The next conversation is the third installment from that November afternoon we spent in Killiney in 2002. You’ll notice that the mood got heavier. Luckily, we had the MTV awards, pizza, Christina Aguilera, and a few glasses of Chablis to lighten things up.
Your picture has recently appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the tag-line: “Can Bono save the world?” You have taken a part-time job as a world ambassador for the DATA organization (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa—but also Democracy, Accountability, and Transparency for Africa), a group you co-founded with Bobby Shriver. Before we discuss the roots of your involvement in humanitarian action, I have to ask: Don’t you ever feel like the world is just shit and nothing can be done about it?
I do get depressed on occasion, a bit black about the uphill nature of this particular struggle. What we’re talking about, in DATA though, in the end, comes from a great tradition. It’s the journey of equality. Equality is an idea that was first really expressed by the Jews when God told them that everyone was equal in His eyes. A preposterous idea then and still hard to hang on to now. You can imagine these farmers standing there with sheep shit on their shoes in front of Pharaoh. And Pharaoh would say: “You are equal to me?” And they’d look in their book and they’d go: “That’s what it says here.” After a while, people accepted that, though not easily. Rich and poor were equal in God’s eyes. But not blacks! Black people can’t be equal. Not women! You’re not asking us to accept that?! You see, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we have to accept this: it says that everyone is equal. Now most people accept that women, blacks, Irish, and Jews are equal, but only within these borders. I’m not sure we accept that Africans are equal.
I’m not sure about what you’re saying either.
Right now there is the biggest pandemic in the history of civilization, happening in the world now with AIDS. It’s bigger than the Black Death, which took a third of Europe in the Middle Ages. Sixty-five hundred Africans are dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease. And it is not a priority for the West: two 9/11s a day, eighteen jumbo jets of fathers, mothers, families falling out of the sky. No tears, no letters of condolence, no fifty-one-gun salutes. Why? Because we don’t put the same value on African life as we put on a European or an American life. God will not let us get away with this, history certainly won’t let us get away with our excuses. We say we can’t get these antiretroviral drugs to the farthest reaches of Africa, but we can get them our cold fizzy drinks. The tiniest village, you can find a bottle of Coke. Look, if we really thought that an African life was equal in value to an English, a French, or an Irish life, we wouldn’t let two and a half million Africans die every year for the stupidest of reasons: money. We just wouldn’t. And a very prominent head of state said to me: “It’s true. If these people weren’t Africans, we just couldn’t let it happen.” We don’t really deep down believe in their equality.
Who said that?
I can’t say . . . but it was a head of state who was ashamed. It actually scandalized him. We have written off Africans. So the next step in the journey of equality is to get to a place where we accept that you cannot choose your neighbor. In the Global Village, distance no longer decides who is your neighbor, and “Love thy neighbor” is not advice, it’s a command.
You’re from the same country as Jonathan Swift. You know he had no hope in the human race . . .
“Eat the rich” was a classic. What a great line!
I read Gulliver’s Travels when I was fifteen, and I found it said a lot about mankind’s evil nature. But then, I’m much more of a pessimist than you are.
But it looked impossible for African Americans to have emancipation from slavery! The idea that women would have a vote and run corporations and be prime minister of England, even fifty years ago, was a very hard thing to accept.
I see your point. We’ve certainly witnessed changes, and maybe we’re more generous than our grandparents.
I don’t know about that. But what we can say is that there has been in the areas of equality a lot of progress.
My objection is that different civilizations don’t keep the same pace. That is what history shows. We in Western Europe and North America live in a postmodern world, whereas Africa lingers on in the Middle Age, or pre–Middle Age. So however well-intentioned we may be, there is an unbridgeable gap. So how do you think we can come to understand each other?
But why is Africa pre–Middle Age? The answer to that question is historical. And let me illustrate this. [Bono abruptly gets up and calls out to his daughter] Jojo! Jordan! [He leaves the room and climbs up the stairs. He returns more than a minute later, bringing back a school manual. He sits down again and starts to leaf through it.] This is a fifteen-year-old’s geography textbook. I was looking at this today, and it tells about it exactly. [Eventually finds the passage and proceeds to read out] “Income gap. Two hundred years ago, it appears that very little difference existed in living standards between the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere. Today, a very wide income gap exists: the North is many times richer than the South. What brought about this gap? The answer seems to lie in colonialism, trade, and debt.” They’re explaining to this fifteen-year-old kid how the reason why Africa is still in the Middle Age is largely to do with us, and our exploitation through French and British colonialism, but also in their present exploitation of unfair trade agreements, or old debts. You can’t fix every problem. But the ones you can, you must. To the degree we are responsible, we must fix. When you ask me to just accept that civilizations are just at a different level, there is a reason why they are. That is my answer.
