Anthology Part 1 - A Passage to Africa
George Alagiah recalls a reporting trip in which one man’s smile changes how he sees his own work. Read the complete extract, then explore how its sensory detail, shifting pronouns and narrowing structure turn observation into personal responsibility.
The reporter inside the story
From A Passage to Africa
By George Alagiah
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.
[1] I saw a thousand hungry, lean, scared and betrayed faces as I criss-crossed Somalia
[2] between the end of 1991 and December 1992, but there is one I will never forget.
[3] I was in a little hamlet just outside Gufgaduud, a village in the back of beyond, a place
[4] the aid agencies had yet to reach. In my notebook I had jotted down instructions on how
[5] to get there. ‘Take the Badale Road for a few kilometres till the end of the tarmac, turn
[6] right on to a dirt track, stay on it for about forty-five minutes — Gufgaduud. Go another
[7] fifteen minutes approx. — like a ghost village.’ …
[8] In the ghoulish manner of journalists on the hunt for the most striking pictures, my
[9] cameraman … and I tramped from one hut to another. What might have appalled us
[10] when we'd started our trip just a few days before no longer impressed us much. The
[11] search for the shocking is like the craving for a drug: you require heavier and more
[12] frequent doses the longer you're at it. Pictures that stun the editors one day are written
[13] off as the same old stuff the next. This sounds callous, but it is just a fact of life. It's how
[14] we collect and compile the images that so move people in the comfort of their sitting
[15] rooms back home.
[16] There was Amina Abdirahman, who had gone out that morning in search of wild, edible
[17] roots, leaving her two young girls lying on the dirt floor of their hut. They had been sick
[18] for days, and were reaching the final, enervating stages of terminal hunger. Habiba was
[19] ten years old and her sister, Ayaan, was nine. By the time Amina returned, she had only
[20] one daughter. Habiba had died. No rage, no whimpering, just a passing away — that
[21] simple, frictionless, motionless deliverance from a state of half-life to death itself. It was,
[22] as I said at the time in my dispatch, a vision of ‘famine away from the headlines, a
[23] famine of quiet suffering and lonely death’.
[24] There was the old woman who lay in her hut, abandoned by relations who were too weak
[25] to carry her on their journey to find food. It was the smell that drew me to her doorway:
[26] the smell of decaying flesh. Where her shinbone should have been there was a festering
[27] wound the size of my hand. She’d been shot in the leg as the retreating army of the
[28] deposed dictator … took revenge on whoever it found in its way. The shattered leg had
[29] fused into the gentle V-shape of a boomerang. It was rotting; she was rotting. You could
[30] see it in her sick, yellow eyes and smell it in the putrid air she recycled with every
[31] struggling breath she took.
[32] And then there was the face I will never forget.
[33] My reaction to everyone else I met that day was a mixture of pity and revulsion1. Yes,
[34] revulsion. The degeneration of the human body, sucked of its natural vitality by the twin
[35] evils of hunger and disease, is a disgusting thing. We never say so in our TV reports. It’s
[36] a taboo that has yet to be breached. To be in a feeding centre is to hear and smell the
[37] excretion of fluids by people who are beyond controlling their bodily functions. To be in a
[38] feeding centre is surreptitiously2 to wipe your hands on the back of your trousers after
[39] you’ve held the clammy palm of a mother who has just cleaned vomit from her child’s
[40] mouth.
[41] There’s pity, too, because even in this state of utter despair they aspire to a dignity that
[42] is almost impossible to achieve. An old woman will cover her shrivelled body with a
[43] soiled cloth as your gaze turns towards her. Or the old and dying man who keeps his hoe
[44] next to the mat with which, one day soon, they will shroud his corpse, as if he means to
[45] go out and till the soil once all this is over.
[46] I saw that face for only a few seconds, a fleeting meeting of eyes before the face turned
[47] away, as its owner retreated into the darkness of another hut. In those brief moments
[48] there had been a smile, not from me, but from the face. It was not a smile of greeting, it
[49] was not a smile of joy — how could it be? — but it was a smile nonetheless. It touched
[50] me in a way I could not explain. It moved me in a way that went beyond pity or
[51] revulsion.
