A Passage To Africa

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A Passage to Africa

Summary
"I want you to do me a favor," writes George Alagiah. "I'd like you to forget what you think you
know about Africa today." It is a strange way to introduce this review of his life on the continent,
since much of what people have heard came through his own news reports, seen by millions over
the past decade.

But one wouldn't want to be too judgmental about this apparent contradiction. As the former
BBC Africa correspondent points out, he is a child of Africa himself, having moved to Ghana, aged
five, from his native Sri Lanka. And when, having finished his education and established his
career in the UK, he returned to the continent in 1990 as a TV news reporter, he was a man on a
mission: "I wanted to challenge the image of Africa as a place of tribal savagery and greedy,
callous leaders," he says. Whether he achieved this mammoth task is open to question, but his
writing of this book is certainly a further attempt to do so.

No one denies that the continent has huge problems. As Alagiah explains, since 1966, when his
family experienced the coup that ended Kwame Nkrumah's Ghanaian rule, Africa has witnessed
more than 80 violent or unconstitutional changes of government. Each year, 5million of its
children die before their fifth birthday (over two-thirds of the global total), and social indicators
show that life for many of its people is getting worse.

The extent of Alagiah's challenge is unwittingly exposed by his own publicity blurb, boasting his
coverage of "the civil war and famine in Somalia, the genocide in Rwanda, the civil wars in Liberia
and Sierra Leone, the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, and the devastating floods in
Mozambique". But Alagiah's affinity with the continent does come across in the honesty with
which he tackles some of the more emotive issues, which would not have made it to camera at
the time.

In 1994, Alagiah made his name covering the horrors of the Rwandan refugee camps, where
3,000 Hutu refugees were dying each day from cholera and starvation. His reports played a
significant role in launching the international relief effort; yet Alagiah, now, reveals that at the
time he was racked with doubt. He knew, as did the relief agencies, that many of those desperate
people were responsible for the murder of 1m Tutsis over the previous two months. "The
genocide was forgotten, and cholera became the story. That was all the newsroom wanted to
know about. For those few days I was following the herd instinct. Temporary though the lapse
was, I regret it still."

Alagiah also admits to mixed feelings towards those close to death who had no history of mass
murder. He describes a visit to one Somali village during the 1991-92 civil war in the east African
state. He felt pity for its starving inhabitants, but he says: "The degeneration of the human body,
sucked of its natural vitality by the twin evils of hunger and disease, is a disgusting thing... To be
in a feeding center is to hear and smell the excretion of fluids by people who are beyond
controlling their bodily functions surreptitiously to wipe your hands on the back of your trousers
after you've held the clammy palm of a mother who has just cleaned vomit from her child's
mouth."
Later, when US troops were sent in to restore food supplies held up by the warring factions,
Alagiah had expected the humanitarian situation to improve. However, his hopes soon
evaporated. Within hours of touching down the soldiers "stormed" a food store, forcing its three
Somali guards to the floor at gunpoint. Even in Alagiah's eyes, the reputation of the Americans
appeared seriously damaged. "It was beginning to look like America versus the Somalis. And if it
was going to come to that, I was with the Somalis... Why, when the rich world intervenes, does it
still have to do so in such an overbearing and insensitive way?"

And when, a few months later, the body of a US soldier who had been killed with 17 colleagues in
a gun battle was jubilantly dragged through the streets, Alagiah could understand the emotions.
"It was the celebration of the weak when the strong are brought down to size. They were
rejoicing in the belittling of America's power, not the murder of one of its sons." Some may feel
the worldwide reaction to the bombing of Afghanistan shows that the US still hasn't learnt this
lesson.

Alagiah does see some rays of hope for Africa's future, in the perspective of new-style leaders
such as Yoweri Museveni of Uganda. Museveni is more interested in addressing the problems
caused by four decades of leadership by Africans, albeit with European and superpower backing,
than by the preceding years of colonial rule and exploitation. He believes that rather than
remaining dependent on the west, through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund,
African countries should be building an independent future.

But the underlying theme running through all Alagiah's stories of horror and catastrophe is
ethnic division. From Zaire to Zimbabwe, from South Africa to Sierra Leone, historic nations have
been torn apart, creating people with split allegiances that have been exploited by dictatorial
rulers. As Museveni told Alagiah: "I speak the same language as the people in the Congo. I share
the same dialect as the people of Tanzania and Kenya; my people in the north of Uganda speak
the same language as they do in southern Sudan... these are the real affinities."