OK. But let’s try this from a different angle. You know that colonialism in France, in the late nineteenth century, was considered a left-wing idea. It was championed by humanitarians.
[laughs] You wanna ask the Africans! Did they feel it was humanitarian?
I’m just telling you what the thinking was at the time in France.
Some people wanted to bring wealth and development to those populations. It may sound unacceptable to our modern ears, because of the evils concealed or brought about. But if you read the literature from that time, you would see that some of the colonialists were actually idealists . . .
What colonies did France have? Algeria, Côte-d’Ivoire . . . How many? Vietnam . . . France was very generous to a lot of countries there. [laughs]But there were many excuses for it! The missions . . . to bring Christianity to the Dark Continent.
Sure, and to bring them the benefits of Western civilization. I’m not saying we have to endorse that today.
But in return, they were robbed of their natural resources: gold, silver, and finally the right to rule themselves. So, however way it was coached or described, in the end, this movement set back that continent by hundreds and hundreds of years. Civilization did not come with colonialism. That’s patently clear.
All noble ideas inevitably carry with them the weight of evil.
Why?
Well, look at communism, for instance. Or, you’re often telling people that the United States were a great idea, but look at all the wrongs it caused. I don’t think you can look at history in a black-and-white way. Every good thing has a dark side.
Right.
Some would say the United States based itself on the killing and the extermination of native populations.
Yes. I think most Americans would admit that America had a bloody beginning, not the founding fathers, but what came after. And the blood is still crying from the ground. Even today the level of violence and gun crime is extraordinary. You wonder if there isn’t some kind of relationship with its violent past. However, outside of that genocide, the peoples who made America their New World came to cling to the idea that everyone could be equal. They might have inherited some bad Karma from the abuse of native culture and peoples, but they were holding on to an idea very tightly as they arrived on the shore and ports of America, and it was equality. I guess politically it’s an idea that came from France originally, and it is still one of the hardest ideas to live up to. It’s a shame there was a layer before it got there, of abuse, but that does not contaminate the idea. The idea is pure. The place where it was executed may not have been.
Napoleon was the product of noble ideals as well.
[interrupting] I like little guys with big ideas! [laughs]
But his campaigns killed hundreds of thousands of people! It’s the equivalent of a genocide. But Napoleon still had many supporters among the conquered peoples, because he was spreading the ideals of the French Revolution, like freedom over tyranny. Generous ideas quite often bring about bloody results. So often, the good and the bad are closely intertwined.
I think you underestimate evil.
Right, it’s true. Look: evil encroaches in tiny footsteps on every great idea. And evil can almost outrun most great ideas, but finally, in the end, there is light in the world. I accept God chooses to work with some pretty poor material. But I’m much more amazed by what people are capable of than I am by what they’re not capable of, which is to say evil doesn’t surprise me. The jungle is never far from the surface of our skin. No, I’m never surprised by evil, but I’m much more excited about what people are capable of. And we’re talking about the journey of equality here. Well, it’s ongoing. There’s been some incredible progress but, I’ll accept, just more than there has been terrible regression. You’re right. With science comes E=C2, out of which we have fusion. You know that famous quote from Oppenheimer? In July 1945, at the testing of the first nuclear experiment, in the desert of Alamogordo, in New Mexico, when he realized what his science had uncovered, he made the famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita, the Indian holy book: “I have become Death itself.”* So . . . Please, please, please! Don’t ever see me as a sort of wide-eyed idealist who only sees the good in people. Cockeyed, maybe.
It’s a very important point.
I do see the good in people, but I also see the bad—I see it in myself. I know what I’m capable of, good and bad. It’s very important that we make that clear. Just because I often find a way around the darkness doesn’t mean that I don’t know it’s there.
How do you find your way through darkness? I guess, just like anyone, you stumble from time to time.
I try to make the light brighter.
And what does the trick for you? Give me an example.
