The white guilt of Bono is keeping Africa down

[link to blogs.telegraph.co.uk]

Bono has good intentions. The road to hell is paved with them. The superhighway to hell is paved with the good intentions of dilettante rockstars whose attitude to aid has kept much of Africa under the boot of foreign powers. The world still imagines Africa is a land of malnourished children, starvation and death. But take Nigeria, for instance, a country of over 200 million people with more than 200 spoken languages and an artistic heritage that includes Chinua Achebe and Fela Kuti. The white guilt of men like Bono is keeping Africa down.
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no is not an idiot – contrary to what graffiti across Dublin claims. He has read his history and written powerful songs about it. Sunday Bloody Sunday and Pride (In The Name Of Love) are just two tracks that have earned their place in pop’s pantheon. But he seems to deny Irish history and fail to relate the Great Irish Famine to what he has observed in Africa.
The famine wasn’t down to food shortages. There were enough crops but they had to be exported to pay rents. The famine was a failure of free markets and the result of an avaricious elite, the same kind of elite that Bono fails to subject to proper scrutiny. He talks of freeing political prisoners and releasing the poor of the world from the grinding reality of daily hunger. That is laudable. However, his solutions tend to rest on the largesse of men and women whose lives have been dedicated to making the rich richer – and keeping the poor in their place.

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Last Edited by Uncle Fuck Stick on 09/23/2013 11:05 PM