YOU MEAN WE EXHAUSTED OURSELVES JOINING HANDS AND THEY DIDN’T EVEN SAY THANK-YOU?

Live 8 no media hit in Africa (CBC, July 3rd, 2005)

Sunday newspapers in such major cities as London and New York plastered their front pages with coverage of the all-star series of free concerts held to bring awareness to global poverty.

But in Africa, where the plight of the poor was a key focus of Live 8, the event didn't attract the same kind of attention.

In Johannesburg, only one newspaper carried Live 8 on its front page.

Still, the message of spreading the wealth apparently reached those wealthy enough to access the internet. More than 26 million people around the world sent text messages on Saturday to support Live 8, organizers said.

Britain's finance minister, Gordon Brown, said public pressure on politicians to help the poor has already helped to shape recent agreements on debt relief and aid.

"I think you've seen that ministers around the world have been affected by the strength of public opinion, churches, faith groups, and it does have an impact," Brown told BBC Television.

But he added that empowering African people was a "lifetime's work."

Indeed. And one no doubt deserving of generous benefits and a pension plan. Please forgive a self-referential rant, but I have asked a few knowledgeable people in government in the last two weeks about Live 8, and read many articles on it. Those with even a modicum of historical perspective and good sense knew full well there is something very wrong and embarrassing here. But all of them felt obliged to bury concerns about rampant corruption, totalitarianism, waste, apathy and inefficiency in gooey bromides about how great it is that so many young people are showing that they “care”.

It’s not great at all. It is a self-indulgent, quasi-racist conceit which betrays the small, but growing, African middle-class and intellectual forces that are the sole hope of that wretched continent. It is an appalling surrender to a post-modern, post-colonial guilt that wasn’t even that persuasive in 1950's Paris, where it was born. It is a selfish, damaging triumph of silly Oprah-speak over genuine charity. As in the Middle East, it proves that the left and its allies have pretty much given up critical though and decided to back demagogues who score high on ideological purity and cut a mean swath through international development conferences at the expense of honest and proud moderate Africans who get up in the morning and strive. Anyone who wanted to make a dramatic, (and moral) difference in Africa would have a hard time gainsaying the ideas that we should abandon our agricultural tariffs and send a message of hope by invading Zimbabwe, whatever South Africa thinks about it. We won’t do that, of course. If we did, we might actually accomplish something. What would we have then to sing about?