I came and went to Malawi in the past fortnight without meeting Madonna at Lilongwe airport. I was there to observe the work of a remarkable new Irish organisation, Wells for Zoe, about which I'll be writing later this week., writes John Waters.
Some reports said Madonna was there so her adopted Malawian son could visit his father. Others quoted her saying she was seeking a "sister" for David and had found the little girl she was looking for: three-year-old Grace, whom she had seen in a video taken in conjunction with the work of her charity organisation, Raising Malawi.
This was subsequently denied.
As an artist, Madonna has struck me as slight and uninteresting, her music requiring the maintenance of low-level sensationalism to sustain it. In the beginning, a prejudice arising from this view caused me privately to join in the generalised condemnations of her "baby-shopping" trip to Africa. I return from Malawi with a different viewpoint.
Malawi is one of the most impoverished countries in Africa, among the poorest places on earth. Like many African countries, it is riddled with Aids. Average life expectancy is 35-ish and the average income less than €1 a day.
With his mother dead, and his father unable to cope, David Banda ended up, like hundreds of thousands of Malawian children, in an orphanage. Being adopted by Madonna means David has multiplied his chances of surviving to middle age. His father says he agreed to the adoption for precisely this reason. At 32, he is himself a senior citizen of Malawi.
Africa haunts us, sometimes shockingly, but all the time in a low-key, nagging way, raising questions from our unexpressed unconscious about the West's past history of colonialism and exploitation, about continuing inequality and the denial of human dignity in a world capable of conferring vast wealth or abject poverty as a happenstance of birth. In Malawi, you might download a Madonna song while someone up the street lies dying from a disease deriving from the widespread incapacity to obtain clean drinking water, while the rain pours down outside. The "immorality" of this is not the most shocking thing about it. What is truly appalling, despair-making and absurd is that it is a reversible catastrophe.
Many, many Westerners are, through their involvement in missionary bodies, aid organisations and voluntary activities, doing their best to help, but despite these immense efforts, the general situation gets no better, leading to the suspicion that much of this activity exists more for the purpose of expressing western good intentions than achieving real change. Whatever its good intentions, it perpetuates the problems and traps its beneficiaries within them.
There is a lack of focus, an overarching tendency to see Africa as some kind of insurmountable conundrum, which can at best be ameliorated with fire-brigade action and handouts.
At the moment, Ireland acquits itself well in terms of its contribution to the international aid effort, but this poses a number of difficulties. One perennial problem is that aid channelled through African governments is highly subject to corruption. The other is that this aid is still seen by us, primarily and unhealthily, as a way of discharging some vaguely-felt moral duty to the undeveloped world, a way of buying quietude of conscience to enable us to get on with our very different lives. We need to find a new way of giving, beyond charity, beyond compassion, and certainly beyond moralising.
Africa also needs a change of culture, to end the mendicity created by the decades of well-intentioned western philanthropy which followed on the centuries of western exploitation. The prevailing and highly destructive begging-bowl culture has a great deal to do with the recurring images of helplessness, dependency and destitution beaming out of Africa as bait for aid, without which the agencies who keep large numbers of people from the brink of immediate destruction would not be able to raise money. But these images also serve to trap Africa in a terminal mindset of unhope.
In this context, Madonna's adoption of an African child becomes significant as a concrete action transcending guilt, posturing and empty rhetoric. The solution she offered David Banda belonged to the now, to the actually existing circumstances of his life. It did not seek to maintain him within his problematic situation in a way that allowed Madonna to feel better. It was transformative. Madonna appears to have gone to Africa and addressed both the sense of bewilderment in herself that many of us share, and pursued a radical solution for one African that has almost certainly saved him.
This is not to propose that we all go out and adopt African children - just that there is a need here for more concrete, practical responses. None of us alone can solve the problem of Africa, but together, with the right approach and focus, we might surprise ourselves. For this we need to be prepared, like Madonna, to change our own lives a little.