Geldof returns

Twenty years after Live Aid, Bob Geldof spent four months travelling around Africa again. It was an emotional journey, as Paul Vallely, the only journalist to accompany him, reveals

It seemed a funny place to stop. But Bob Geldof was clear. "Here," he snapped. "Pull over here." At the side of the road was a broad sweeping valley, a green patchwork of fields that stretched out of sight in either direction. It looked indistinguishable from a hundred others we had passed on our long journey through the Abyssinian highlands. We were only minutes away from one of Ethiopia's most antique cultural capitals, the little town of Lalibela which is the site of a breathtaking series of underground churches hewn by hand from the rock of the ancient plateau. So why stop here?

It seemed a funny place to stop. But Bob Geldof was clear. "Here," he snapped. "Pull over here." At the side of the road was a broad sweeping valley, a green patchwork of fields that stretched out of sight in either direction. It looked indistinguishable from a hundred others we had passed on our long journey through the Abyssinian highlands. We were only minutes away from one of Ethiopia's most antique cultural capitals, the little town of Lalibela which is the site of a breathtaking series of underground churches hewn by hand from the rock of the ancient plateau. So why stop here?

Geldof got out of the car and walked over to the side of the road. "This is the place," he said, and then stared silently into the valley for what seemed like an age. It was 20 years since he first came to this spot. The then Marxist government of Ethiopia had wanted to show the place off to him, partly because of its history, but mainly because they had just taken it from the rebel army in what felt like an interminable civil war. It was 1985. The year of Live Aid.

"When I first came to this impossibly beautiful place," the rock star campaigner began, and then paused. He spoke slowly and self-consciously, as if he were preparing sentences to be written, weighing each word. "This green landscape was naked brown soil, the earth burned by the remorseless sun which had brought the drought and famine which cauterised this entire land. There were tanks and men with guns everywhere. It felt a menacing place, in many more ways than one.

"When we got to this valley it was dusk. Suddenly I became aware, as the darkness grew, of tiny pinpricks of light. They started over there, and then spread, gradually across the valley, and then up the hillside, and on to the top of the plateau. Like little fireflies illuminating themselves in a chain sequence across the whole landscape. Then someone told me what they were."

They were fires. And they were being lit by desperate people who had abandoned their homes and trekked for days, and sometimes weeks, to a place where they heard there was food aid to be found. But when the sun fell, and this entire population on the move knew they could not reach their destination for the night, they made camp where they were, drew their thick white woollen blankets around them against the bitter cold of the mountain night, and lit a tiny fire.

"The hillside came alive with fires," said Geldof with a curious detachment. "But I knew what each one represented, because I had seen those scenes close-up elsewhere already. Parents giving the last of their food to their f children - some of whom were so weakened that they would die that night. Children who had been left orphaned by the journey. Eight-year-olds carrying three-year-olds. An intolerable vision. Like a painting of hell."

And then something bizarre happened.

"Just down there, to the right, there must have been an aid workers' camp, because I heard a radio. It was a long way off, but the sound carried. It was the BBC World Service. After a while it began to play the Band Aid single, 'Do They Know it's Christmas?'. I was horrified, at the triteness of our response set against the immensity of this reality. And then, when it got to Bono's line, his voice rang out with utter clarity across the landscape. And as he sang: 'Tonight, thank God it's them instead of you' I started to cry."

When I turned from the empty landscape to look at Geldof he was crying again, 20 years on.

The eucalyptus trees were in flower as we entered Lalibela, a dusty little place of several hundred mud huts, some of them substantial and a few more than 400 years old. But Lalibela's treasures were hidden from view. Hens clucked in the yards around the doors. Pigeons were cooing. Soft smoke rose gently from the roofs. The warm smell of bread wafted up from the houses lower down the hillside and mingled with the scent of meat cooking caught on the breeze as we moved through the town.

