Bob Geldof’s new book – a fascinatingly candid and gritty collection of essays, diary entries and photos from his recent travels in West, Central and East Africa – reveals his tremendous affection for the continent. Melanie McGrath reads between the lines to find out what makes Geldof, the traveller, tick.
 Towards the back of Geldof in Africa is a picture of Sir Bob on a podium with Nelson Mandela. While the great former president looks spruce in his overcoat and fur hat, Sir Bob looks like a grizzled, cartoon hyena the morning after the night before. A more unlikely advocate of Africa is difficult to imagine and yet, in the 20 years since the first Live Aid concerts, this is precisely what Bob Geldof has become: a gruff, obdurate champion of the world’s economically poorest and, some would argue, culturally richest continent; Comrade-in-Chief of the Angry about Africa Brigade.
There have been hints of another Bob along the way – the loving father, the impassioned husband – but this gentler, more complex and considered Bob has remained largely hidden. It’s been close on thirty years since he first burst onto the pop scene, but all we really know about Bob Geldof is what we gather from his mucky-mouthed pronouncements on everything from child custody to AIDS. And all we tend to see of him are that spray of grizzly hair and those tiny, bagged-up eyes which rise to heaven at the first whiff of official-speak and political spin.
It would have been easy to have passed the man off long ago as some foul-tongued, ranting oddity, were there not ample evidence of his ability to get a job done. Like a hippo striking the surface, Sir Bob only has to stir to take half the river with him. Underestimate him at your peril.
Geldof in Africa offers a more balanced picture of a man whose complexities we’ve long had to guess at or simply ignore. He wrote the book and took the photographs for it (with some additions from professional snapper John Maguire) while filming for the BBC series because as he himself says, ‘TV reduces everything’.
Geldof in Africa the book is everything Geldof the man could not show or say on TV: a collection, or, more accurately, a disorganisation of Bob’s bits about the continent. The result is a delightfully rushed affair, a sort of frantic supermarket sweep across a continent which has, more than any other, refused western expectations of order and definition.
In all honesty, Geldof isn’t a ‘good’ writer, but nor is he by any means a bad one. A book like this calls less for perfect prose than for an honest eye and some hard thought.
It is now three quarters of a century since Karen Blixen dreamed of Africa, but Blixen’s musings still colour western expectations of the continent and Geldof is as easily seduced by them as anyone else. Off he goes, scooting across dazzlingly romantic landscapes, documenting starry nights in the Sahara, the softness of the air in the Tanzanian savannah and the ‘dense, sexy hothouse of mad, wild, verdant fertility’ of the Congolese jungle. All this he does well enough, but the real genius of the man lies not so much in his ability to enter the Blixen dream but in his willingness and capacity – quite rare among western writers on Africa – to emerge, still wide-eyed with wonder, into the real but less glamorous world of busy human interactions on the other side.
A boy in the middle of nowhere wants to discuss football. “Don’t you realise 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?” replies Sir Bob. But his funk is fleeting. Geldof implicitly understands what every open-minded traveller who spends much time in Africa knows, that this is a modern, peopled continent, a place of everyday delights and a few extraordinary horrors but always and resolutely a continent in the here and now.
The boy’s interest in David Beckham gives him common ground and in the end Geldof is grateful for it. ‘The striking thing,’ he says, ‘is that tradition and modernity [are] not opposites, or a starting and a finishing point, but something which has fused to make a singular African solution.’
Someone with Geldof’s profile can never travel like you or me. He is accompanied in Africa by bodyguards and interpreters and has meetings with Mandela and Arafat, but throughout it all he remains a remarkably ordinary curmudgeon with a fine sense of his own perversity, cheerfully sporting the full range of travellers’ gripes. Africa’s chaotic airports, its dodgy infrastructure, the elasticity of ‘Afrotime’,and the tenacity of its mosquitoes and of its corrupt officials all get pretty good airplay.
He moans about having to camp and not being able to get a decent tot of whisky in Islamic countries. Early flights and (get this) loud night-time music come in for some Geldofian growls, too. But all that is kind of beside the point, because the fact of the matter is that Bob Geldof clearly has a deep and genuine devotion to Africa and loves and admires its people. The fierce light, the energy and dynamism of the cities, the fabulous variety of its landscapes, the grace and stoicism and adaptability of Africans, the lyrical beauty of Africa’s 2000 languages, even the odd bit of wildlife, these all enchant Bob Geldof, because where and when it really counts, the Comrade in Chief of the Angry About Africa Brigade is a man who takes Africa on its own terms.
This, of course, is what travelling through Africa is all about and why too, if you look carefully at the photographs in this book, you will see an uncompromising commitment not only to Africa and Africans but also to the truth. A wondrous swish of white sand beach in West Africa still bears its traditional garnish of washed-up bottles. A thornbush is leaved with multicoloured plastic bags. A beautiful Mursi girl puts on a grump, an elaborately cicatriced Sudanese woman stands before the camera with beads of sweat still running down her face. These are Africans and this is Africa. Take it, says Geldof – you’d be a bloody fool to leave it.
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