[Ed. note: This is the 40th in a series of personal essays by the @U2 staff about songs and/or albums that have had great meaning or impact in our lives.]
Perhaps like a lot of U2 fans, my main obsession alongside the band is Africa — the idea, the image, the reality, the fantasy, the politics, and particularly the history, the latter of which I have chosen to make the main focus of my degree. Since I first began to take Bono's words about the continent seriously not long after discovering U2's music, its grip on me has at times felt remorseless. But as well as having shaped me for the past seven years, Africa -- whatever that might be -- has begun to recently change the way I view the band, and especially the man, that first sparked my interest in it.
Like many fans, I was deeply moved by the MTV diary Bono recorded with Chris Tucker in 2002, which I first saw on an MTV World AIDS Day special. I remember sitting and watching, a disconcerting swirl of emotions rising in my stomach every time a condemned AIDS victim was trotted out for the cameras along with examples of the poverty-stricken wretchedness the Ugandan community was apparently inflicted with. Up until then, my interest in U2's music had been growing rapidly, but Bono still remained a figure of some mystery. I was dimly aware of his humanitarian activities, having caught them via occasional snippets on the evening news or in the music press, but it wasn't until then that I was shocked into facing the grim realities he was attempting to present to the world. I was simply appalled, not only at the depravation I'd seen, but at myself; at my own selfishness and apathy, at my own ignorance of issues such as poverty and global AIDS. As the show ended, I felt my life turn around. This had to change. I had to change. The world and these people depended on me.
I sometimes wish I still believed that.
From that point on, my perspective on the world outside began to change. I proudly signed up to DATA and, when it rolled around in 2005, the Make Poverty History campaign. I also joined my local Amnesty and Greenpeace groups and put my name down for almost every U2-related cause I could find, from Burma and Palestine to death penalty abolition and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Those early years as a fan impressed on me most perhaps the need, however impossible it seems at times, to lead a decent, ethical life, and many of those causes I still fervently believe in. The Africa stuff, however, I probably don't.
Regarding Africa, I didn't question Bono's agenda, something my liberal-leaning parents were happy to encourage. I believed ardently that more aid was what was best, and that anyone who disagreed did so out of self-centredness or ignorance. Nobody around me with the same interest seemed to think differently; it was simply seen as the Right Thing, a defining statement of your human decency. I so rarely took off my white wristband it felt like an extension of my being.
Things began to change, however, when I left school. By that point, I was used to hearing people badmouth Bono, but most of it I dismissed as being a predictable tenet of my jaded and disinterested generation. To quote Neil McCormick, I was already becoming a snob about something I knew very little about. But at university I felt the tectonic plates shifting again.
I hate feeling like my time at college is all I've come to talk about, entering my writings as frequently as it does. But in truth, it's all I've known for the past two years, and more and more I've come to realise how my life didn't really begin until then.
Without wanting to descend into self-pity, my time in high school had not been a happy one. I had essentially been one of the "weird kids," and when to my delight I found myself at a university that appeared to be full of everyone who had also been the "weird kid," I realised that for the first time in my life I could be a hedonist. I could drink whiskey until 5 a.m. with my friends whilst discussing Nietzsche, stumble late and hung-over into lectures the next day before heading out again the following evening. I wanted to truly allow myself my heart's desires, now that I appeared to have found people who genuinely seemed to like me and enjoy my company. I wanted to go crazy -- or else I knew I'd go crazy.
But amidst the bourbon-soaked haze that was my freshman year, I realised something else. The people I was around had different views than me on Africa, but that wasn't because they were stupid -- on the contrary, they were far smarter, more well-informed and coming from a place more grounded in reason than I. Doubts began to form in my mind about everything I'd believed so religiously and unquestioningly for the past few years. But it was still all just bar-talk with other students. It wasn't until I ran into a particular academic at the university that my view really changed.
After discovering at the end of my first year that I'd chosen the wrong subject to major in (economics), I duly failed and re-enrolled on a history course, signing up to all the modules about Africa. Perhaps it was apt, if not slightly prophetic, that the man teaching the class, whom I'll simply refer to as Richard, was Irish and looked like a stunningly handsome cross between Larry and a young Rattle & Hum-era Adam. He also was, and still is, a genius, a brilliant historian and an incredibly eloquent, funny and charismatic man. His lectures held me riveted, and our seminar discussions were great fun, a place where we were given the opportunity to debate and argue in an intense but incredibly warm and laid-back atmosphere. I was starting to fully recognise the benefits of education for its own sake, not simply as a tool for passing exams and scoring high grades, or as something to just use to show off to those around me.
But most of all, his views on Africa made me realise how little I really understood the place. I was faced with the fact that so many of the people who had shaped my view of the continent, including politicians, NGOs, economists, celebrities and even my own friends and family, had claimed to know how to engage with African societies, but in reality didn't have the courage to admit how limited their knowledge was. It shocked me how I'd thought for so long that it was enough to simply do a tour around a small village or a community in a particular country, build a school or a well, talk to a few people and pose for a few photographs, and to therefore arrogantly assume that you now understood the people there. Instead of feeling admiring, I was now slightly nauseous whenever I watched Bono jet around with politicians and political scientists, horrified that he seemed to have become part of their shallow clientele. As opposed to feeling angry and defensive when I heard Richard pour scorn upon him and Geldof, I couldn't help but agree with him deep down. I suddenly realised why some people had no patience with a (albeit self-proclaimed) spoiled-rotten rock star who was, despite all his claims to understand the problems afflicting parts of Africa, still going back to his mansions in Dublin or France at the end of the day.
