A Passage To Africa

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The simple one sentence sixth stanza ‘And then there was the face I will never forget’ implies the great significance of the meeting it alludes to , how important it must have been for the author. He points out how the reporters wipe their hands after holding the clammy hands of a mother who had just wiped vomit from her child’s mouth.

The first example of Amina Abdirahman and her family is particularly moving for the reader, describing how she left her daughters to search for food, yet one them dies of hunger in her absence. Paragraph 5 describes an 'old woman' who has a wound which hasn't been treated and who is rotting in her house, unable to find food for herself. The height of pity is reached in the eighth paragraph when Alagiah describes how the people, defeated by death, crushed by its oppression and helpless in its absolution still refuse to give up whatever shard of dignity they have left: the woman covers herself up, the man does not let go of his gardening hoe. These people are graceful even in their defeat. Among these is the face Alagiah catches sight of, the face that smiles. It is a face, not a man, not a name, simply a face; as were those faces that he saw and forgot that were mentioned before. But the smile is what makes it special, something unearthly in its beauty. He cannot pin down what the smile means, he describes it in negative sentences, it is not one of greeting or joy. He wonders at it as it has moved him to a feeling much ‘beyond pity and revulsion.’ 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

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Pathos and pity is evoked in the reader by the next paragraph, its impact strengthened by the use of names as the plight of two daughters and their mother is described. The anaphora in ‘no rage, no whimpering’, the dash followed by adjectives such as ‘motionless, simple and frictionless’; all are used to diminish death, as if it is a matter of no importance or significance, an everyday occurring which is inevitable. Seeing death up close on a daily basis, Alagiah feels that it is rather life which is the difficult part, as in seen by his description of the girl’s existence as a ‘half-life’ and her death as ‘deliverance’ as if life is a punishment, something to be saved from. His cynicism is again shown in how he refers to the famine which permeates the place as ‘a famine away from the headlines,’ as if all of the desolate scenes around him are not gruesome enough anymore to act as material for news. The ghastly horror of slow death does not hold the strength to leave an impact on anyone.

How does the writer, Alagiah, use language to inform the reader about the harsh realities of being a journalist? The very beginning of the excerpt speaks of the condition of the people of Somalia, calling them “a thousand hungry, lean, scared and betrayed faces” emphasising how they were betrayed by the people who were supposed to protect them or pretend that they will protect them. The author even throws shade at his own venture inside the land in search of more terrible sights, calling it a ghoulish hunt, portraying the inhumane greed of the media world that prides itself on being the first to uncover stories and venture in search of suffering and monetises them. Compare and Contrast the Ways in Which Two Poets Create Sympathy for Their Characters – ‘on a Portrait of a Deaf Man’ and ‘the River God’. hunt’ and ‘tramped’- predatory language shows the profession as a predatory nature it is animal like and barbaric The passage then breaks into two with a short sentence to show the change in focus to 'the face I will never forget'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. It was rotting; she was rotting' changes 'it' from 'she' to show how broken and dehumanized she is by the famine, she has no basic no human rights. This also shows how we dehumanize those across the world who are suffering, and, like the writer, need reminding that they too are human. George Alagiah writes about his experiences as a television reporter during the war in Somalia, Africa in the 1990s. He won a special award for his report on the incidents described in this passage. One of Britain’s most respected television journalists, with a reputation built up over many years of covering world events’ Guardian