Harry Belafonte is one of my great heroes. He’s an old-school leftist and holds on to certain principles like others hold on to their life. He told me this story about Bobby Kennedy, which changed my life indeed, pointed me in the direction I am going now politically. Harry remembered a meeting with Martin Luther King when the civil rights movement had hit a wall in the early sixties: [impersonating croaky voice of Belafonte] “I tell you it was a depressing moment when Bobby Kennedy was made attorney general. It was a very bad day for the civil rights movement.” And I said: “Why was that?” He said: “Oh, you see, you forget. Bobby Kennedy was Irish. Those Irish were real racists; they didn’t like the black man. They were just one step above the black man on the social ladder, and they made us feel it. They were all the police, they were the people who broke our balls on a daily basis. Bobby at that time was famously not interested in the civil rights movement. We knew we were in deep trouble. We were crestfallen, in despair, talking to Martin, moaning and groaning about the turn of events, when Dr. King slammed his hand down and ordered us to stop the bitchin’: “Enough of this,” he said. “Is there nobody here who’s got something good to say about Bobby Kennedy?” We said: “Martin, that’s what we’re telling ya! There is no one. There is nothing good to say about him. The guy’s an Irish Catholic conservative badass, he’s bad news.” To which Martin replied: “Well, then, let’s call this meeting to a close. We will readjourn when somebody has found one thing redeeming to say about Bobby Kennedy, because that, my friends, is the door through which our movement will pass.” So he stopped the meeting and he made them all go home. He wouldn’t hear any more negativity about Bobby Kennedy. He knew there must be something positive. And if it was there, somebody could find it.
Did they ever find anything redeeming about Bobby Kennedy?
Well, it turned out that Bobby was very close with his bishop. So they befriended the one man who could get through to Bobby’s soul and turned him into their Trojan horse. They sort of ganged up on this bishop, the civil rights religious people, and got the bishop to speak to Bobby. Harry became emotional at the end of this tale: “When Bobby Kennedy lay dead on a Los Angeles pavement, there was no greater friend to the civil rights movement. There was no one we owed more of our progress to than that man,” which is what I always thought. I mean, Bobby Kennedy is still an inspiration to me. And whether he was exaggerating or not, that was a great lesson for me, because what Dr. King was saying was: Don’t respond to caricature—the Left, the Right, the Progressives, the Reactionary. Don’t take people on rumor. Find the light in them, because that will further your cause. And I’ve held on to that very tightly, that lesson. And so, don’t think that I don’t understand. I know what I’m up against. I just sometimes do not appear to.
I think that someone in your position has the ability to do things that other people can’t. People who run relief agencies don’t get to talk to Tony Blair. Still, aren’t you in danger of being used by those politicians, who will in the end do what they have been elected to do, which sometimes isn’t a lot?
I’m available to be used, that is the deal here. I’ll step out with anyone, but I’m not a cheap date. I know that I’m being used, and it’s just at what price.
So what’s the price?
Well, as an example, so far, from the work DATA has been involved in with others, we got in late 2002 an extra five billion dollars from the United States for the poorest of the poor, and a commitment for another twenty billion over the next few years in a combination of increased aid to countries tackling corruption and a historic AIDS initiative. From a conservative administration, that was unthinkable in the development community. Even a year ago [2004].
Would it have been possible if you hadn’t represented that organization?
A lot of people were involved, but I think most would agree that we helped dramatize in a new way as justice rather than charity, as something the Left and Right could work on together, getting radical student activists to work together with conservative church groups. We had rock stars, economists, popes, and politicians all singing off the same hymn sheet.
Did this start with the Drop the Debt campaign?
I was talking about DATA in the U.S., but you’re right, the model was formed by Jubilee 2000 in Europe in their campaign to eliminate Third World debt. In 1997, I was asked to help out in a campaign to use the occasion of the millennium to cancel the chronic debt burdens of the poorest countries on the planet to the richest. Politicians were looking for something dramatic to mark that moment. It would be the abolition of an economic slavery. Some of the countries like Tanzania or Zambia were spending twice as much of their national income servicing old Cold War loans than they were on the health and education of their populace. It was obscene.
But what is it exactly that made them borrow so much in the first place?
Well, you can say it was irresponsible borrowing, but it was also irresponsible lending. In the sixties and the seventies, the West was throwing money at any African country who wasn’t siding with the Communists. The Cold War was being fought in Africa. People like Mobutu, the dictator in what was then called Zaire, stashed this money in Swiss bank accounts and let his people starve to death. It is completely unacceptable to make the grandchildren of those bad decisions pay the price for that. As I say, this was not about charity, this was about justice.
How much have you succeeded in canceling?
About one-third of all such debts, which adds up to a hundred billion dollars’ worth.
And you feel you were an important part of that success.
