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"As a band we have a giant collective ego. It picks us up. Anyway, I don't think I'd be a good bank clerk. Or a hot dog salesman. I might be a good president." -- Bono, 1982 |
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"As a band we have a giant collective ego. It picks us up. Anyway, I don't think I'd be a good bank clerk. Or a hot dog salesman. I might be a good president." -- Bono, 1982 |
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In Rwanda, U2's Bono Denounces 'Dehumanization' of Africans
AFP,
May 18, 2006
Irish rock star and activist Bono decried western portrayals of Africans as "dehumanizing" and urged greater efforts to battle poverty and disease on the continent.
On his first visit to genocide-scarred Rwanda, the U2 front-man was visibly disturbed after visiting a memorial to the 800,000 victims of the 1994 mass killings. The mega-celebrity has launched a global campaign to boost world awareness of the dire poverty and sickness that ravages the African continent. Bono listened somberly, head bowed, as Eugenia Nyirakiruzamye, a 42-year-old survivor of the slaughters with deep scars on her face and neck, recounted her ordeal in almost unbearable detail at a church-turned-genocide memorial here. He then silently laid an arrangement of white lilies on a vault housing the remains of mainly minority Tutsis who were killed while seeking shelter in the church as Hutu extremists rampaged through the country. Bono's spirits brightened a short time later, however, when he visited a nearby village targetted for U.N. development aid. Students from a local school greeted him with singing, drumming and dancing. "The thing I'm learning is breaking with cliches," he said. "We see this pattern of Africans displayed as supplicants. We need to start portraying Africans as noble, entrepreneurial, very handsome, beautiful, smart. "Break the cliches," Bono told a crowd at the school in Mayange. "As people dehumanize African people it's very easy to turn away from them." His comments came on the second leg of a six-nation tour of Africa that has already taken him to Lesotho, and will see him visit Tanzania, Nigeria, Mali and Ghana in the next eight days. On his arrival in Kigali from Maseru, Bono visited a hospital where he was shocked to see patients sharing beds and decrepit facilities. He said struggling health care workers, and not celebrities, were the world's real heroes. "I come from a culture where people think that pop stars and rock stars are heroes, which is preposterous," he said. "The hospital workers here should be the heroes." © Agence France Presse, 2006.
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