Book Review

A Passage to Africa by George Alagiah

Published by Little Brown and Company, 2002 286 pages
Reviewed By Rodrick Mukumbira
In A Passage to Africa, former British Broadcasting Corporation Africa (BBC) Africa correspondent,
George Alagiah mixes political insights with personal testimony to produce an autobiography, not about
himself but of Africa itself.
With unblinking honesty and compelling insight, he chronicles the horror, the hope and the humanity he has
borne witness to: from the "kleptocracy' of Mobutu sese Seko's Zaire to the political expediency of Robert
Mugabe's Zimbabwe; from the playground petulance of Liberia's child soldiers to the towering moral
authority of Nelson Mandela.
In this powerful testament of a continent Alagiah considers home kicks as a five-year-old in 1961 when his
father announced that the family was to leave Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) for newly independent Ghana in
Africa.
"Even as a child of five I think I knew that it represented something better than the divided island we were
about to leave. I learned from half-heard conservations between my parents that Ceylon was not somewhere
that we Tamils would prosper. So Ceylon was bad and Africa was good. Now we were poor; in Africa we
would be rich" (pp5).
He looks at Diaspora and its effects: that the majority of those leaving Ceylon were professionals, an issue
he compares to the current problems befalling Africa.
"But now who would run the ministries? How would the roads be maintained? Where are the doctors who
would ensure health for all?" (pp29).
Like E.M Forster in A Passage to India Alagiah, who is currently a newscaster at BBC, is honest in account
of colonialism on another continent. He speaks of how independence in Ghana created a new breed of
colonisers - Indians, Poles, Filipanos, Ceylonese and Czechs. He also writes about a new breed of British
who, unlike the imperialists, now came in as expatriates and technical advisers. He talks about how the
former coloniser had ventured in banking.
Once in the book, Alagiah appeals to the reader to forget his past BBC reports of Africa's famine, civil wars
and general strife. He says "all was once well in the continent as it had hope and optimism.
"In the theatre it's called the suspension of disbelief. You put aside your scepticism and let your imagination
run with the plot" (pp36).
He talks about optimism abound in Ghana at the time citing the musical bands like E.T. Mensah and the
Tempo Dance Band whose 'hi-life' music had one meaning: the unity of Africa and the destiny of its people.
Alagiah narrates about the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963 and how this
brought hope that it would speed independence for many African countries. He writes about the criticism
that now befell Ghana's first president Kwame Nkrumah ranging from his marriage to an Egyptian girl to his
allegedly spending of million of dollars on a palace in his home village.
Nkrumah's dream about democracy in Africa failed and a coup in Ghana in 1966 that installed a military
government shattered Alagiah's childhood vision of Africa being the "better" than Ceylon .
A Passage to Africa enters into what Alagiah calls "Africa's Lost Years". This is the chaotic period in the
seventies and eighties. He says two and a half decade later, from the time his family migrated to Africa, it
was now in worst shape than he could remember.
As BBC television reporter he says he met one time Liberian president Prince Johnson who proudly showed
him the chair in which former military ruler Samuel Doe had endured beatings and torture.
"He seemed proud of his achievement and he called himself a freedom fighter, and in the same breath he
urged me to buy a video tape of Doe's last, painful hour" (pp70).
Alagiah remembers 16-year-old General Do-or-Die, a Liberian child soldier as a living embodiment of the
war, who had given himself a new name so that "he could melt into his new world, and find a place in an
environment where there is no room for weakness and childishness". He remembers Paulo Simbini, a
Mozambican who was captured by the Renamo. Simbini spoke of a friend who had rounded up his own
family into a hut and set it on fire.
He remembers Rosemary and her sister in Northern Uganda. Captured by the Lord Resistence Army, they
were repeatedly raped and afterwards made to stab corpses. They were only allowed to stop when their
captor decided that he had seen enough blood on their clothes and bodies.
Alagiah writes about his translator, Seth Ngarambe, a Hutu Rwandan who was a refugee in Goma, eastern
Zaire, who later appeared before the genocide tribunal facing charges of killing his Tutsi wife.
"Africa's conudrum is not its own. Africa got to where it is today because the vast majority of its people
were let down primarily by their leaders and also by those in the rich world who made common cause with
dictators and despots" (pp270).
He says what Africa has gone through has been witnessed by the baobab trees. He says the baobab trees
have seen the liberation movement gaining momentum and the people of Africa rejoice. But less than 50
years down the line, the baobab's small and oval leaves may have caught a chill from the killing fields of
Rwanda.
"The baobabs have seen it all: the best and the worst. They have known incredible beauty and the terrifying
ugliness" (pp 280).