In truth, I think the place where I had the most impact was the United States. The movement already had a lot of momentum in Europe and especially the U.K., but in the U.S., Jubilee 2000 had been a lot slower to catch on. We were running out of time to grow the grass roots. I had to go straight to the decision-makers, or at the very least the people who knew those decision-makers.
Who were they?
The best phone call I ever made in my opinion was to the most extraordinary woman in the world: Eunice Shriver Kennedy, sister of John F. Kennedy, the woman who in her forties, after having changed the world once advising to elect JFK to president, changed the world once more by starting the Special Olympics. A legend and a lesson in civic duty. All the Kennedys are, and I’m not just saying that because they’re Ireland’s Royal Family, but because I’ve seen how hard they work.
What advice did Eunice Shriver give you?
She told me to ring her son Bobby, which I did. And he immediately put the family Filofax to work for me. Remember Filofax?
In a different lifetime, yeah.
Well, it was contacts. And more than just giving me numbers, he called them and often accompanied me to those appointments.
Would a member of the most famous Democratic family have influence with Republicans?
Actually, some. But there were more than a few meetings where he would hide in the corridor outside. Mind you, his brother-in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger had a lot of Republican friends. Arnie called a congressman from Ohio called John Kasich, who became an important guide through the Republican side of the Congress.
So you feel that without you, the American side of the Drop the Debt campaign would not have been as effective.
Myself and Bobby Shriver. I think that if you asked President Clinton how he got a hundred percent of the bilateral debt canceled for twenty-three countries, he would say that DATA’s forerunner Jubilee 2000 more than helped. If you asked him how it made it through Congress, he would say: “A lot of footwork by a few people.” And I’m certainly one of them. Bobby Shriver and I, Larry Summers, the then treasury secretary, we were dead in the water without John Kasich. President Clinton believed in it, but we had to fight hard to get his way. It’s funny, I thought the president of the United States was the Big Cahuna, the Boss. But he’s not. In the United States, the Congress is in charge. When President Clinton announced his commitment to full cancellation, we thought we cracked it, we were jumping up and down. But then I started getting calls: this isn’t gonna get past Congress. And that’s how I found myself inside the body politic, trying to figure out how it lived and breathed, how it behaved—a rock star wandering around the corridors of power rather than placarding at the gates outside. Strange. Every few weeks I had to travel to Washington, D.C., to go and meet all kinds of unexpected people, in an attempt to get debt cancellation accepted in the United States. It was uphill. Myself and Bobby Shriver were entering a world not just of ideologue politicians, but one of bankers and economists, and a certain elite who guard America’s piggy bank. For most of these people, especially the bankers, it’s against their religion to cancel debts. Bobby had a background in finance, but I was way out of my depth.
So what was your line in that part?
I had one answer and two questions.
I’m not surprised you’d start off with an answer. What was it?
Go back to school. Bobby fixed me an appointment with Professor Jeffrey Sachs at Harvard, which completely changed my life. He emboldened me. He turned the math into music. I spent a lot of time with him on and off campus. He’s a man who sees no obstacles to a great idea.
But did you also meet people who didn’t think that way?
Yes. I also asked and got to meet very conservative economists like Robert J. Barrow, for example. I wanted to get to know the people who might oppose the idea.
What was he like?
I liked him. In the end he wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal, offering us “Two Cheers.”
OK. Now tell me about the two questions.
And the second?
The first, I have just mentioned. “Who can stop this from happening?” I wanted to meet the people who could roadblock us . . . to roadblock them. The second was: “Who’s the Elvis here?” In whatever area I was, I wanted to know who’s the boss, who’s the capo di tutti capi here. “Who’s Elvis,” I used to ask, at banking? And they’d say: “Well, in development, it’s the World Bank, it’s Jim Wolfensohn, it’s the people running the International Monetary Fund.” So I used to go and meet them. It’s Robert Rubin, who was the treasury secretary of the United States, his signature was on every dollar; it’s Paul Volcker, who was the legendary chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Alan Greenspan of his age. I just went all the places they didn’t expect me to turn up. I didn’t go because I wanted to, I went because we had to, to get it through the Congress. It wasn’t enough just to talk to President Clinton. Oddly enough, Bill Clinton’s staff used to call him Elvis anyway. That was his nickname. The Southern twang, I guess. But it turns out Elvis wasn’t enough. In the United States, the president is not the most powerful force—the Congress is. We needed a Colonel Tom* to get our bill passed. And Colonel Tom was the Congress.
