 Hello and welcome to a summary of all you need to know about George Allagay's passage, a passage to Africa. Now this is based on his report on a visit to Somalia during the war which broke out in the early 1990s. So in this video I'll explain in-depth the version of this extract as it appears in the Pearson-Edexcel International GCSE anthology, but also as I go through the text with you I'll explain the meaning related to what he writes, important language devices that you need to be aware of when analyzing this text, but also other important relevant contextual factors that you will find helpful as you study this text. So let's get started. Now as I mentioned before, this extract is based on Allagay's writing about his experiences as a television reporter during the war in Somalia, Africa in the 1990s and he won a special award for this particular report. So what I'll do is I'll read through specific paragraphs and every so often stop and highlight and point out important language and literary techniques that you need to be aware of and the meaning related to that. So let's begin with the first two paragraphs. I saw a thousand hungry lean, scared and betrayed faces as a crisscross 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 a village in the back of beyond, a place that aid agencies hate yet to reach. In my notebook, I had jotted down instructions on how to get there. Take the Badal road for a few kilometers till the end of the tarmac, turn right onto a dirt track, stay on it for about 45 minutes, goof good dude. Go another 15 minutes of prox, like a ghost village. In the gulush 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 started our trip just a few days before, no longer impressed as much. The search for the shocking is like the craving for a drug. You require heavier, more frequent doses the longer you're at it. Pictures that stunned the editors one day are written off with the same old stuff the next. This sounds callous, but it's just a fact of life. It's how we collect and compile the images that so move people in the comfort of the city rooms back home. Now this opening is really powerful and the fact that he starts with the first person pronoun I enables us as readers to really see the world and especially Somalia through his eyes. He then writes in hyperbole and this really captivates us. We're really intrigued what is happening in this part of Somalia. So when he lists the thousand hungry lean, scared and betrayed faces, this hyperbole, but also this listing really makes us intrigued as to what the story is behind these people. Why are they suffering so much? He then repeats this first person pronoun again and what this is doing is essentially holding our hand through this passage. We're seeing everything through his eyes. He then mentions that Gufgadud is the back of beyond and what this alliteration does is it shows just how remote the area that he's going to in Somalia really is. So some people might not even know Somalia, let alone a really, really remote, perhaps to some degree backwater part. So what this shows is that he's really, really venturing far and beyond. He then lists the directions to where he's going and he uses here a syndetine, a syndetic listing. This is when you list different things without using a conjunction such as and but because. Now what this is syndetine does and why it's effective here is it's showing just how far reaching this place is. So in other words, he has to really, really go far into a really, really remote location and it starts building up tension as we're reading it. We're wondering what is happening in this particular part of Somalia. Now the simile, which he describes what drives him as a journalist like the craving of a drug is really powerful because this shows his primary motivation, but also it helps us understand the motivations and the psychology behind being a journalist, especially a wartime reporter. And what this is showing actually is it's really surprising to learn that his interest is somewhat this morbid interest in learning more about people who are suffering and finding more and more images and people who are really finding life quite challenging. And this kind of makes us a little bit disgusted, the fact that journalists find it almost addictive the more they find the more morbid stories. Also our sense of disgust is compounded by this colloquialism and bear in mind that colloquialism means colloquial language, which is informal language. So this coupled with sibilance with same and stuff shows that actually in the journalist world, once people are accustomed and in some ways used to seeing so much suffering, they almost feel like they need to find even worse versions of this suffering. So it shows that really he's in the business of storytelling as opposed to reporting and genuinely raising concerns about people who are suffering in Somalia. So this is really, really surprising for us. And of course, he also acknowledges this, he can read our minds because he says this sounds callous, but it's a fact of life. And what this compound sentence does is it shows that he too understands that this feeling is in some ways unforgivable. It's not really fair that journalists go and almost indulge themselves in finding really horrific stories just for the sake of a good story rather than to help the people who are suffering. Of course, he also mentions them as a journalist. He essentially talks about the guilt that the entire media community shares in looking for these horrendous stories. So it's just not him as George Allagaya alone. This is perhaps a behavior