A Passage to Africa notes

A Passage to Africa

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 kilometres 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 centre is to hear 

and smell the excretion of fluids by people who are beyond controlling their bodily 

functions. To be in a feeding centre 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 shrivelled 

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. 

George Alagiah 

This text is very ambivalent as George Alagiah expresses his conflicting feelings; he feels guilty about living off the suffering of the people in Africa but on the other hand he knows it's his job to get information and make money

First Paragraph:

"I saw a thousand hungry, lean, scared and betrayed"
- list of adjectives adds emphasis and weight

"but there is one I will never forget."
- suspense is created in the last sentence of the paragraph by indicating that he is going to explain something later, this creates a hook to keep the reader reading
- use of the word "never" is very strong and shows how greatly this thing has affected him

Second Paragraph:

"'Take the Badale Road...'"
-long, detailed description of how to get there emphasises the remoteness of the village and how far from civilisation it is.

Third Paragraph:

"In the ghoulish manner of journalists on the hunt for the most striking pictures"
- use of words "ghoulish" and "hunt" emphasise how menacing and predatory journalists are as they feed of the suffering of others which indicates that perhaps he is uncomfortable with his role as a journalist

"like a craving for a drug"
- uses a simile and compares his need for suffering to the craving of a drug which illustrates that it's a dangerous addiction and he always needs more.
- also shows that he knows it's bad but does it anyway - selfish - "it's a fact of life"

Fourth Paragraph:

"Habiba was ten years old."
- use of a name and age to make it more personal which shows that he does feel emotionally connected

"No rage, no whimpering, just a passing away."
- repetition of "no" emphasises the simplicity of her death
- triplet adds impact

"the smell of decaying flesh"
- use of senses such as smell creates a more vivid image of the scene
- use of word "decaying" is powerful and vivid

"festering wound the size of my hand"
- use of the world "festering" is  sensual and graphic
- comparison to a grown man's hand gives reader a clear image of the size of the wound

"And then there was the face I will never forget"
- reader finally find out about the face he wrote about in the introduction - this is the climax of the story
- very short and dramatic sentence for impact

Fifth Paragraph:

"Yes, revulsion"
- repetition of the word "revulsion" to make it clear that that is what he means - a very honest opinion
- also emphasises how disgusting these events were

Last Paragraphs:

repetition of "smile"
- shows his disbelief he feels he has to keep repeating it over and over to reassure himself that it was real