A Passage to Africa (Edexcel IGCSE English Language A)

• The article highlights the human cost of war:

  • Aligiah saw “a thousand hungry, lean, scared and betrayed faces”

  • There are so many they form a collective for Aligiah, without any one of them particularly standing out

• He gives a specific example per paragraph of people he encounters, but “reports” on them in the style of a detached journalist:

  • “By the time Amina returned, she had only one daughter.”

• Aligiah presents a human perspective on the desperation the people are facing, illustrating how society ignores their suffering:

  • He uses vivid and sometimes gruesome language to convey this

• The man’s embarrassed and apologetic smile at his situation makes Aligiah himself feel embarrassed by his opposite circumstances:

  • “...how should I feel to be standing there so strong and confident?”

• Aligiah suggests that being exposed to so many horrific images can desensitise the observer to what he/she is witnessing:

  • “What might have appalled us when we’d started our trip … no longer impressed us much.”

• He writes as a hardened journalist who has become accustomed to witnessing famine, poverty and the extremes of human suffering:

  • “Normally inured to stories of suffering…”

• Aligiah aims to shock the reader, as well as evoking pathos:

  • He does this through the use of emotive language, such as “terminal” hunger

• It is the man’s smile that makes him stop and actually consider the man’s circumstances, and the part he has to play in ensuring that all of the anonymous people who suffer in war have their story heard:

  • “I would write the story of Gufgadudd with all the power and purpose I could muster.”

• It is ironic that the one regret Aligiah has is that he never learnt the man’s name, even though he was the individual that caused the “seminal moment” in the writer’s experiences

• The use of “I” gives reliability to the account and stresses its personal quality from the start

• The first two paragraphs are written in a note style, as though extracted from field notes:

  • This adds to the sense of legitimacy of the account

• Aligiah sometimes adopts a journalistic tone to suggest the passive role of journalists in reporting from conflict zones

• For example, “She’d been shot in the leg…”

• Aligiah uses an informal tone, shown by the abundant use of hyphens and colloquialisms, to present an emotional and harrowing topic in an accessible way

• The isolated sentence, “And then there was the face I will never forget” emphasises the life-changing importance of the moment

• The writer uses simple sentences to state facts, such as “No rage. No whimpering.”:

  • This adds to the sense of a detached report, which then contrasts with his highly personal response to the man who smiles

• Aligiah uses rhetorical questions in the second half of the article to indicate that he is reflecting on his position and thinking to date

• He is able to describe in great detail what he witnesses in the first half of the piece, but uses the questions in the second half to suggest that his emotions are now harder to explain

• The ultimate question in the article is how should people react to other people’s suffering

• He therefore resolves to answer that question in his own way — by writing it down and reporting it

• Aligiah addresses the nameless man directly in the final paragraph

• This reminds the reader that this man was a real person who managed to bridge the divide between reporter and reported

• It focuses the reader’s attention on a single, important individual, contrasting with the “thousand hungry, lean, scared and betrayed faces” Aligiah started with

• By addressing him directly, Aligiah acknowledges his own part in dehumanising the people he was reporting about, as he regrets never learning the man’s name

• The language used by Aligiah brings to life the suffering and decay experienced by the Somalian people

• For example, “the smell of decaying flesh”, “festering wound” and “It was rotting; she was rotting.”

• This contrasts with the imagery of the smile, which is normally seen as positive

• The village is described as “ghost-like” and journalists are described as “ghoulish”:

  • These choices evoke a sense of death in the village and the journalists “feeding off” the dead

• The simile “like the craving for a drug” implies the thirst of the media for ever-more shocking stories and footage, as the public and the reporters become increasingly immune to human suffering

• Rule of three, or triads, are employed to emphasise the slow, gradual “degeneration of the human body”

• For example, “that simple, frictionless, motionless deliverance”

• Aligiah employs strong, emotive language not only to evoke pathos in the reader, but also to highlight the realities of reporting from a conflict zone

• He describes his reactions being a “mixture of pity and revulsion” at the “disgusting” shutting down of the human body

• Aligiah describes this admission as a “taboo that has yet to be breached”, suggesting that even war reporters do not share all the horrible realities of the situations they witness and experience

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