So it was like a crash course in how power works.
That’s what it was.
So how did you put that knowledge into practice? What were you able to achieve?
On debt cancellation we won the day. It was close, but with a lot of help from a few people, particularly John Kasich. He was incredible. He passionately made the case to the Republicans. In a floor fight in the House of Representatives, he shouted down opposition to the bill and we made it. It took him months, and me months traveling back and forth from Dublin. Internationally, it was no small victory. If the U.S. hadn’t moved, everyone else would have gotten out. As I say, there was a hundred billion dollars in play, and I’m very proud of our part, however small it was.
So you think your photo with these politicians paid off.
Well, there is three times the amount of children going to school in Uganda now, three times the amount of children as the result of debt cancellation. That’s just one country. All over the developing world, you’ll find hospitals built with that money, real lives changed, communities transformed. And if it didn’t go through Congress, then the Europeans could have fudged there. You see, they move en masse. Would we have gotten there without people taking to the streets, banging the dustbin lids and raising the temperature of the debate? No. You need both. What the protesters are asking is to get in the room. So then, when you get in the room, occupy it, make your argument, and don’t leave till you get the check.
It’s another kind of power: star power.
You know, celebrity is ridiculous. It’s silly, but it is a kind of currency, and you have to spend it wisely. And I’ve learnt that much.
In the U.S., you went from friend of Bill Clinton to flashing a peace sign in a photo op with George W. Bush . . . Please explain, because I’m getting confused here . . .
I was in a photo with President Bush because he’d put 10 billion dollars over three years on the table in a breakthrough increase in foreign assistance called the Millennium Challenge. It is an amusing photograph. I had just got back from accompanying the president as he announced this at the Inter-American Bank. I kept my face straight as we passed the press corps, but the peace sign was pretty funny. He thought so too. Keeping his face straight, he whispered under his breath, “There goes a front page somewhere: Irish rock star with the Toxic Texan.” [laughs]
What an amusing and self-effacing guy. It’s hard to buy that, don’t you think?
You know, I think the swagger and the cowboy boots come with some humor. He is a funny guy. Even on the way to the bank he was taking the piss. The bulletproof motorcade is speeding through the streets of the capital with people waving at the leader of the Free World, and him waving back. I say: “You’re pretty popular here!” He goes [Texan accent]: “It wasn’t always so . . .”—Oh really?—“Yeah. When I first came to this town, people used to wave at me with one finger. Now, they found another three fingers and a thumb.” Isn’t that funny? [laughs]
So you liked this man?
Yes. As a man, I believed him when he said he was moved to also do something about the AIDS pandemic. I believed him. Listen, I couldn’t come from a more different place, politically, socially, geographically. I had to make a leap of faith to sit there. He didn’t have to have me there at all. But, you know, you don’t have to be harmonious on everything—just one thing—to get along with someone.
You put other stuff out of your mind: tax cuts for the rich and an up-and-coming war in Iraq?
You become a single-issue protagonist. You represent a constituency that has no power, no vote, in the West, but whose lives are hugely affected by our body politic. Our clients are the people who are not in the president’s ear. My mouth, because it is, belongs to them. Our clients are the people whose lives depend on these Western drugs, whose lives will be radically altered by new schools and new investment in their country. That’s a position I take very seriously. They didn’t ask me to represent them. Jubilee 2000 asked me to represent them, and, yes, Jubilee 2000 is a North-South, pan-African, pan-European, and pan-American operation, but those people didn’t actually say: “Hey, Bono, would you do that?” The ball kind of fell to my feet, it’s the truth, and I saw a way past the goalkeeper. What am I gonna do? I’m gonna do what I can. It’s already preposterous to have that position. I’ll let somebody else be war watchdog.
Speaking of watchdogs, was there uproar within the band when they saw you in some of these photos?
Yes, but they also know the strategy is effective. If it’s not, they’re going to torture me. They’re results-oriented. They also push me to sharpen my arguments.
So being in a band prepared you for what you’re doing now.
