A Passage To Africa

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hungry, lean scared and betrayed faces’- list of adjectives creates an image of suffering, links to the end when trying to make the reader feel guilt.

He is writing reflectively and his attitude towards the events seems to have changed since he originally reported on the event. M. Forster set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. George Alagiah’s work, A Passage to Africa covers the horrors that surrounded the Somalian civil war that happened in the 1990s.This builds tension, because out of all Alagiah has seen which he says eventually becomes numbing, he uses the absolute ‘ never forget ’ to indicate how much this affected him.

He describes the subtlety of the legacy 'black people in places like malawi or kenya still show a vestigial diffidence in the company of whites, the result of the drip-draining of confidence over more than a century of playing second fiddle.He uses the semantic field of predation [being a predator] in: ‘ journalists on the hunt ’ to suggest the sufferers are prey, or victims – of journalists like himself, which is particularly unsettling. Vivid and sensory language in the paragraph, 'smell of decaying flesh', 'festering wound', 'yellow eyes' and 'the putrid air she recycled'.

The shock of recognition is always there, but it is the personal element that gives A PASSAGE TO AFRICA its originality. He acknowledges that situations often appear desperate, and the problems intransigent, but he is not without hope that solutions can, and will, be found. This is a balanced and ultimately optimistic trip through Africa's recent history by a man who grew up there as a child and has reported on it's triumphs and disasters as an adult - and the moral issues that reporting can throw out.For example, he instructs someone how to get there using time on various 'dirt tracks' (showing the poverty of village) and how there are no real landmarks or signs. In this extract, Alagiah creates a sense of pity through emotive language in lists and rules of three to create a sense of the profusion of suffering: ‘ hungry ’, ‘ scared ’, ‘ betrayed ’.