A necessary intrusion: George Alagiah on the
painful choices that face a television reporter in
wretched Somalia.
GEORGE ALAGIAH
Sunday, 23 August 1992
WE HADN'T been driving long when we came across the corpse. Another victim of the famine in Somalia.
He'd given up exhausted, about a day's walk from the city where he hoped to find relief. Of course, he
couldn't have known things were as bad there.
For me, it was time to decide how we were going to portray this. My cameraman and I had talked about
trying to do more than shock the viewer, show people rather than nameless victims. Well, here was a victim
and he was nameless. Should we be running this kind of stuff? Even the gunmen I'd hired for protection
muttered, through the interpreter, about dignity in death. Never mind that, as soldiers for the Habir Gadir
clan army, they seemed to care little for the sanctity of life. They would have felt the same even if the dead
man had been a clan enemy they'd shot in the civil war.
Anyway, I did what I presume all television reporters would do: I asked my cameraman to shoot it every
way - close and graphic, wide and meaningless. That way I could postpone the decision till I was in the
cutting room. Back in the land cruiser I try to suppress those first stirrings of triumph: We've got one
sequence in the bag, might even be an opening shot.
Goofgaduud turned out to be worse than I'd been told. I have come to dread the moment of arrival at a place
like this. That moment of intrusion is much worse, of course, when you take the paraphernalia of television
with you into a world seemingly left behind in the harshness of pre-civilisation.
The stronger ones came up to our vehicle - they'd heard there were aid workers in the region and took us for
an advance party. There was neither anger nor despair when they realised the truth. That's the thing about
hunger. After weeks - or months - you come to this plateau of acceptance. Or so it seems.
The father in me would rather caress the bodies mutilated by famine; the man in me wants to rage at the
injustice of it all; I twitch at the medical pack the BBC gave me - wanting to hand over the drugs that might
calm one child's fever. I do none of this - which child would I choose? You can't help them all. Instead, I
shout at the cameraman, make sure he's got that sunken chest, focused on that grieving mother. I tell myself
I'm doing more good this way.
Mogadishu is a study in chaos. One day we had a puncture at one of the busiest intersections in the town. I
had 10 nervous minutes to watch the mayhem around me. A couple of boys threw themselves at each other.
Their guns clattered on the tarmac - I seemed to be the only one worried about whether the safety catches
were on. Somalia's version of joyriders stand atop pick-up trucks, probably looted from an aid agency, and
cling to the anti-aircraft guns that are welded on. There are no planes to shoot at in this war, but these men
are not fussy.
In town at the aid agency house where we put up for the night, I offered the drugs to a nurse. Maybe she
could decide who is to survive and who is not. The aid worker can't run away from the decision. She's not
jumping on a plane to go and tell the world about it.
But we do have some things in common. Relief agencies depend on us for publicity and we need them to tell
us where the stories are. There's an unspoken understanding between us, a sort of code. We try not to ask the
question too bluntly. 'Where will we find the most starving babies?' And they never answer explicitly. We
get the pictures all the same.
There's also a camaraderie. Aid workers are the one group with whom you don't have to feel guilty about
having a decent meal in the midst of famine. They understand that you are there to work, not share in the
wretchedness. It's the same for them.
And for those with money there is food. If everyone had the cash, of course, there wouldn't be enough. But
visiting journalists and the like eat well. It's called the market system and it works - in fact it's just about the
only thing that does work in Somalia these days.
Aid agencies offer the only real chance of gainful employment now. Khaled, a cook at one of the UN houses
in Mogadishu, bakes lobster just so, and his chilli sauce ought to be bottled and sold. Lobster is cheap there
and even the dedicated have to eat.
Filming over, we shared a charter flight back to base with another television crew. There's a ritual on these
journeys. You make light of what you've been through. 'Was that village an eight or nine on the Richter
scale of good pictures?' It's not callousness - it's called keeping your distance. 'We'll meet again,' says the
pilot. 'There'll be another disaster some place else - on that you can bet.'
He is right, of course. What will I do next time? What kind of pictures will it take to move people then?
There's only one answer and it's the one I try to judge my work against. You're there to tell the story, not to
market misery.
International Committee for the Red Cross is working throughout the country. ICRC aims to continue
providing 20,000 tonnes of food a month. Its dollars 150m programme represents one- third of its 1992
budget. 500 community kitchens (250 in Mogadishu) have been set up. Cheques to British Red Cross Somali
Appeal, 9 Grosvenor Crescent, London SW1X 7EJ.
Care specialises in moving food through ports into convoys of trucks. It is providing logistical support for
British and EC aid. Cheques to Care Somalia Appeal, 36-38 Southampton St, London WC2E 7HE.
Save the Children is running five feeding centres and three health clinics, saving 20,000 children from
starvation. Also providing seeds. Cheques to Save the Children, Department 204006, Freepost, London SE5
8BR.
Oxfam's emergency agricultural relief programme is providing seeds, tools etc in rural areas, to ensure there
is replanting for next season. Cheques to Oxfam (Somalia), 274 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 7DZ.
Medecins sans frontieres has been providing medical help and materials for hospitals and about 15 feeding
centres for severely undernourished children. Cheques to Medecins sans frontieres, 8 Rue St Stabin, 75011
Paris, France. Mark envelopes CPP, 406OU.
George Alagiah is foreign affairs correspondent for BBC television news.