Bob Geldof brings his familiar urgent way with language, plus a previously unseen gift for photography, to his latest African project, writes Rosita Boland.
When it comes to Africa, Bob Geldof will keep on buzzing in our collective ears like a persistent and impossible-to- ignore mosquito. This year is the 25th anniversary of Live Aid, which will inevitably attract media attention. To make the most of this publicity, Geldof, who has consistently campaigned ever since Live Aid for African issues, particularly Aids awareness and debt, has come up with a new African-focused project.
Geldof in Africa is the title of both an upcoming six-part television BBC series and an accompanying book. Given the subject, it is perhaps surprising that "it is not a charity book", according to the publisher. Over a year, Geldof and his camera crew travelled around 13 African countries, reporting and recording the stories that don't make the holiday and travel shows.
Throughout the year, Geldof took notes and photographs, and these make up most of the book. More than 20 years ago, Geldof published his frank and pacy autobiography, Is That It?, and proved he could write as well as sing. He employs the same angry, entertaining and frantic style in Geldof in Africa (a writing credit is also given to Paul Vallely).
The photographs in the book do a fine job: the blackboard outside a communal mud hut advertising FA Premier League matches on satellite; the people debilitated by taking the drug khat; the incongruous image of the tea-towel of Ireland pinned over the simple UN bar in Kisangani; sandstorms; the Babel-like crowds of fishing boats and humanity at the Gold Coast; the goat sacrifices; the faces that stare right back at the camera, with dignity or despair or curiosity. Some pictures are Geldof's and some are John Maguire's, although, frustratingly, none have bylines. Whoever took them, though, they're good.
This book is as uncomfortable a read as it is an arresting one. Abject poverty, Aids and the horrible aftermath of a horrible war are not easy topics to cover. No one who reads this book will forget Geldof's description of the young north Ugandan children who are stolen from their villages to be soldiers in the conflict between the Ugandan government and its Lord's Resistance Army. If they try to escape, the villages they are abducted from are burned.
One eight-year-old child Geldof heard about, who had escaped and been recaptured, was put in a circle of her former village playmates by her captors. The children were instructed to bite her to death or else face the same fate themselves. They obeyed.
The Geldof in Africa television series begins on Mon, June 20, on BBC1. The book is published by Century, £20