that's encouraged in the media community. And this is shown through the this collective pronoun we. Let's move on. There was Amina Abderaman who had gone out that morning in search of wild edible roots, leaving her two young girl lying on the dirt floor at the hut. They had been sick for days and were reaching the final, innovating stages of terminal hunger. Habiba was 10 years old and her sister Ayan 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 that time in my bits dispatch, a vision of famine away from the headlines, a famine of quiet suffering and lonely death. There was an old woman who lay in her hut, abandoned by relations who were too weak to carry on her journey to find food. It was a smell that drew me to her doorway, the smell of decaying flesh. Where shin bones should have been, there was a festering wound the size of my hand. She had been shot in the leg as a retreating army of the deposed dictator took revenge on whoever it found 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. Now he goes into detail on one specific woman that he sees and this proper noun is quite humanizing so giving her her name and her surname really brings to life these individuals in Somalia. They're no longer this mass of suffering Africans. They are really specific to one individual woman. He then mentions how she was in search of wild edible roots. Now what these pre-modifiers do is they emphasize the modest food and also the lack of proper nutrition that is in this part of Somalia. And of course what this does is it's really heart wrenching to read this and we as readers feel a deep level of sympathy for Amina. Also on top of that we then learn to compound her problems. Her children are suffering from terminal hunger and this description is really really heart wrenching for us. Once she comes back the simple sentence Habiba died is really sudden and quite shocking. It just seems like her daughters were alive one day and one of her daughter just dies the next day and this simple sentence just shows how sudden and shocking death really is and how much it's an everyday reality for a lot of people in this part of Somalia. He then mentions the simple frictionless motionless deliverance this death of Habiba and again here he's using a syndetine to really describe in a lot of depth now how people just simply pass away and it's really really surprising how quickly they do so. He then uses oxymoron here so he mentions life and death and this perhaps could convey Alegai's own mixed feelings but also the feelings that people have when they go into this part of Somalia. To some degree they almost accept that death is a part of life because of course this is wartime conditions but also the idea of life is still seen as really precious and sacred in his eyes so he's he perhaps is also having mixed feelings and this is of course reflected in the oxymoron. He then also describes the famine leading to quiet suffering and lonely death and of course the pre-modifying adjectives quiet and lonely really show the abject suffering that a lot of Somalian people are experiencing which he witnesses. He then uses the definite article to talk about the old woman and he then mentions and repeats the idea of the smell and this repetition especially the sensory language appealing to what we can sense and smell particularly shows how disgusting the conditions probably are in this particular small village. He then heightens the sense of disgust by using dysphemism so remember dysphemism is when deliberately harsh language or deliberately inappropriate language is used to convey something in a way that's quite shocking. This is the opposite of euphemism where we deliberately use language which is somewhat flattering or in some ways the euphemism is used to make and to soften the impact of something that's quite harsh however here he's using dysphemism to really make it very very hard hitting how horrendous this village is. He then talks about the damage and the wound on this particular lady's leg and it's interesting because he uses a really interesting description to describe it as a gentle V shape of a boomerang. This is kind of domestic simplistic language and to some degree in contrast to the previous dysphemism this actually understates the extent of her injury. Also he mentions in this compound sentence it was rotting this is of course a woman's injury but also she herself was rotting and this statement is really really horrifying as we're reading. He then continues and then there was a face I will never forget. My reaction to everyone else I met that day was a mixture of pity and revulsion. Yes revulsion. The degeneration of the human body sucked of its natural vitality by the tween evils of hunger and disease is a disgusting thing. We'll never say so in our TV reports it's a taboo that has yet to be breached. To be in a feeding centre is to hear and smell the excretion of fluids by people who are beyond controlling the bodily functions. To be in a feeding centre is surreptitiously to wipe your hands on the back of your trousers after you've held the clammy palm of a mother who has just cleaned vomit from her child's mouth. This pity too because even in this state of utter disrepair they aspire to dignity that is almost impossible to achieve. Now here it's interesting that he uses this declarative sentence which really grips us and always remember that declarative sentence is a sentence that declares a fact feeling or mood right. So here in this case the declarative sentence shows a volta or a turning point in this passage. Why is this a turning point? This is because he