[52] What was it about that smile? I had to find out. I urged my translator to ask the man
[53] why he had smiled. He came back with an answer. ‘It's just that he was embarrassed to
[54] be found in this condition,’ the translator explained. And then it clicked. That's what the
[55] smile had been about. It was the feeble smile that goes with apology, the kind of smile
[56] you might give if you felt you had done something wrong.
[57] Normally inured3 to stories of suffering, accustomed to the evidence of deprivation, I
[58] was unsettled by this one smile in a way I had never been before. There is an unwritten
[59] code between the journalist and his subjects in these situations. The journalist observes,
[60] the subject is observed. The journalist is active, the subject is passive. But this smile had
[61] turned the tables on that tacit agreement. Without uttering a single word, the man had
[62] posed a question that cut to the heart of the relationship between me and him, between
[63] us and them, between the rich world and the poor world. If he was embarrassed to be
[64] found weakened by hunger and ground down by conflict, how should I feel to be
[65] standing there so strong and confident?
[66] I resolved there and then that I would write the story of Gufgaduud with all the power
[67] and purpose I could muster. It seemed at the time, and still does, the only adequate
[68] answer a reporter can give to the man's question.
[69] I have one regret about that brief encounter in Gufgaduud. Having searched through my
[70] notes and studied the dispatch that the BBC broadcast, I see that I never found out what
[71] the man's name was. Yet meeting him was a seminal moment in the gradual collection of
[72] experiences we call context. Facts and figures are the easy part of journalism. Knowing
[73] where they sit in the great scheme of things is much harder. So, my nameless friend, if
[74] you are still alive, I owe you one.
Notes
- 1 revulsion: disgust
- 2 surreptitiously: secretly
- 3 inured: hardened
Reading focus
Its subject is harrowing, but its central English problem is more precise than “famine in Somalia”: how can a reporter represent another person's suffering without reducing that person to an image? Alagiah makes this problem visible by turning the reporter's gaze back on himself.
Fact, form and inference
The minimum context changes how the passage is read; anything more risks becoming a detached history lesson.
| Secure fact | What it helps you notice | Interpretation that still needs textual support |
|---|---|---|
| Alagiah was a television reporter recalling work in Somalia from late 1991 to 1992. | References to a cameraman, editors, notes and a broadcast belong to an actual reporting process. | The passage criticises the pressure to convert suffering into arresting material. |
| Somalia faced drought alongside civil war, displacement and the collapse of services. | The crisis is not a timeless condition of “Africa” or a simple natural disaster. | Reporting isolated bodies without causes may produce sympathy but not understanding. |
| The extract comes from a later book that combines personal memory with reporting. | The older writer can revisit his earlier reactions, notes and choices. | The first-person voice is confessional: the witness also puts his own conduct on trial. |
This hybrid is most usefully described as literary reportage/memoir: documentary particulars and the machinery of television news are shaped through retrospective personal reflection.
The first two columns establish a source situation. The third contains arguable inferences. Context can make an inference more accurate, but it earns no separate credit: the passage must carry the argument.
Perspective is more than topic
A topic names the territory. A perspective makes a contestable claim about it.
| Topic label | Perspective claim |
|---|---|
| Famine | Repeated exposure to suffering can dull the response of reporters and distant audiences. |
| Journalism | The demand for ever more arresting images can place professional success in conflict with humane attention. |
| A smile | One quiet act by an observed person can unsettle the confidence of the observer. |
| Rich and poor | The passage questions a hierarchy in which the powerful look and speak while vulnerable people are only looked at and spoken about. |
These claims can coexist. Alagiah may be exposing professional callousness, acknowledging the value of reporting, and admitting that even purposeful reporting cannot erase the original inequality. A precise response should therefore use verbs such as questions, exposes, complicates or confronts rather than flattening the passage into “journalists are bad”.
