Were Band Aid and Live Aid good or bad for Africa?
“While I don't doubt Bob Geldof's sincerity the Band Aid single was for Britain an enormous feel-good exercise and one which has arguably done Africa more harm than good. At the very least Geldof and Midge Ure should have listened hard and long to local African experts who spoke from informed critical and realistic perspectives. Instead, the whole of pop rose up as one with its own idea of how to feed the world based on 10 minutes of BBC News footage.”
Not my words, but those of the pop and cultural historian Bob Stanley in his magisterial overview of modern pop, Yeah Yeah Yeah. But which Bob has right on his side? Geldof or Stanley? Was Do They Know It’s Christmas? a truly terrible single or did it have any merit as a piece of music? Rather more importantly, as far as the crises in Africa are concerned, what is the verdict 40 years on? Did Band Aid and Live Aid do more harm than good.
It's time to take a medium-sized dive.
MEDIUM-SIZED DIVE
So, for anyone who doesn’t know and most people will, Band Aid was the collective name of a charity supergroup featuring mainly British and Irish musicians and recording artists. It was founded in 1984 by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise money for anti-famine efforts in Ethiopia by releasing the song "Do They Know It's Christmas?" for the Christmas market that year. Geldof was so moved by the plight of starving children in Ethiopia he’d seen on a Michael Buerk segment on BBC news that he decided to try to raise money using his contacts in pop music.
Geldof enlisted the help of Midge Ure, from the group Ultravox, to produce a charity record. Paula Yates, Bob Geldof's partner, is considered to have been the driving force behind the original Band Aid. In the New Year in the US, a charity super group released We Are The World – and there’s a very good documentary on Netflix at the moment about that including a rather nice sequence where Stevie Wonder does an impression of Bob Dylan to a creatively blocked Bob Dylan which he loves and adapts. Worth watching.
Then the following summer, Live Aid was a benefit concert , again organised my Geldof and Ure, which played out to capacity crowds at Wembley Stadium in London, John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, and also in the Soviet Union, Canada, Japan, Yugoslavia, Austria, Australia, and West Germany. An estimated audience of 1.9 billion, in 150 nations, watched the live broadcast, nearly 40 percent of the world population.
OK, so now it’s time to have an entirely reasonable discussion.
Discussion Point #1
First question to tackle. Is “Do they know it’s Christmas?” actually any good as a song?
It’s a creature of its time. Not just charity singles, but also sports team songs from that time have this “look at all of us stars being normal” vibe. Its heyday was the 70s and 80s, starting with Back Home for the 1970 World Cup and ending with World In Motion for Italia 90. It might have something to do with the pre-digital era where there was something vaguely magical seeing a whole bunch of celebs getting together and mucking around in the video, just like you or me.
The modern equivalent is that disastrous attempt by Gal Gadot to get all her celeb mates to pass the baton on John Lennon’s “Imagine” during the first global lockdown. What both that and the Band Aid effort have in common is minimal effort required from the participants for supposedly maximum returns. But the Imaginevideo did of course backfire rather spectacularly.
The actual task of creating the song was quite tricky to pull off. First it had to be written very quickly to capitalise on the Christmas market and, most importantly, save lives. The additional difficulty in construction was to sort out who got which line or verse and choosing a format that could easily host a wide range of singing styles. They had to abandon Status Quo’s contribution as unusable. Bono goes absurdly over the top for his line. But it passes the old grey whistle test. You can hum, or indeed whistle it, which is more than you can say for the US version “We Are The World”.
What about the lyrics?
The lyrics are a different matter. Evidently Midge Ure had to rewrite Bob Geldof’s original draft as unworkable. “There won’t be snow in Ethiopia this Christmas”, for example didn’t even scan. Unfortunately Ure’s version might have scanned “And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas” - but was far more problematic. Not only is Africa famously a hot continent, there’s plenty of snow on Kilimanjaro, though less now than it had back then. The line goes on “Where nothing ever grows / No rain nor rivers flow". This is clearly blatantly untrue of Africa as a whole and again there’s this tenedency to conflate a localised famine in Ethiopia with an entire continent. Hackles would rise if Albania and Tonbridge Wells got lumped together.
And of course, they have heard of Christmas in Ethiopia, so they know what it is. The Christian community in Ethiopia country is one of the oldest in the world. It is in fact older than the one in the UK. Peter Gill, one of the few Western journalists in Ethiopia at the time, has commented: “As Ethiopians have pointed out ever since, they did of course know it was Christmas because the starving were mainly Orthodox Christian.”
"Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you". is a good example of a line which is intended to be both empathetic and also induce guilt. But it can also be interpreted as manipulative, bullying and patronising, sung by a pampered pop star. It all depends on how you frame it.
Now it’s easy to be wise forty years on. Midge Ure’s final assessment in his autobiography was that "it is a song that has nothing to do with music. It was all about generating money... The song didn't matter: the song was secondary, almost irrelevant." To be fair to Geldof, who more often seems to double down when promoting his views, he later agreed it was one of the worst songs in history.