Every one of Africa's land borders, drawn up in 19th-century Europe, cuts through at least one
ethnic culture area, 177 in total. When the Organization of African Unity first met in 1963, its
leaders decided to respect these borders for fear that neighbourly disputes could lead to conflict.
Now, after 40 years of civil wars, this no-change policy must surely be discredited. How can rival
ethnic groups ever rebuild the trust to create prosperous nations? This, far more than slavery
and colonialism, has been Europe's continuing legacy.

As the conflagrations in the former Soviet Union over the last 10 years have shown, ethnic
rivalries, once unleashed, are almost impossible to contain. And given that neither Nato nor the
UN will be sending troops en masse to impose peace across Africa, who can say that the next four
decades will not be as bloody?

A Passage to Africa
Analysis

Ideas
George Alagiah is describing a visit to Africa. He is discussing the horrors that he saw on his visit
and how they have haunted him since.
Context
George Alagiah was a BBC newsreader. He used to be a reporter and he was sent to Africa to
cover the events that unfolded in the 1990s in Somalia. At this time, there was a civil war and the
people encountered many difficulties.

Author’s Purpose
He is writing reflectively and his attitude towards the events seems to have changed since he
originally reported on the event. This seems most clear in the final line, when he discusses his
regret at not knowing the man’s name. It suggests that his purpose and empathy level is different
now that it was then.
language

Emotive Language
Emotive Language is any language that makes you feel something for a person or situation. It is
an umbrella term and there are many different devices that create emotive language:
‘I saw a thousand hungry, lean, scared and betrayed faces’.
It is the list of 3 adjectives that create the pity and empathy that we feel for the situation.
Another example is:
‘simple, frictionless, motionless deliverance’
Note the contrast between the two quotes mentioned above. Whilst the first set of adjectives are
harsh, the second contains much gentler and softer description. It is almost as though Alagiah is
contrasting the harshness of the incidents with the human empathy that he feels.
However, emotive language is not only created through adjectives:
‘The degeneration of the human body, sucked of its natural vitality by the twin evils of
hunger and disease, is a disgusting thing’

The use of the verb ‘sucked’ creates the lack of control that the people encountered and the noun
‘evils’ represents the disgust he has for the situation.

Simile
A simile is when you compare one object with another. A simile uses the words ‘as’ and ‘like’ to
compare.
As a highly experienced journalist, Alagiah becomes critical of his profession:
‘The search for the shocking is like the craving for a drug: you require heavier and more
frequent doses the longer you’re at it’.
He compares reporting to addiction. It is as though they are always wanting something more
controversial and more repulsive. It also seems as though the profession is bad for him: much
like a drug.

Rhetorical Question
Rhetorical questions are questions that require no answer. The question remains unanswered in
the piece.
Alagiah is haunted by the question: ‘What was it about that smile?’ It is as though all these years
later, he remains haunted and he is unable to forget the man who smiled.
Listing
He lists incidents that he has seen over the years that will forever be in his head. It is as though he
is traumatized by all he has seen, from a mother with her children to an old woman.

Structure
It is interesting that the description of the place comes before we understand why Alagiah was in
Africa. This creates a sense of disgust and repulsion.
Alagiah lists incidents that have remained strong in his mind. He finishes the piece with the
haunting image of a man. Despite the fact the image is haunting, the man was ‘smiling’. It is as
though it is a contradiction to the emotion Alagiah was feeling.

