Passage to Africa Revision

Setting the scene. Read the opening paragraphs and then answer the quiz questions opposite

• 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. I 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
• Passage to Africa - paragraphs 1 & 2
• Notes on opening paragraphs of Passage to Africa

Read the extract below and then do the quiz opposite

• 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'er 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.
• Identifying attitudes and values in A Passage to Africa.

Painting pictures with words. Read the extract below and look at the picture then complete the quizzes on the next slide.

• Caption: An image of the effects of the famine in Somalia in 1992, the time at which George Alagiah was reporting from there. This image was taken by Chris Steele-Perkins and shows two emaciated women with their dead children who lie wrapped in cloth on the bare ground.
• 
• 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

Understanding Paragraphs 4 & 5

• Amina Abdirahman and her children
• Understanding paragraphs 4 & 5
• The old woman in her hut

'And then there was the face I will never forget'

• 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 smilenonetheless.
• 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.
• Understanding the smile

A power shift. Read the paragraph below and then complete the quizzes on the following slide

• 
• Caption: George Alagiah reporting from Africa
• 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?

Exploring how the shift is presented.

• 
• Looking at language

The journalist re-born. Read the final tow paragraphs and then take the quiz to see if you have understood what the passage has been about.

• 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.
• Examining the ending of A Passage to Africa

You have now completed the revision for A Passage to Africa