initially admits that he kind of felt the same feeling when he saw all of these different people who are suffering which is pity and revulsion. And then when he says yes this adds a conversational tone to this article and what this does is it shows Alagaia's brutal honesty. He's admitting honestly and very openly that he kind of saw a lot of people almost as a mass of one suffering body of Somalian people. He also uses cliche hair. Cliché is overused and very common language so the twin evils of hunger and disease. And what this cliche does again is it's somewhat quite formal in the sense that he's being politically correct. Oh this is terrible. Isn't it terrible that all these people in Somalia are suffering. However it shows that if he's using a cliche his heart is not really in it when it comes to really seeing the suffering for what it is. He kind of sees again as I've mentioned before all Somalians as this suffering mass of people but he's seeing it more from a rational and factual perspective. Then he uses these pronouns we and our and what this does again is it shows it's his way perhaps of implicating and showing the guilt of not only him but a lot of journalists who probably have the same feeling and this maybe shows a secret in the media industry that's being uncovered. The media industry that goes to all these war zones to presumably help people raise awareness of all the suffering that's going on but actually what he's showing here is a lot of people in the media industry know what they're doing. They know that they are shocking a lot of readers but they're doing so in a way that they don't necessarily care that much about raising awareness it's more to do is just creating a very sensational story. He then uses hair and smell as sensory language which makes it really really visceral. It shows again how terrible and horrific the conditions are and he makes us as readers really smell what the place could probably be and also hear all the horrendous noises in the feeding centre. He then in this sentence where he states and begins with an old woman will cover her shriveled body. He uses this indefinite article to again it makes this woman really anonymous. She's just like every other Somalian. He then mentions this old woman as I've mentioned and she is anonymous. We sense that she's just like loads of other suffering Somalian people and he then talks about this because he's just showing just how widespread and how common it was to see these dying and decaying people. So he states an old woman will cover her shriveled body with a and I'm going to continue but bear in mind the shriveled description so this pre modifier again is showing how this woman is wasted and really wasting away in her body. So she will cover her shriveled body with a soiled cloth as you get as your gaze turns towards her and of course this description the old woman covering her body with a soiled cloth the adjective soiled really emphasises the degeneration of these feeding centres. He then mentions or the old and dying man who keeps his hoe next to the mat with which one day soon they will shroud his corpse as if he means to go out until the soil once this is all over. 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 heart. In those brief moments there'd been a smile not from me but from the face it was not the smile of greeting it was not the smile of joy how could it be but it was a smile nonetheless it touched me in a way that I could not explain it moved me in a way that went beyond pity or evolution. What was it about that smile? I had to find out. I urge 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 was what the smile had been about it was a feeble smile that goes with apology the kind of smile you might give if you felt you'd done something wrong. Now here again what Alagaia does firstly is he also implicates us so he goes from talking about how journalists are guilty to some degree but also he now starts including us and we are active participants and this is shown through this second person pronoun your. He then also talks about the old and dying man and again just like the old woman this is an anonymous man and this this anonymity shows how widespread the suffering is and death is in Somalia. He then mentions an agricultural term this is the hoe that's used for digging and this simplistic agricultural language just shows how simplistic these people's lives are but also just how horrendous the lives have been turned around these people have done nothing they just lead very simple lifestyles but now they're suffering the brunt of a really horrible war. He then uses language relating to death and this fits into the semantic field of death the language is corpse and dying and what this shows is that death is ever present wherever he's going here. He then mentions fleeting meeting and this term is really interesting because Farsi fleeting a meeting rhyme but also both are present continuous verbs and what this shows is this is a common thing that continuously happens when he sees all of these people when he meets the eyes it's always a very quick glance and then a turn away they've lost the dignity and this really stays with him and this is emphasized through this present continuous verb. He then also repeats the term smile so and also specifically a smile and what this shows is actually contrary to what we understand of a smile which is something positive in this instance is quite negative in context. He then asks himself the rhetorical question how could it be of course again this is what we would be asking if we saw this mention of a smile how