "s" sound brings the scene closer for the reader.
• Alagiah repeats the words from his opening sentence "And then there was the face I will never forget"
• Alagiah says his reaction to everyone he met that day is a mixture of "pity and revulsion "
• "Hunger and disease" are personified as "twin evils"
• Alagiah admits he "surreptitiously" wipes his hands on his trousers after holding the hand of a mother who has "just cleaned vomit from her child's mouth"

Pity and Revulsion

• Alagiah tells us that the people struggle to retain human dignity in such a terrible situation.
• The old woman covers her "shrivelled" body with a "soiled cloth"
• The dying man keeps his gardening tool next to him like he means to go out to till the soil
• Life and death are so close to each here other they cannot be easily disentangled.
• The reader may be getting to the heart of the passage and its message.
• Alagiah analyzes how people react to human misery, expressing "pity and revulsion."
• Nightmarish imagery personifies "hunger and disease" as evils sucking the human body's vitality.
• Alagiah admits to feeling disgusted by illness in feeding centers.
• Alagiah describes how people struggle to retain dignity, like an old woman covering herself.
• A dying man keeps his hoe, and his mat will soon "shroud his corpse," showing life and death intertwined.

The Unforgettable Face

• Alagiah saw the face for only a "few seconds."
• It is a "fleeting meeting of eyes" before the person disappears into the "darkness" of the hut.
• Alagiah repeats the word "smile" three times in one sentence,
• The smile "touched me in a way a could not explain"
• The smile went beyond emotions of "pity and revulsion"
• Alagiah does not know "What was it about that smile"?
• The translator asks the man, and we learn that the man "was embarrassed to be found in this condition".
• It is the "feeble smile" that someone gives if they are sorry about something or feel like they are guilty of doing "something wrong"
• Normally Alagiah is normally hardened or "inured" to such "stories of suffering"
• Journalists are "active" while subjects are "passive":

Impact of the Smile

• Alagiah then gives us an analysis of the normal relationship between journalist and subject of his or her reports.
• The man who smiled at Alagiah somehow makes Alagiah consider whether what he is doing as a journalist is right.
• He is now looking at himself in the same way he would look at others.
• This means the famine has been caused by violent conflict.
• Alagiah asks "If he was embarrassed to be found weakened by hunger and ground down by conflict, how should I feel to be standing there so strong and confident?"
• He said he would write the story with all the "power and purposes."
• He will now carry on reporting well.
• The meeting was a profound and last experience.
• Alagiah says "Facts and figures are the easy part of journalism. Knowing where they sit in the great scheme of things is much harder"
• Alagiah's final paragraph brings this passage to a conclusion, with a revelation about Alagiah's "brief encounter" in Gufgaduud.
• He regrets that he never learned the man's name.
• He calls him his "nameless friend"
• Alagiah says "So, my nameless friend, if you are still alive, I owe you one".
• The meaning is which reverses the usual relationship of the powerful West and the developing world.