The place was about its normal business. A boy of six or seven walked past with a tin of cow manure on his head. Others carried sticks of sugar cane which they had bought with the small coins they had earned from showing tourists the secret churches which become visible to the stranger only when you are literally a few feet away from them. A runaway bullock shouldered its way suddenly through the crowds and made off down a roadside track.

"Stop that cow," shouted the hapless man who had just bought it at market and was chasing it - to the laughter, it seemed, of the entire town.

In the market there were great piles of grain, though much of it was dusty and some of it the worse for termite attacks. There was coffee: green, khaki and black. There was rock salt for people and salt cakes for animals, brought by merchants hundreds of miles from the Djibouti coast. There were plastic bowls and basins, and trays of cheap watches. There were Muslim weavers selling their produce, alongside traders with colourful fabrics from China; globalisation has tentacles that reach into the remotest mountain fastnesses. There were children selling Jolly Juice, a concoction made from tinned orange powder and dodgy-looking water.

There was nothing to remind Geldof of the terrible days of 1984-85. Apart from the flies. One of the most haunting images for a Westerner arriving at the height of the famine was of children too weak to wipe the flies from their faces. But if you arrive today in the Ethiopian highlands at the wrong time of year the flies are there still, and in such numbers that you feel as though you are trapped inside a buzzing black cloud. Even the outsider eventually becomes too weary to ceaselessly swish the insistent insects from your face and arms. May to September is the terrible time, until the frosts come to kill them off in October.

But the children seemed unfazed. They carried on happily, busy in their mercantilist enterprises, or happy at play with stones or sticks, hoops made from twisted circles of wire, or kicking a misshaped football.

"Isn't it great to see these kids looking so healthy," said Geldof, ruffling the hair of a boy walking beside him who stared up at the gangly whiteman with undisguised curiosity. Twenty years ago he had avoided touching the children for fear a photographer would snap what he called a "White St Bob nurses Sick Black Baby" picture. Things were different now. These children had smiles and chubby cheeks, and a sheen in their hair; they shouted and laughed, tripped up their mums and were shouted at. And yet their very health and vigour conjured up a huge welling sadness at the memory of those who were denied these simple things back in 1985.

A curly-haired boy, aged about 12, in a Chicago Bulls T-shirt approached Geldof. "I will be your guide," he said, more in declaration than in request.

"Will you now?" said Geldof with a laugh; presumptuousness has, after all, been a classic Geldof trait from his early days as pushy post-punk to his more recent refusals to take No as an answer from prime ministers and presidents.

The boy's name was Chombe. By day, he said in remarkably good English, he guided tourists around the churches; by night he went to the monastery, which was the only place with electric light, so he could read. "I want to be a doctor, or a pilot," he said. "This way to the underground churches."

There was a funeral ceremony going on in the grounds of The Saviour Of The World, the biggest rock church to be found anywhere on earth. It is an extraordinary sight. On a flat area of solid red volcanic rock, 13th-century masons - some 40,000 of them, archaeologists estimate - hewed down to shape a great block of natural stone. The biggest is 33 metres long, 23 metres wide and just under 12 metres high. This was then hollowed out, like a gigantic architectural sculpture, with 72 pillars of the rock left for support. Small wonder that it and the 11 other churches have been called the Eighth Wonder of the World.

Oddly enough the church itself was empty, apart from a handful of pilgrims and tourists, whom Geldof joined to get his chest, back, head and hands blessed by a priest wielding the enormous 800-year-old silver Cross of Lalibela (which the Ethiopian government recently paid $25,000 to get back from some nimble-fingered Belgian who had dubiously acquired it). The centre of the action was all outside, in the church grounds.

A group of priests wearing gold-embroidered cloaks were assembled around an empty bed. Though they gathered beneath the shade of a grove of thorn trees they carried fringed parasols of pink and silver, red and yellow, black and gold. They were chanting mournfully to the slow, deliberate beat of two different-sized drums, as the family of the deceased wailed on the ground beside the dead man's bed.