It turns out that a lot of the things that you learn from being in a band are analogous to politics. And not just politics, even the so-called nasty old world of commerce, anywhere you’ve got to get your message across. I know much more than you’d expect about these things, just from trying to keep on top of U2’s business. We like to say our band is a gang of four, but a corporation of five. I understand brands, I can understand corporate America, I can understand economics. This is not at all so difficult. U2 was art school, business school. It’s always the same attitude that wins the day: faith over fear. Know your subject, know your opponent. Don’t have an argument you can’t win. On the Africa stuff we can’t lose, because we’re putting our shoulder to a door God Almighty has already opened. We carry with us—this is something that’s important—the moral weight of an argument. That’s much bigger than the personalities having the debate. I might walk into an important office and people are looking at me as though I’m some sort of exotic plant. But after a few minutes, they don’t see me. All they’re hearing is the argument, and the argument has some sort of moral force that they cannot deny. It’s bigger than you, and it’s bigger than them. And history as well as God is on its side.
So you became an insider in the political world. I’m sure you had preconceived notions about politicians. Were those proven wrong or right?
Well, as you get older, your idea of good guys and bad guys changes. As we moved from the eighties to the nineties, I stopped throwing rocks at the obvious symbols of power and the abuse of it. I started throwing rocks at my own hypocrisy. That’s a part of what that work was about: owning up to one’s ego. These characters in the songs like “The Fly” are owning up to one’s hypocrisy in your heart, your duplicitous nature. There’s a song called “Acrobat” that goes: Don’t believe what you hear, don’t believe what you see /If you just close your eyes/ You can feel the enemy . . . I can’t remember it, but the point is: you start to see the world in a different way, and you’re part of the problem, not just part of the solution! [laughs]
It’s probably the same when you start a band. You also have these preconceived notions about the corporate labels and corporate management. Once you get to the other side of the fence, maybe you begin to see things differently.
It is exactly analogous. So who’s the devil here? Bureaucracy! It’s like a Kafka story. The labyrinth of red tape that excuses inaction. But it’s not an excuse, and you have to go through it. Even if a lot of them are not bad guys, even if they’re just busy guys, they have to be held responsible and accountable, because these people are in power. Like, Congressman Tom Lantos talks about, as a child, being put on a train to a Hungarian concentration camp and how crowds gathered to watch them being put on the trains, and how this haunted him later in life, not the mistreatment at these death camps, but the blank looks of the passersby, how he repeated the question often to himself: “Didn’t anyone ask where those children are going?” I said to him: “Aren’t we doing that now with AIDS? We have the drugs, but . . .” And he said: “Yeah, we are. This is exactly analogous. We are watching them being put on the trains.”
And what should be the response?
I want to find people who will lie across the tracks.
So, are the politicians the train conductors?
No, it’s our indifference that should be on trial. As for politicians, I’ve got to meet and know quite a lot of them; I’m surprised by how much respect I have. They work a lot harder than I thought, they’re not paid that well, the most talented of them would definitely make tons of cash in the commercial world, but stay in politics out of a sense of civic duty. People say power is their drug of choice, but in these days the CEO of a large corporation is the one with power. It’s true that in the U.S. special interest ruins a lot of politics, and runs a lot of shows, that’s the closest you can find to outright evil in politics. The National Rifle Association can buy their way in an argument. How many Americans think it’s a good thing that you can buy a gun in a shop? Hardly any! But the ones that do have put so much money into the National Rifle Association that they can get their issue through Congress. It’s amazing! Why can’t we treat the people that live in wretched poverty with the kind of political muscle they have in the tobacco industry, who hire a bunch of lobbyists and go surround Washington, D.C.? They don’t just go, “Cigarette smoking is a fundamental human right. We want to smoke!” No. They fight tooth and nail for that piece of that pie and their customers, and I’m sometimes one of them . . .
So how does DATA “fight tooth and nail” for its clients, the poorest of the poor?
What we’re trying to do at the moment, those of us who care about the wanton loss of life and the inequalities of the developing world, is to come together under one umbrella. In fact, we’re calling it the One campaign—not a reference to the U2 song, but that’ll come in handy. We have to stop doffing our caps and shyly begging for crumbs from the table of the rich countries. We’ve got to get organized. We have to be able to hurt people who harm us, who obstruct the necessary legislation to put things right. We want to be able to take out radio ads in the constituencies of obstructive politicians, and explain that it’s not just money they’re cutting off. It’s lives, mothers, children dying, like I have seen with my own eyes in a hospital in Malawi—three to a bed, two on top and one underneath. The statistics have faces, they’re living and breathing. That is until a decision in D.C., London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin goes against them, then they stop breathing.
And has your strategy been working?
We’ve already done it in a small way with a congressman who should now remain nameless, who wanted to be famous for cutting foreign aid until he started to hear from every church and high school in his district that his obstruction was killing kids. We had ads all over the radio. In the end, to his credit, he apologized. You see, that’s political muscle; that’s what people can do if they work together and invest in a movement. Politicians are about “pig roasts”: it’s what people are talking about when they’re barbecuing chicken that counts. It’s what church people are saying, “soccer moms” as well as college students.
