Publications
GELDOF IN AFRICA Publication date: 01/06/2006 'A beguiling mix of high-ground morality, mystical anthropology, pressure politics and a love letter. This is the agitprop version of Michael Palin' A.A. Gill, Sunday Times With a foreword by Bob
Geldof and over 300 colour photographs, this is the only
official Live8 book to be published, and charts one of the most
momentous days the world has seen in decades. For every copy
sold £5 will go to Live8.
From Geldof's initial reluctance to stage another Band Aid event to the lead up to the concerts around the world and the day itself, this book is a unique record of an extraordinary day witnessed by over 85% of the world's population. The book will also contain backstage images, exclusive photographs from the concerts around the world, reflections and quotes from the many performers. Live 8 includes text and pictures
reminding us exactly what the day was about and what is now
required in the battle towards making poverty history. Includes
reflections on the outcome of the landmark G8 summit in Edinburgh. The Official
Live 8 Book Three days ago, in the late
bright afternoon, I wandered across the scissor-mown lawns at
Gleneagles. I found a little clearing amongst some trees and
hunched down. Overhead the humming bird helicopters clattered and
thumped in the evening air as the world's most powerful people
left what the Secretary General of the United Nations called the
most successful and important G8 Summit for They couldn't see or hear me and I didn't really understand it, but I began to sob. I felt weird, empty. I don't know… it was over. It was over. Because of this thing - this
concert, event, lobby, protest, gathering, moment. Because of you.
And the bands. And the
crews and technicians and thousands of people who made this thing
that was Live 8. Because of all this, the men in those helicopters
had just written a cheque to double aid to $50 billion for the
poor of I thought, 'Now we have to make sure they cash it', and we will. We will get them to spend the money, we will name the corrupt who try to take one percent of it and we will speed up the 100% debt cancellation for the poorest countries that was also confirmed at Gleneagles. I think I cried because I was never sure it was going to work. That billions of us could force the men in charge to move. I was worried that they would remain forever remote, unreachable in the isolated vacuum of their national power. But it did work. In the end there were just too many of us. In other places in this book you will see what it was all about and what it means for the future of the poorest and weakest people in our world. You already know how we roared on behalf of those who were mute, how we moved power for the powerless, how we walked that long walk for many who cannot even crawl and how billions of us stood up for the beaten down and put-upon. We were lead there by our bands, by musicians who articulate us better than we can ourselves. They talk a language understood by all humanity, and they have lead us on this long 20 year journey from Live Aid. In their music is the sum of our longing for universal decency. They communicate dismay and disgust at the daily carnival of dying that parades across our TV screens. In the nightly pornography of poverty hundreds of thousands die annually simply because they are too poor to stay alive. What a glorious, magnificent day. What a rejection of the defeat of cynicism, I thought as I watched the TV monitor side stage showing me four continents, nine countries and their greatest artists, nine cities and their greatest sites, millions physically present and thousands of millions spiritually there as we watched this one concert, one moment, one idea winding itself around what was truly one world that afternoon. And then I got a bizarre tickling sensation, thinking just maybe this is going to work. Three days ago, crouched down
among the chopper beaten trees of Gleneagles I was shocked that 'the
plan' had indeed worked. The Commission for The long walk. Over. The As are you. At home. In the parks or street or stadia or squares of the world on 2nd July 2005. This was the day we pulled it off. This was the day the powerful were powerless. When they bent in the force of our noisy gale. When we drowned out their endless No's by our boundless Yes. Where the promise of 20 years ago was realised. Everything that rock 'n' roll and had ever been about to me, or seemed to suggest or vaguely promised was made real on that beautiful day. We should never need another event like it. But if we do, new generations know what must be done and they will not fail. The power of this wild music to call us to gather 'bout the electronic hearth of the TV or PC screen will continue. But will it, can it ever be expressed with such power, such elegance, passion and joy as on the summers day last week? My phone rang. I'd had it on 'loudspeaker' for weeks because it was constantly in use and I feared imminent brain cancer, ear rot, overheated temples or whatever. Now with the helicopter noise I couldn't hear. I put it on 'normal' and tried to listen. I had to go. I wiped my eyes and stopped myself being shaky. Didn't want to look silly. That's it for me, I thought, as I clambered into our mini van. On the ground the riot police and machine gunned army waved us past the great security fences. Overhead the choppers thundered away across the glens carrying the men you had made listen. I will never forget that day. Neither will you. Neither must you. Tell your children you were there. That you watched. That you changed the world. You and your mates. All 3.8 billion of them. And when they say why? Tell them that you couldn't stand it. It wasn't fair. It wasn't right. A great injustice was being done. Tell them you were not powerless. Tell them that the bands played and you danced and sang and laughed and in so doing you allowed others you would never see or meet to do the same some day in the future. We played our hearts out. 'And we played real good for free.' Thanks for everything. Bob Geldof Geldof
in Africa
But most of us continue to see Africa as an object, a single, blighted place burning in the relentless glaring heat. For others it occupies a romantic space in our imagination of child-like primitives and wild, beautiful creatures. For still more, it's the dark side of our minds, the impenetrable place, the unknowable mind. And yes, all of this is partially true too much of the time. But there are other Africas.' Bob Geldof View
a slideshow of pictures Bob Geldof wanders through 'the Luminous Continent' with his camera, and putting his mental snapshots into his diary. Stunningly illustrated with his own photos and essays, Geldof in Africa paints a provocative, informative, funny, poignant and endlessly entertaining picture of this extraordinary land. Includes over 350 photographs – many taken by Bob himself – of his amazing journey. LINKS The Commission for Africa's Report G8 news from The BBC The
Nurse who Inspired Live Aid Twenty year Is
That It? Century
will publish an updated edition of Bob's autobiography Is
That It? this autumn. Is That It? was originally published
by Sidgwick and Jackson in 1986 and sold over 300,000
hardbacks in the UK alone. |
'Africa is not the Dark Continent as so often
described by writers from the gloomy northern skies of Europe.
Not the Dark Continent at all. It is the Luminous Continent.
Drenched in sun, pounded by heat and shimmering in its blinding
glare. And within this immense continent, deserts with their
seas of sand, tropics with their jungles, equators with their
rain forest and coasts with more animals and fish than are
imaginable.There are more people, languages and cultures
here than anywhere else on our planet. Africa is quite simply
the most extraordinary beautiful and luminous place on earth.
s
ago, Michael Buerk's reports on the famine in Ethlopia shocked the
West into action and resulted in the biggest relief programme the
world had ever seen, supported by Bob Geldof and Live Aid. One of
the most memorable images of that time was of the young British
nurse working for the International Red Cross, who, surrounded by
85,000 starving people, had the terrible task of choosing which
children to help out of all those who were too far gone to be
saved. They called her 'Mamma Claire'. 'In her was vested the
power of life and death,' Bob Geldof has said, 'She had become
God-like, and that is unbearable for anyone.' Earlier this year
Michael Buerk persuaded Claire Bertschinger to return to Ethiopia
for the first time to confront her feelings of guilt, and the
result was a moving documentary shown in January 04. When she
joined the International Red Cross, Claire Bertschinger was
fulfilling a passionate vocation for relief work in dangerous
places. Apart from Ethiopia, she has worked with war wounded and
hostages in Labanon, with the Mudjahadeen in Afghanistan, and with
prisoners and victims of crossfire in Uganda, Sierra Leone and the
Sudan. Often working in war zones under fire herself, she has
shown an impressive combination of courage, commitment, compassion
and resourcefulness. Her story is of a warm, charismatic woman who
chose to save lives rather than settle down and start her own
family - and in the process found a great personal happiness.