All around street traders sat, observing and discreetly carrying on their business. Goats and sheep were sold by men in low voices. Bundles of grass for spreading on the floor of homes were hawked by wordless women who had walked in that morning from the outlying rural areas. Others sold sugar cane and the huge leaves of the false banana plant to cook bread on. The interaction between the market and the place of worship seemed as old as religion itself.

"The paradox is," said Geldof, "that I discovered this oasis of peace in the midst of famine, war and death." In fact the paradox was even greater, for Lalibela was created in such circumstance. Different parts of the town go by biblical names: the River Jordan, the Mount of Olives, Mount Tabor. "It is a mini Holy Land set up in the days when the pilgrimage to the real Jerusalem was too dangerous," explained the guide-boy Chombe. "A new Jerusalem was ordered to be built here by King Lalibela, and he ordered that the churches should be built by digging down, rather than building them into the sky, to keep them undetected by invaders and marauders."

So it was in the 13th century, and so it remained in 1985 when Bob Geldof found a profound sense of peace in the midst of war. That sense of transcendent tranquillity remains today. "It is," he said, "quite simply one of my favourite places in all the world."

"Can I have that?" asked a shepherd boy who had appeared from nowhere when we stopped to take in the view of the vast Abyssinian plateau, from which gorges fell thousands of feet precipitously without warning.

"What?" said Geldof.

"That," he said, pointing to the empty plastic water bottle which Geldof had been about to throw among the rubbish in the back of the vehicle.

"Sure," said Geldof. The boy beamed and went off proudly cradling his new treasure.

"Some of us need so much," said Geldof, "and some people are happy with so little."

Africa is everywhere a place of paradox. Geldof's trip across it, of which Ethiopia was merely the first leg, was to last almost four months, and take in 11 countries. It was to throw-up paradoxes aplenty. Some of them were iconic - like the satellite dishes emerging from the thatched roofs of mud huts, the monument to Soviet MiG fighters now used to give shade to donkeys pulling water carts, or the beggar with deformities which would have looked medieval were it not for the two pairs of flip-flops he wore on his knees and hands. All these tell us things which are both expected and unexpected about the relationship between Africa and the developed world. It is shot through with irony. "Look at that," Geldof pointed out in one market town, as a boy passed by wearing a T-shirt with the legend: I Am Not A Tourist. "Post-modern or what?"

Of course, some apparent paradoxes are really just our Western prejudices in disguise. Nowadays even the smallest and dustiest African village seems to have an internet café powered by a noisy old generator and a satellite phone. "And why not," said Geldof. "We so often unthinkingly suppose that there is a linear progression from tradition to modernity. We see progress as the rest of the world 'catching up' with the West. Yet part of the genius of Africa is its ability to take what it sees as good, but to hang on to what it sees as better."

Nowhere was that more clear than in a hospital in Hargeisa in Somaliland. It was an unprepossessing place: tatty, unpainted, badly lit. But the doctor in charge there, Dr Hussein Adan, had been trained as both a traditional African healer and in Western medicine. By fusing the two he had developed a way of replacing shattered limbs with a technology that involved the implantation of camel bones into the legs of men and goat bones into the heads of children. It was all sterilised with a mixture of camel's milk and paste from the bark of desert shrubs - and then treated with antibiotics.

Here Geldof met an 18-year-old girl. Her head was crushed in a car crash. "Her brain came out on the road," the doctor explained. "We brought her in, removed the stones and grit from her brain, and then used a mixture of frankincense and camel milk to clean it. Then we covered the hole in her head with a piece of goat bone." The girl was sitting up in bed. "She's not well but she's improving."

Camel bones and goat bones, frankincense and antibiotics, and camel milk with everything. It sounds preposterous. But, like so much else in Africa, amazingly, it works. "And the striking thing," said Geldof, "is that tradition and modernity were not opposites, or a starting and a finishing point. They are something which fused to make a singular African solution."