From scale to one face
Structure is the arrangement of the moral encounter, not a list of sentence types. Read the passage in movements, asking what each position lets the reader understand that was not available before.
| Movement | Main focus | What changes because of its position |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Scale and exception | Many frightened faces, but one that will remain in memory. | The opening gives away the destination while withholding the reason: one encounter will outweigh the mass. |
| 2. Route and professional routine | Notebook directions, a search for pictures, reporters becoming harder to shock, editors demanding novelty. | Suffering is first filtered through the machinery and appetite of news. Alagiah implicates himself before asking for the reader's trust. |
| 3. Accumulating human detail | A mother and daughters, an abandoned woman, sensory and bodily detail, then reflection on pity, disgust and dignity. | The crisis becomes individual, yet the catalogue also tests whether close looking humanises people or turns them into ever more shocking scenes. |
| 4. The smile | One face, a brief meeting of eyes, an action Alagiah cannot immediately classify, and an explanation through the translator. | Agency changes sides. The man does something that the reporter must interpret rather than simply record. |
| 5. Reversal and question | The professional code of active observer and passive subject is stated, then overturned. | A local gesture expands into a question about the reporter, the subject, distant audiences and global inequality. |
| 6. Resolution and debt | A promise to report purposefully, regret over the missing name, reflection on facts and context, direct address. | The ending offers writing as a response but preserves failure: the encounter matters, yet the person who caused it remains unnamed. |
Where is the decisive hinge?
The detailed accounts of suffering are possible turning points because they increase intensity. They do not, however, change the relationship: Alagiah still looks, selects and reports. The more decisive hinge comes when the man's smile makes the reporter stop, ask and then question his own position. This is stronger structural evidence for a question about power because it changes who appears morally active.
Notice the double movement around that hinge:
- narrowing: a huge quantity of faces becomes several individual cases and finally one gesture;
- widening: that gesture becomes a question about
me/him,us/them, and unequal worlds; - returning: the ending goes back to notes and broadcast evidence, but now their failure to preserve a name matters more than their factual accuracy.
This makes the ending more than a recap. It reinterprets the opening: the unforgettable face is not simply the most shocking image but the encounter that exposed the limits of looking.
Evidence that carries an argument
The official examination provides the anthology text. Your job is therefore to navigate, discriminate and embed economically. The eight anchors below are deliberately short: each is useful for more than one focus, but none explains itself.
| Locate in Issue 8 | Short anchor | Local work | Whole-text possibility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opening, lines 1-2 | “a thousand” | Compresses scale into a quantity. | Sets up the narrowing towards one remembered person. |
| Professional routine, lines 11-13 | “same old stuff” | A casual, dismissive register treats new suffering as familiar material. | Exposes how repetition and editorial demand can normalise horror. |
| Self-confession, lines 33-35 | “pity and revulsion” | Places compassion beside an uncomfortable bodily response. | Prevents Alagiah from presenting himself as a simple humane rescuer. |
| Reporting taboo, lines 35-36 | “we never say so” | The collective pronoun turns concealment into a professional habit. | Creates a gap between the polished report and the witness's private reaction. |
| Smile, lines 48-50 | “a smile nonetheless” | The concession keeps the gesture important after easy explanations are rejected. | Makes the observed man the source of an interpretive problem. |
| Reversal, lines 59-62 | “turned the tables” | A reversal metaphor makes a changed power relation explicit. | Marks the passage's structural and ethical hinge. |
| Widening question, lines 62-64 | “us and them” | Binary pronouns expose social distance. | Connects one meeting to a hierarchy between represented and viewing worlds. |
| Final address, lines 73-74 | “I owe you one” | A colloquial admission of debt sounds personal but incomplete. | Closes with humility while the man's missing name preserves the failure. |
A question changes which evidence is best
Suppose the focus is professional detachment. Both “a thousand” and “same old stuff” are relevant, but they do different jobs.
- “a thousand” is strongest for a structural argument about scale being corrected by later narrowing.
- “same old stuff” is stronger for the local attitude: its everyday dismissiveness jars with the gravity of what has been reduced to routine.