I explored some of the arguments regarding aid in greater detail not long ago in an OTR. I was aware that it might cause some offense, but I couldn't help but feel a lot of it had to be said, even just for the sake of presenting an alternative view. At the risk of sounding arrogant, the reaction I got was rather unexpected; more than a dozen people e-mailed me to say that it had struck a chord, and were glad that another fan felt the same way.
This view was exacerbated when I headed to South Africa over the summer, spending a month working for a magazine in Cape Town. Following Richard's advice, I was determined not to go out with an NGO or charity; I was determined not to have an agenda, to assume that simply because I was from the West that somehow my help was wanted or needed. African countries had had a bit too much of that already, I couldn't help but think. I wanted not to advise, but simply to listen and learn, even if it made me feel very uncomfortable.
A visit to a poverty-stricken township just outside the South African capital further entrenched but also complicated my feelings. I was depressed by how doing tours around these shanty-towns had now become part of the tourist's itinerary, where the inhabitants of the flotsam-and-jetsam-built houses were brought out and displayed like creatures in a zoo for the gawking onlookers from Europe or the U.S. Even though our tour had been arranged by a taxi driver who lived there as opposed to an external company, I still felt like I and the people I was with were intruding. I felt deeply uncomfortable and distressed ... even though that was probably in some ways a good thing. My ideals were truly in a state of flux.
As our taxi pulled away, I realised that the only idea I was certain of was that although my default setting was to feel sorry for the people around me, I realised with a pang that such an emotion was not mine to feel -- for all I knew, they could be extremely happy in their families and communities. I didn't know them at all. How could I expect to after having spent only a few brief hours with them?
Ultimately, this trip had been characterised by those of us from abroad simply coming to South Africa briefly to fraternise with the locals during the day, doing things that would look good on our CVs, before going back at night to sleep in youth hostels with running water and electricity, where the roofs were not made of tin and the walls not made of mud. For all my liberal posturing, I was still a Westerner through-and-through. The joys, frustrations, pains and pursuits of all the people in the townships were not mine. I was still ultimately not seeing them as equals, and I left feeling that what I'd done had not been a sign of engagement and understanding, but merely belittlement and condescension. Whoever or whatever Africans were, I realised, they were not as simple as Westerners, from colonialism up until the present day, had frequently made them out to be.
Amidst all this came the inevitable jolts at the fact that I occasionally wanted Bono to simply shut up. U2 and particularly Bono had changed my life, in some ways saved it. It was because of the front man that I had developed any interest in Africa at all. I knew that innately none of this meant I loved him any less, but the doubts sown by the new crowd I was mixing with were making me feel increasingly guilty and disloyal.
Thankfully, with U2 there always appears to be a sort of homecoming. The song that spoke to me the most at this time was "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight."
"There's a part of me in the chaos that's quiet
And there's a part of you that wants me to riot.
Everybody needs to cry or needs to spit
Every sweet tooth needs just a little hit
Every beauty needs to go out with an idiot
How can you stand next to the truth and not see it."
To some they just seemed like random couplets thrown together. But once again I felt that the song was speaking to me in a voice as clear as the day. Everyone needs to let go occasionally, to truly embrace what they think is right, it seemed to be saying. Don't feel guilty.
"It's not a hill, it's a mountain
As you start out the climb
Do you believe me or are you doubting
We're gonna make it all the way to the light
But I know I'll go crazy if I don't go crazy tonight."
Yes, I'm doubting. But Bono is not God, and I feel sure I can be forgiven for not taking his every word as gospel. I can't ignore what I feel are the obvious ideas staring at me in the face. The road ahead is going to be painful, one of having to abandon my old certainties and preconceptions and being prepared to embrace light from whatever source it may come.
Yet at the same time, I've begun to understand that as much as I adore and admire my African history tutor, having been as much of an inspiration to me as Bono, he has none of Bono's idealism. There were times during our discussions about Africa when I would catch myself, looking with amusement at the arrogance underlying some of them, sitting as we were feeling smug at our laying claims to having knowledge that so many didn't have access to. Richard appeared at times typical of many academics, permanently disenchanted with the world, forever standing at the sidelines critiquing but unwilling to engage with it. What use was any of these new-found ideas and concepts, I felt, if they weren't going to move beyond the ivory towers of academia and reach the world outside? I'm determined to do something with them. I don't know what exactly, but I'm working on it. ;)
It's a mountain, not a hill -- but a rather exciting one. Every time I listen to "Crazy..." I feel more liberated, imbued with a sense that despite the world now seeming 10 times more complicated than it had previously, life has a new intellectual urgency, full of possibility and meaning. I've drawn inspiration from a book written by the brilliant South African journalist Rian Malan, My Traitor's Heart, in which one of his interview subjects, Creina Alcock, a woman who spent almost her entire adult life living among the country's Zulu communities, gave voice to the idea of a lifetime: "Love is worth nothing until it has been tested by its own defeat ... love is to enable you to transcend defeat." She reminds me of someone....
As I now watch Bono at his usual Africa-related endeavours, I realise that I've never loved him more. But it's a different kind of love, one that I can't help but feel has grown and matured, not based on unquestioning devotion but instead accepting his complexities and flaws; it's perhaps evolved into something more like Creina Alcock's defeated love.
I don't write this to arrogantly claim in any way that I have the answers to the problems that may or may not afflict Africa. I only know that I want to learn more about the place, an exhilarating process that I know will consume the rest of my life. I still love Bono, perhaps more than words could ever say. But I don't think he has the answers either. Maybe that's not such a bad thing....
© @U2/Fry, 2009.