Geldof saw that in politics too. Under the shade of an acacia thorn he came across a group of elders from one of the clans which traditionally governed Somalia. They rule under an ancient system known as the Tol, under which responsibility for crime lies not with an individual but with his clan. "What they told me," explained Geldof after drinking camel-milk with the elders, "is if a man steals a camel his clansmen will say: 'Where did you get that?' Social pressure forces him to tell them, whereupon they reply: 'Take it back, or else his clan will come to us and demand compensation.' For centuries the system worked."

But then as warlords took over control in post-colonial Somalia they abolished the system of elders. Anarchy ensued. By contrast in the breakaway area known as Somaliland it has not only been retained but has been elevated to the status of the second chamber of parliament. Few there doubt that this is one of the key factors in the relative stability of Somaliland. "This odd mix of African and Western systems of governance clearly works," Geldof said. "The evidence on the ground is that tradition does not inevitably precede modernity. It is the interaction between the two that in Africa will bring change and progress."

It was early in the morning. Bob Geldof was back in Ethiopia, on the road between Somalia and Harar, the city to which the French romantic poet Rimbaud fled Europe to end his days as an African merchant. As we passed through a little town we stopped to have a look at the market. There were traders selling all the usual stuff, minute amounts of potatoes, tomatoes or onions, piled carefully in tiny pyramids by way of display. But in the middle of the space there was something more frenetic.

Once the farmers in this market had grown the best coffee in the world. But prices on the world market dropped by over 70 per cent after countries like Vietnam and Indonesia began to grow coffee. Ethiopia found it was losing its primary cash crop. In years of famine, places like this, which once had been rich enough to buy in cereals from elsewhere, found that their people were beginning to starve, just as their countryfolk in the north have done for generations. But now the local people have found a solution. They went to the hillside terraces where they had carefully intercropped coffee and maize and ripped up the coffee bushes. In their place they started growing a drug, khat.

"Khat makes you lazy and then crazy," a local aid worker, Fatimah, told Geldof. "The men sit and chew, and talk and brag, and build castles that have no doors. And if the khat comes late they go wild."

That was why in the market men were running down the hillside with freshly cut bundles of khat, wrapped in far bigger leaves to keep them moist. As soon as they arrived these leaves were stripped away (to be eaten by goats nosing among the discarded wrappers) and the produce was swiftly stacked in far bigger bundles. These were then wrapped in plastic sheets made from old food-aid sacks for the journey. The men work with vigour and great speed. "Who says there is no dynamism in African economies," laughed Geldof, as the stuff was hurled into pick-up trucks which roared off as quick as they could, leaving huge columns of dust whirling in the air behind them.

That is why the vehicles leave the market at such speed. Addicts - who now number 80 per cent of the population in parts of eastern Africa - need to get their fresh delivery or else they get very agitated.

"Not all change that the outside world forces upon Africa is progress," Geldof observed.

The mighty cataracts of the Blue Nile Falls were once known in the local language as The Water That Smokes. A waterfall nearly half a kilometre wide cascaded across a massive outcrop of hard rock as one of Africa's greatest rivers began its long descent to the Mediterranean. So impressive were the falls that the Ethiopian people featured them on the obverse of their nation's primary unit of currency, the 1 birr note.

"Look at them now," said Geldof as we disembarked from the Ethiopian military helicopter, "they look more like a domestic plumbing problem rather than the thunderous roar of triumphant nature." Indeed water the colour of milky drinking chocolate flowed placidly to the cliff edge and trundled across an area reduced from over 400 metres to 40 feet.

It was not the only disappointment. Geldof, whose attitudes to Africa oscillate as wildly as the flow of water across the falls, was in one of his White Man in Africa moods. In the steps of the Great Explorers and all that. But the local villagers who soon ran to the helicopter spoiled all that.