For that focus, the second choice is more discriminating. A compact analysis might read:
Alagiah's dismissive phrase “same old stuff” exposes how repeated horror has been converted into newsroom routine. Its casual register clashes with the suffering being filmed, so the confession implicates reporters rather than allowing Alagiah to pose as an uncomplicated rescuer. Because this numbness appears before the smile, the later reversal tests the professional identity he has just admitted.
The explanation moves from contextual meaning, to wording, to perspective, to the whole-text turn. It does not need a device inventory or a claim about every reader's feelings.
Language under ethical pressure
Alagiah's language does not merely intensify suffering. It examines the ethics of converting suffering into a report. Three patterns work together across the passage.
Pronouns move responsibility
| Movement of voice | Contextual work | Question it leaves open |
|---|---|---|
The retrospective I | Gives first-hand authority but also makes the reporter's reactions available for judgement. | Is confession an act of accountability, or does it recentre the reporter? |
The professional we | Implicates the cameraman, reporters and reporting conventions; responsibility is shared. | Does the collective voice expose a system, or let the individual briefly shelter inside it? |
The generalising you | Places an audience inside bodily encounters that television reports usually sanitise. | Does this create honest proximity, or assume everyone would respond as the reporter did? |
me/him and us/them | Turns social hierarchy into a grammatical relation after the smile. | Can naming the division begin to undo it, or only expose it? |
| Direct address at the end | Attempts to speak to the man rather than only about him. | Does calling him a friend create equality when his name and voice are still absent? |
The crucial development is from a collective account of what reporters do to a singular account of what this encounter demands from Alagiah. The smile does not simply make him emotional; it makes professional distance unavailable as a hiding place.
Sensory accumulation can cut two ways
The middle of the passage accumulates names, ages, objects, colours, textures, smell, sound and bodily deterioration. This specificity can resist the abstraction of casualty figures: individual lives and physical conditions cannot be tidied into a statistic. Yet the passage has already admitted that reporters search for arresting pictures. Graphic detail can therefore be read as both necessary witness and possible spectacle.
That tension is more precise than “imagery makes the reader sad”. Ask instead:
- What has the report made impossible to ignore?
- Whose dignity or agency remains visible within the description?
- Does the detail provide context, or only an intense image?
- How does its position prepare the later shame and reversal?
The passage's mentions of cameras, editors, dispatches, taboos and notes make the act of reporting part of its form. Alagiah is not only representing an event; he is revealing the choices and omissions through which an event becomes news.
Callousness is placed before shame
Early bluntness about the hunt for pictures and editorial appetite is set against the later admission of being unsettled and morally questioned. The contrast is structural as well as tonal. If Alagiah began with guilt, the passage could present him as already enlightened. By admitting professional numbness first, he makes the smile a genuine correction rather than a confirmation of what he already believed.
An alternative remains possible: the account's centre is still the reporter's awakening. A perceptive reading can value the self-critique while asking whether the man's life is given enough space beyond what he teaches Alagiah.
Comparison through perspective
AO3 comparison begins with a shared axis, not a shared noun or device. “Both texts are about difficult experiences” offers a topic. “Both writers discover that their first way of seeing another life is inadequate” offers a relationship that can be tested through evidence and method.
Four flexible Part 1 routes
| Comparison text | Shared axis with Alagiah | Similarity and difference in conveyance |
|---|---|---|
| From The Danger of a Single Story | Representation, pity and equality. | Both writers expose how a narrow story can reduce people. Adichie accumulates several autobiographical examples into an explicit public argument; Alagiah concentrates on one encounter that turns confession into a moral reversal. |
| From The Explorer's Daughter | Observation and ethical discomfort. | Both first-person writers admit divided responses to what they watch. Herbert places emotional suspense beside sustained explanation of the hunters' material needs; Alagiah makes the observed person appear to question the observer's power. |
| From H is for Hawk | An intense encounter disrupting emotional control. | Both passages narrow onto a meeting and render perception closely. Macdonald's rapid, shifting imagery shows astonishment, projection and panic; Alagiah's quieter smile interrupts professional routine and opens a question about responsibility. |
| From Chinese Cinderella | Vulnerability, recognition and a decisive human response. | Both narrators are changed by another person's response. Mah's father's approval opens a future but remains conditional and controlling; the Somali man's gesture gives him moral authority despite his lack of material power. |
These are routes, not prepared pairings. A fresh unseen might concern journalism, outsider perspective, compassion, guilt, dignity or the ethics of looking. The wording of the focus decides which relation matters.
