Buerk knew that he had captured a profoundly affecting scene. Here was a white woman, surrounded by the poor and powerless, and with the stroke of a pen she could decide life or death. But at that moment, he didn’t know that his report on the Ethiopian famine would become one of the most influential pieces of television ever broadcast. It would help to mobilize an unprecedented amount of attention for an African calamity. And it would provoke into action a powerful, quixotic force — one that has transformed (some say warped) the way that the Western public relates to Africa and its burdens.
Three days after he left Mekele, Buerk arrived in London with a sequence of shots cut together from Mohamed Amin’s footage. His report led the bbc’s six o’clock news. That night and the next, scenes from northern Ethiopia flickered across television screens in Britain and around the world. One of those sets belonged to a minor Irish rock star, who watched from his home in London’s Chelsea district as Claire Bertschinger made her unthinkable choice. “In her was vested the power of life and death,” Bob Geldof later said, “[which] is unbearable for anyone.” What he had seen sparked in him a righteous fury. He started to phone his friends.
Four weeks later, Geldof and Midge Ure, singer for the band Ultravox, coaxed the syrupy lyrics of “Do They Know It’s Christmas? ” from the golden throats of Britain’s pop-music royalty. It became the fastest-selling single in UK history, and all the money earned — over $8 million (all figures US) — went to famine relief. Then came the American version, “We Are the World,” and Canada’s ” Tears are Not Enough.”
Geldof was both rebel and prophet — the rock-star ideal. He channelled public anger at the Cold War geopolitics that had prevented a timely response to the famine. Europe and North America had produced bumper crops that year, and reports emerged that mountains of stockpiled grain and lakes of wine were simply going to waste. On television, Geldof interrupted Margaret Thatcher during one of the Iron Lady’s smug defences of the status quo. “But Prime Minister,” he said, hair tousled, anger barely checked, “there are millions of people dying, and that’s the terrible thing.”
Schools held bake sales. Union leaders, clergy, and comedians worked their audiences for donations. Inuit communities in Canada raised thousands of dollars and sent a delegation to Ethiopia. Politicians decided to ride the tidal wave of public interest, and soon air forces from European countries, the United States, and the Soviet Union were competing with each other to air-drop food into the Ethiopian highlands.
The climax of all this attention was Live Aid. On July 13, 1985, less than nine months after Buerk’s broadcast, Geldof and Ure herded dozens of pop stars onto stages at Wembley Stadium in London and jfk Stadium in Philadelphia. U2’s Bono, pallid and dressed in a faux-Tudor jacket, delivered a searing performance of “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Phil Collins sang in London and then rocketed across the Atlantic in a Concorde, arriving in Philadelphia in time to drum for a reunited Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. The live broadcast of this “global jukebox” lasted for sixteen hours and reached an unprecedented 1.5 billion viewers.
The day’s iconic moment came when David Bowie introduced a short video shot by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Ethiopia. On the stadium Jumbotrons and on TV sets around the planet, an emaciated boy wailed in anguish and a three-year-old girl appeared to take her last, gasping breath. It was perhaps the first time that millions of human beings wept at the same moment, for the same reason.
Live Aid, together with spinoffs like Fashion Aid and Sport Aid, ultimately raised more than $140 million. Most of the money went to large humanitarian organizations, though several months after the concert Geldof flew to Ethiopia to oversee a flotilla of Live Aid trucks as they delivered food to the highlands. In addition to private donations, the sustained public outcry leveraged huge amounts of aid out of governments: in 1985, they gave 1.27 million tonnes of food to Ethiopia and doubled the country’s official development assistance to $720 million. That sudden influx of aid saved hundreds of thousands of lives in a part of the world that just one year earlier had been almost completely ignored.
“The interesting question,” said Michael Buerk when I met him at the posh Reform Club on London’s Pall Mall, “is why people reacted in a way that had never happened before and has never happened since.” Buerk, one of Britain’s most prominent journalists until his recent semi-retirement, believes that the widespread generosity was in part a backlash against the greed that characterized the Thatcher and Reagan era. Technological change also played a role. Brian Stewart, the cbc Television journalist who followed up on Buerk’s report, notes that new video and satellite technologies led audiences to feel as though they were watching the distant tragedy in real time.
But most important were the images themselves. The shuffling skeletons. The shrivelled babies. Viewers hadn’t yet developed any immunity to scenes like these. “Somehow it got through to people that this was a situation they could do something about,” said Buerk. “And out bursts this clapped-out pop singer, Bob Geldof, who articulated the feelings people had in a way that was intensely disrespectful but charismatic. People thought, ’ There are millions dying in a world full of food. Bugger the complexities, let’s save lives.’ ”