is it even possible to be happy in this situation. However he then uses hyperphora here now remember that hyperphora is when somebody asks a question and then answers their own question this is a rhetorical device and of course this brings us into his mind as a journalist he wants to discover why people are reacting in a specific way but also why he's so moved by when he witnesses a Somali person or someone who's suffering and they have this smile this mysterious smile he wants to discover what about it is making him feel really uneasy. He then explains this he says that this is a feeble smile that goes with apology and the juxtaposition of the word smile and apology shows that actually these people feel really sheepish at being seen in such a helpless condition. Alagaya continues normally 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's 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 the 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 I resolved there and then that I would write the story of Goof Daddid with all the power and purpose I could master it seemed at the time and still does the only adequate answer reporter can give to a man's question I have one regret about that brief encounter in Goof Daddid 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 similar moment in the gradual collection of experiences with whole context facts and figures are the easy part of journalism knowing where they sit in the general scheme of things is much harder so my nameless friend if you're still alive I owe you one now here what Alla Gaia does is he shows through the word inured which means becoming hardened that he indeed has become hardened to all the suffering he has seen however he does this as a signpost that something is going to shock him and something is still going to strike him as different in this encounter he then mentions an unwritten code between the journalists and their subjects and again this abstract noun emphasizes the collective role that journalists play but also the collective role that interviewees the people that they interview play in their interactions he emphasizes this further by saying that the journalist is active the subject is passive and what this compound sentence does is it emphasizes the vast gap that exists between journalists and the people that they interview he then even he even emphasizes this further by talking about these pronouns so he talks about us and them he then emphasizes this divide by talking about the rich world and the poor world it's a journalist that go out from the rich world into the poor world they are separate from their subjects they don't always necessarily care that much for their subjects but they are more intrigued by what is happening in this poorer part of the world and of course this contrast shows a vast global wealth gap Alla Gaia then mentions that he resolved that he would write the story with all the purpose he could muster so this was a really seminal moment and of course this complex sentence shows he almost experiences a Damocene conversion and when I say Damocene I mean Damascus this is when Saul in the biblical context he is going killing all of these Christians and then he has a bright light that shines upon him and this leads him to become Paul and he completely converts how he sees the Christians however this is descriptive in sense that in this instance Alla Gaia has a Damocene conversion he goes from being just this journalist is going there just to get a really good story possibly quite shocking to he really finds a very human and shocking element to it he has suddenly been changed by this interaction with this one particular man who ironically remains anonymous he then even emphasizes this anonymity by admitting he never found out what the man's name was and of course this declarative sentence shows that he feels really guilty he wishes he could have gone and discovered more about this particular man because this man had changed his entire trajectory and his career as a journalist before meeting this man he kind of saw all of these suffering people as one and the same yes okay this person is suffering it's okay however once he witnesses this man and talks to him and asks him a question about that smile this is the Damocene conversion this is what it takes to change everything and to humanize a lot for these people in Alla Gaia's eyes of course he emphasizes this change this conversion by describing the seminal moment of course this is hyperbole but it shows that this is a real turning point for him especially in his career as a journalist he then talks about facts and figures and this alliteration is important because it shows that actually a lot of journalists just approach things from a very rational perspective and this is actually the easy part of journalism the hard part is now really inserting themselves emotionally into the story and really feeling what their subjects are feeling he then ends by saying my name is friend if you're still alive i owe you one and this direct register is interesting because it ends with the colloquialism i owe you one and what this does is it puts us firstly in the position of the suffering man because he uses the pronoun you but also this colloquialism i owe you one really shows that he's been moved and changed by this man and what he has witnessed through this man so that's all if you found this video useful please do make sure you visit our website because you will find lots of revision materials to help you when understanding this but indeed other extracts in the edexcel anthology thank you so much for listening