Given the degree of difficulty, I think we can excuse the hammy nature of the song. The lyrics are downright weird in places, but again written by pop stars in a hurry in London whose knowledge of Ethiopia, and indeed Africa was minimal. Bob Stanley’s point is a good one though. Did they not think, for example, to run the lyrics past someone who might have at least make them pause? Rather like England’s Antarctic explorers from a previous generation who didn’t see the point talking to any Inuit about what to wear in cold weather, there is very much an air of “west knows best” which permeates proceedings throughout. More on that before the end.
Discussion Point #2
Did Band Aid and Live Aid actually help Africa? Where did the money go?
As far as can be told, most of the money did seem to go where it was supposed to go. It raised more than £114m for famine relief, and as a result, people were aware of Ethiopia’s devastating food shortages. It did undoubtedly save thousands from death.
If we trace the success of Live Aid’s fund raising, due deference must be given to Geldof, Yates and Ure for actually getting on and doing something rather than wringing their hands. But it was Michael Buerk who made the original harrowing report which so affected Geldof. And the young woman who Buerk interviewed is the original hero of the entire narrative. Now Dame Claire Bertschinger, she was then a nurse on the ground who was being asked to select children to live or die. She was originally appalled by Buerk’s requests to “pick up a really sick child” for the camera. And she thought you’ll need more than a band aid to sort this out. But when the planes of food started to arrive, she realised the power of what Buerk had indirectly achieved.
Whether all the money went where it should has been hotly debated ever since. More sinisterly, the president of Medicins Sans Frontieres commented that aid could be turned against those toward whom it was directed and those delivering the aid integrated into a system of oppression. In his opinion relief agencies and their funders could be part of the problem not just part of the solution.
It's fair to say that Geldof's aggressively simplistic approach which worked so well to galvanise fund relief also saw him taking, as David Rieff puts it, a morally serious dispute with respectable arguments on both sides and turning it into a pissing match in an alley behind a pub. Some criticisms of the direction of funds, for example, he has characterised as simply bollocks. More diplomatically, Bono’s commentary is that it is better to spill some funds into nefarious quarters for the sake of those who need it than stifle aid because of possible theft.
Whether he’s right about that or not depends on how you see the world. My wife said she got into a serious argument with her father for one of the only times in her life about whether to give to Live Aid or not. She saw starving children who needed to be saved. But he’d lived in Africa for many years and knew that this was giving western governments an excuse not to solve the structural issues they themselves had caused during the postcolonial exit from the continent.
It’s a moral maze.
Discussion point #3
Negative perceptions of Africa: long term effects of Live Aid
The journalist and explorer Henry Morten Stanley once fought alongside General Custer in the American Midwest during the wars against the “Plains Indians”, as they were described then. In his first book, Through the Dark Continent in 1878, about his travels in Africa, he shared this insight: “The savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision.”
It's hard to escape the conclusion that this view has continued to underpin western perceptions of Africa ever since. However well meaning Band Aid and Live Aid were, and they were indeed extremely well-intentioned, they also perpetuated this unsavoury White Saviour syndrome.
This is how Moky Makura, executive director of Africa No Filter puts it:
The problem with the save Africa industry is the attitude of privilege in which it often comes wrapped. It is fed by and entirely reliant on a single, outdated story of Africa that was perpetuated and entrenched by the Live Aid phenomenon. Daytime TV in the UK is replete with adverts from international NGOs that continue to use the Live Aid model. They feature broken African characters who feed the stereotypes and tug at the heartstrings of British viewers. There is never any nuance or context in their stories.
Sadly, the mainstream media, the most influential ambassador for the Live Aid legacy, still largely perpetuates this dominant narrative about a broken continent plagued by poverty, conflict, corruption, crime, poor leaders and disease. In their version of Africa, the continent is a place beset by dependency and full of people who lack agency.
Geldof, with his bull-headed binary view of the world insisted that the sole criterion for inclusion in Band Aid and Live Aid was commercial appeal. As a consequence, there is a complete absence of African presence or even influence on Band Aid and Live Aid. Artists who had performed during the apartheid era in South Africa such as Status Quo and Queen were however included, while self-professed racists such as Eric Clapton also featured.
I remember watching Live Aid and being impressed by Queen’s performance. It’s celebrated in the film Bohemian Rhapsody. Geldof said of it that Queen were absolutely the best band of the day. That they played the best had the best sound and used their time to the full. But I also thought it very strange that Wembley was singing along in unison to the lyrics “We are the Champions, No time for losers, Because we are the Champions of the world.”
For anyone looking for easy or trite conclusions, the balance sheet on Live Aid and Band Aid is decidedly mixed. Together they saved thousands of lives. At the same time, they marked a catalytic moment that perpetuated the narrative of the west as champions of the world, and sealed Africa’s image as the losers we ultimately had no time for, apart from as recipients for celebratory handouts. They portrayed Africa as a broken continent, and defined it for an entire generation.
In Conclusion
So, to sum up Band Aid and Live Aid, it’s a mixed bag.
Do they know it’s Christmas is not a great song by any yardstick, but it wasn’t designed to be.
Its lyrics are on the nose in places and that was preventable at the time by checking them with some actual Ethiopians.
It did make money and it did save lives. You might say, case closed in that respect.
But it also perpetuated the west’s unhealthy post-colonial perception of Africa as a broken thing that always needs fixing.
It failed to solve and may have been instrumental in weakening \ the structural solutions needed to solve the postcolonial issues the west created in the first place.