What will happen if your dialogues don’t result in any real change?
When there are so many lives at stake, I think we will have to consider civil disobedience—certainly, taking to the streets in numbers that will surprise the status quo. There are more regular people than you can imagine who care about these issues and are ready to more than put themselves out to make poverty history.
You take a lot of moral positions in our conversations, but you’re wise enough to know that it’s not necessarily morality that will help your cause triumph.
The moral force, finally, I do believe in the weight of it. But the apparatus is not moral. The route through it is a very cynical one.
You said it was a labyrinth. Did you find your way through it?
There were ways you could gang up or surround difficult people. If a politician had a hard heart, maybe the person who organized his schedule would not. “Staffers” became allies. After all, they were the ones running the show. Proper politicians were older, but the people who ran their offices were my age or younger. So if they weren’t U2 fans, they probably knew one. I found in a lot of cases their idealism still intact.
Sometimes we run into people who are the same age as us but who have made different choices. They’d say to you: “I’m standing on the same ground as you, but in my position I can’t help because in my job I am stuck.” They tend to be schizophrenic. How do you confront that?
I have to say that I applied the same strategy that we did as a band. When we got to the United States, or France, or Germany, in the early eighties, you had all these people in their silk jackets with the radio stations on their back, just that glazed look in their eye. I used to ask them how they got into this, and the most jaded, hardened record executive would start saying: “Oh, I used to work in a college radio station,” or “I went to see Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore,” “I saw the Rolling Stones with Brian Jones”—Really, how was it like? I would get them to remind themselves why they came to the party, because often they’d forgotten. It’s the same for the politicians: a lot of them came for the right reasons, but just forgot. And of course politicians are a little like priests and cops. They’re either there for the best or the worst reasons: to serve or to abuse their power! [laughs] But the latter are the few, not the many.
Just like politics, it seems like people enter the music business for either the best or the worst reasons. Have you had to deal with much corruption there?
U2 has had a pretty good time of it in the music business. Our manager, Paul McGuinness, protected us from so much, he really was a cut above the rest, and instilled in us a sense that we had to be awake to the business as we were to the art. Yeah, we have had to deal with some bullies at a corporate level in the music business, but in the end I don’t have “Slave” written on my face, like Prince did in the early nineties. U2 is in charge of its own destiny. We own our master tapes, we own our copyrights, we run our own show, the music business does not own us.
You own your own stuff. That’s almost unheard of, isn’t it?
Well, there was a cost to that, as I told Prince when he asked me. We took a lower royalty rate, and on those big albums, we were paid less. But we own it. I asked him: “Why are you wearing ‘Slave’? He said: “I don’t own my stuff, they own it. They own me.” And then he asked me like you just did: “How did you pull that off?—Eh, lower royalty rates.” You know, most people want the money in their hand, not down the road. There’s no excuse in the twentieth century for intelligent people signing a deal they don’t understand. That said, Prince deserves the best deal in the world because he is the best in the world. He’s Duke Ellington to me!
Back to politics for a second. Do you hear a lot of: “I would love to help you but I can’t” from politicians?
One congressman wouldn’t even look at me. He was in charge of yes-or-no’ing foreign appropriations. He was a big shot and a big problem. He would talk to me like almost through an interpreter. He was just kind of upset that he, a hard-working guy, had to talk to this rock star from Ireland. You know, I kind of agreed with him. He was saying: You’re not gonna get this money, because I know where it’s going. It’s going down a rat hole, these guys have been ripping us off for years. Because Africa’s first problem is not natural calamity, it’s not their corrupt relationship with Europe and America. They’re the second and third problems. The first problem is their own corrupt leadership. Eventually, we convinced him that the money would be well spent, and later, when I came back from Uganda, I took him pictures of a water hole. I said: “There’s the money. It didn’t go down a rat hole, it went down a water hole, Congressman!” I have a lot of respect for that guy now, but he was tough. He was a tough guy. In the end of course it wasn’t me that persuaded him, it was the chorus of voices in the background—the movement. This unusual panoply of powerful voices from Church leaders like the Pope to sports leaders and student bodies, what Bill Clinton later referred to as a big tent. [laughs and puts on Southern accent] “When you’ve got the Pope hanging out with rock stars, that’s what I call a big tent.” You see, Jubilee 2000 could get a crowd of forty thousand people to surround the G8 summit in Cologne and hold hands. So it’s not just, Let’s have our little photo with Bono in here, and get him out of the room. You know, there is some firepower in the background.