"Where are you from?" they asked, in perfect English.

"England."

"Ah," they replied, "David Beckham." One even produced a current Premiership fixtures list.

"Do you mind," Geldof laughed. "Here I am trying to pretend that I am in this hugely and adventurously remote part of the world that no one has ever been to and you keep crapping on about David Bloody Beckham."

"He missed goal in Euro 2000," said one villager, rounding off the humiliation.

Geldof turned back to the falls and Ethiopia's great dilemma. What is a minus for tourists is a plus for local industry. A dam has been built upriver from the falls so that even the mighty Nile can be turned off and on like a tap. Exactly when, and how often, is desirable is a matter of keen debate in Ethiopia. Added into which are the views of those who think the government should just abrogate an agreement reached between Sudan and Britain in 1888 which allows the Sudanese to claim sovereignty of the actual water preventing the Ethiopians using it for irrigation. "Change and progress," mused Geldof. "In the case of the price of coffee, it is change the Ethiopians cannot control. At least with these decisions it is Africans themselves who must decide, rather than accepting priorities imposed by outsiders, as they have to in so much of life."

The past few months in Africa have been something of an epiphany for Bob Geldof. At the beginning of last year he persuaded Tony Blair to set up the Commission for Africa because after visiting Ethiopia again in 2004 it appeared that 20 years after Live Aid nothing had improved; indeed things had got worse. "Africa is fucked," were his exact words to the prime minister, apparently. His travels across the continent have changed his mind.

"Yes, of course Africa is still plagued by drought, famine, hunger, disease, ignorance, witchcraft, corruption, bad government, bureaucracy, war, Aids, death," he told me. "But the problems Africa faces are not intractable, which is what the pessimists suggest."

On the contrary, what Geldof has now experienced on the ground is a sense of flux, and of opportunity. "There is dynamism in the air, and change. Africa today is very different from the place I first visited 20 years ago at the time of Live Aid. Over the past five or so years the signs that change is beginning have swept like a tide across the continent. When I first came here two decades ago there were about 20 wars going on across the continent; today there are just four. Then half of all African countries were dictatorships; today more than two-thirds of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa have had free-ish and fair-ish multi-party elections. Some have even produced changes of government.

"Of course, creeps like Mugabe hang on in Zimbabwe. But new political leaders, like Prime Minister Meles here in Ethiopia - a really smart guy - are emerging, many of whom show a new commitment to the common good of their peoples. They are setting up new institutions - like the African Union, which might just work. Almost half of all African countries had economic growth of more than 5 per cent in 2003. There's the start of what could be a real momentum for change."

We stayed up too late, and drank too much, on our last night in Lalibela. Just before dawn I staggered to the bathroom, glancing out of the window on the way. What I saw made me bang on the wall to wake Bob in the room next door.

Out of the window was the other end of the same valley we had encountered when we first arrived. A light flickered on the far hill. Then another and another, in an eerie echo of that desperate trek of 20 years before.

But this time the cause was different. It was the feast of Meskal, the second holiest day in the calendar of the Ethiopian Coptic Church, of which most of the population are adherents. As we looked out from our balconies the whole valley slowly lit up with individual families lighting fires and illuminating the insides of their homes with burning brands in blessing. Sounds of rejoicing filled the air. Children shouted excitedly, provoking dogs to bark, donkeys to bray and cocks to crow before their time. As the pinpricks of light spread, the valley filled with that most African sound of celebration as the women let rip a strange ululating sound from the back of their throats.

Bob Geldof watched and listened, this time his eyes aglow with joy. The fires of despair had given way to the flames of hope.

'Geldof in Africa', directed by John Maguire, can be seen on BBC1 on Mondays and Wednesdays at 7.30pm from 20 June to 6 July. A book, also called 'Geldof in Africa', from which some of our photographs are taken, is published by Century at £20. To buy the book for £18 (including p&p), call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798897