Questions
1. What years was Alagiah in Somalia?
2. Where was the hamlet?
3. How does Alagia use language and structure to present his emotions?
4. Provide 3 facts about George Alagiah
5. What is emotive language?
6. What structural devices are used in the piece?
7. In this extract below, how does the writer present his thoughts and feelings in this passage?
Support your views with detailed reference to the text.
I saw a thousand hungry, lean, scared and betrayed faces as I criss-crossed Somalia between
the end of 1991 and December 1992, but there is one I will never forget.
I was in a little hamlet just outside Gufgaduud, a village in the back of beyond, a place the aid
agencies had yet to reach. In my notebook I had jotted down instructions on how to get there.
‘Take the Badale Road for a few kilometers till the end of the tarmac, turn right on to a dirt track,
stay on it for about forty-five minutes — Gufgaduud. Go another fifteen minutes approx. — like a
ghost village.’
In the ghoulish manner of journalists on the hunt for the most striking pictures, my cameraman
… and I tramped from one hut to another. What might have appalled us when we’d started our
trip just a few days before no longer impressed us much. The search for the shocking is like the
craving for a drug: you require heavier and more frequent doses the longer you’re at it. Pictures
that stun the editors one day are written off as the same old stuff the next. This sounds callous,
but it is just a fact of life. It’s how we collect and compile the images that so move people in the
comfort of their sitting rooms back home.
There was Amina Abdirahman, who had gone out that morning in search of wild, edible roots,
leaving her two young girls lying on the dirt floor of their hut. They had been sick for days, and
were reaching the final, enervating stages of terminal hunger. Habiba was ten years old and her
sister, Ayaan, was nine. By the time Amina returned, she had only one daughter. Habiba had
died. No rage, no whimpering, just a passing away — that simple, frictionless, motionless
deliverance from a state of half-life to death itself. It was, as I said at the time in my dispatch, a
vision of ‘famine away from the headlines, a famine of quiet suffering and lonely death’.
There was the old woman who lay in her hut, abandoned by relations who were too weak to
carry her on their journey to find food. It was the smell that drew me to her doorway: the smell of
decaying flesh. Where her shinbone should have been there was a festering wound the size of
my hand. She’d been shot in the leg as the retreating army of the deposed dictator … took
revenge on whoever it found in its way. The shattered leg had fused into the gentle V-shape of a
boomerang. It was rotting; she was rotting. You could see it in her sick, yellow eyes and smell it
in the putrid air she recycled with every struggling breath she took.
And then there was the face I will never forget.
My reaction to everyone else I met that day was a mixture of pity and revulsion. Yes, revulsion.
The degeneration of the human body, sucked of its natural vitality by the twin evils of hunger and
disease, is a disgusting thing. We never say so in our TV reports. It’s a taboo that has yet to be
breached. To be in a feeding center is to hear and smell the excretion of fluids by people who are
beyond controlling their bodily functions. To be in a feeding center is surreptitiously* to wipe
your hands on the back of your trousers after you’ve held the clammy palm of a mother who has
just cleaned vomit from her child’s mouth.
There’s pity, too, because even in this state of utter despair they aspire to a dignity that is
almost impossible to achieve. An old woman will cover her shriveled body with a soiled cloth as
your gaze turns towards her. Or the old and dying man who keeps his hoe next to the mat with
which, one day soon, they will shroud his corpse, as if he means to go out and till the soil once
all this is over.
I saw that face for only a few seconds, a fleeting meeting of eyes before the face turned away,
as its owner retreated into the darkness of another hut. In those brief moments there had been a
smile, not from me, but from the face. It was not a smile of greeting; it was not a smile of joy —
how could it be? — but it was a smile nonetheless. It touched me in a way I could not explain. It
moved me in a way that went beyond pity or revulsion.
What was it about that smile? I had to find out. I urged my translator to ask the man why he
had smiled. He came back with an answer. ‘It’s just that he was embarrassed to be found in this
condition,’ the translator explained. And then it clicked. That’s what the smile had been about. It
was the feeble smile that goes with apology, the kind of smile you might give if you felt you had
done something wrong.
Normally inured to stories of suffering, accustomed to the evidence of deprivation, I was
unsettled by this one smile in a way I had never been before. There is an unwritten code between
the journalist and his subjects in these situations.
The journalist observes, the subject is observed. The journalist is active, the subject is passive.
But this smile had turned the tables on that tacit agreement. Without uttering a single word, the
man had posed a question that cut to the heart of the relationship between me and him, between
us and them, between the rich world and the poor world. 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?
I resolved there and then that I would write the story of Gufgaduud with all the power and
purpose I could muster. It seemed at the time, and still does, the only adequate answer a reporter
can give to the man’s question.
I have one regret about that brief encounter in Gufgaduud. Having searched through my notes
and studied the dispatch that the BBC broadcast, I see that I never found out what the man’s
name was. Yet meeting him was a seminal moment in the gradual collection of experiences we
call context. Facts and figures are the easy part of journalism. Knowing where they sit in the
great scheme of things is much harder. So, my nameless friend, if you are still alive, I owe you
one.

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