Choosing a relation that can sustain analysis
Imagine a comparison focus on how writers present the danger of seeing people too simply.
- “Both texts concern Africa” is too broad and says nothing about either perspective.
- “Both writers use first person” matches a method but leaves its meaning empty.
- “Both writers expose how pity can reduce people to a single condition, but they correct that gaze differently” establishes a shared idea and a useful difference.
That third proposition can control evidence from both texts:
Both Alagiah and Adichie question ways of looking that deny people their full complexity. Alagiah makes the division visible through “us and them”, then structures the smile as a reversal in which the supposedly passive subject acquires moral authority. Adichie instead moves through several personal anecdotes where an initial assumption is corrected by new knowledge. Alagiah therefore dramatises one abrupt reckoning inside a report, whereas Adichie accumulates examples to argue that repeated stories create and can also repair unequal perceptions.
The paragraph is point-by-point because that makes the relation easy to follow. Another organisation can succeed if it sustains explicit comparisons, balanced support and analysis of how each perspective is conveyed.
From close reading to exam decisions
The same understanding feeds two different official families. Read the command before choosing material.
| Family | What the command requires | Best use of this passage | Boundary |
|---|---|---|---|
AO2 /12 | Analyse how language and structure achieve the named effect; support with close reference and brief quotations. | Trace a perspective across the whole passage, combining precise wording with focus shifts, contrast, the smile hinge and the ending. | Device spotting, retelling and isolated opening analysis do not fulfil the demand. Equal numbers of language and structure points are not a rule. |
AO3 /22 | Compare writers' ideas and perspectives about the named focus and how they are conveyed; use detailed support from both texts. | Build several relations around representation, observation, dignity, guilt, power or responsibility, then analyse the different choices that construct them. | Topic links and technique matching are not enough. No paragraph order is compulsory. |
Shaping an AO2 response
- Turn the focus into a perspective question: for example, what does Alagiah come to understand about professional detachment?
- Scan the whole arc before selecting: opening position, professional routine, accumulating detail, smile, reversal and ending.
- Choose a small set of discriminating references. Let each do a different job rather than repeating the same claim.
- Explain wording in its sentence and paragraph context, then connect it to the movement of the passage.
- Revisit the ending. Ask what has been resolved and what remains ethically unsettled.
A response can integrate language and structure naturally: dismissive register early in the passage matters more because the smile later overturns the professional stance it reveals. That is more precise than alternating a “language point” and a “structure point” by rule.
Shaping an AO3 response
Before writing, make a compact relation map:
| Focus-led axis | Alagiah's position and method | Other writer's position and method | Exact relation |
|---|---|---|---|
| What does observation do to human equality? | The reporter admits distance; one observed person reverses it through a gesture and the ending retains debt. | Locate a fresh unseen moment where looking grants, withholds or revises agency. | Similar concern, but perhaps a sudden reversal versus a gradual realisation, or self-critique versus confidence. |
| How is emotional control disrupted? | Professional numbness gives way to personal shame. | Locate the other writer's initial control, trigger and changed voice or focus. | Compare both the change and the different way it is arranged. |
Aim for a range of developed relations with balanced support. If only one text receives rewardable consideration, the official maximum is 8; this is the official one-text limit. A passing title mention does not count as substantive second-text work, but an unusual paragraph structure does not create a cap by itself.
When the pairing is unseen, return to durable questions:
- Who looks, speaks, acts and interprets?
- What changes the writer's first perspective?
- Which local choices make that change visible?
- Does the ending resolve, complicate or reopen the central idea?
- What is genuinely similar, genuinely different, or similar for different reasons?