Have you ever said to yourself: “This is more complicated than I thought. These people may be right, I may be wrong”?
Oh yeah. When it came to understanding the big issues—and outside that fantastic phrase: “I have met my enemy and he was partly right”—I realized that a lot of the aid for instance had been incredibly badly mishandled over the years, creating worse situations. It’s not enough just to ask for money. I learnt that the skeptics and the cynics had a real point, and that without strict conditionalities, there was no point in giving. You’re actually propping up sometimes the most evil despots by aid.
I think the most useful people are the ones who are out in the field, who work there and know the population. I don’t count myself among the skeptics or the cynics, but . . .
. . . But you’re pessimistic!
A couple of years ago, I was in Tuvalu, a tiny archipelago somewhere in the middle of the South Pacific. It’s all sand, all flat. They can’t grow anything there. And these people get help from the European community. I talked to an Italian civil servant who lived in Fiji. He’d regularly visit these small islands to make sure that the money was well spent. He said the islanders don’t go fishing anymore—they eat junk food and they watch TV, and they lie asleep all day. Now that I’m mentioning it, it sounds like I’m describing life in some parts of Paris suburbia . . . Now they have been given money to build solar panels. And then they asked: will that make our washing machines work? He said: probably not. So they said: we won’t assemble them. And then they said they wanted a nuclear plant! And there are a whole bunch of civil servants there, benefiting from that aid, who obviously don’t do much for their fellow men. So, without education, I’m afraid there is no point in giving aid.
That’s the story of aid for the last thirty years, but this is no longer the story. That story has come to an end.
Money is not the only problem in those places.
Well, with AIDS, it is. And with some things, it is. But the waste of resources, the lack of good leadership is often the real problem.
When you discuss the problems of Africa, it seems like you think that idealism is the solution.
But I’m not dealing with idealism! None of my work is based on idealism. It’s pragmatism. OK, maybe on debt cancellation, I’m arguing it as justice rather than charity. But in terms of dealing with Africa now, I’m looking for a Marshall-type plan for Africa.* That’s pragmatic!
I can’t help but remember what you said earlier: “At one time, it looked impossible for African Americans to be freed from slavery.” But it was not only Westerners who were responsible for slavery. It was also the Arabs and other Africans.
My reply to that is: yes, but we’re not talking about Arabs or other Africans. We’re talking about us, our inherited wealth from that exploitation.
But why are Westerners still trying to solve the problems of Africa? How come Africans aren’t doing it by themselves?
If we see aid as investment, and the debt burden of these countries as unjust, and offer fairer trade conditions, Africa will be able to take charge of its own destiny. The reason for the T for Trade in DATA is, in the end, aid is not the way forward for the poorest people in the world. Trade is the way forward. We have to let the poorest of the poor trade with us. And, at the moment, we’re not letting them trade fairly with us. So when you say, “Why can’t Africans look after themselves?,” that is the only way forward for Africa: Africans taking charge of their continent. But at the moment, we won’t let them! Even after twenty-three countries whose debts we’ve canceled now, there are still countries paying back to the World Bank and the IMF more money every year than they’re spending on health and education. These are dignified people, and they wanna get up off their knees. But it’s us that has them chained to the ground!
But why, then, has no African leader just come forward and said: “We don’t need the white men to solve our problems. We can do it ourselves!”
But that’s what NEPAD was: New Economic Partnership and Africa’s Development. This is what Thabo Mbeki was doing when he put together African leaders in a new kind of partnership, away from patronage. That’s what we’re talking about: a new kind of relationship. But you can’t self-determine if you’re carrying that kind of level of injustice in trade and in debt. How about this? If Africa got one percent more trade, one percent of global trade, it’s the equivalent of three times what Africa receives every year through aid. Africa receives about 21 billion dollars in aid every year. So 70 billion cash would come into the continent, for one percent increase in trade. This is the way towards self-determination. This is what we’re working for, away from the nipple of aid. Africans are sick of the cap in hand. They deserve equal and as fair access as anybody else to the pie. So I’m not for some sort of paternalistic attitude to Africa. I’m against it. But in order for that to happen, we have to break a certain chain. And colonialism is still there in a certain sense. Slavery is present. Economic slavery is what we’re talking about, where people make cheap goods for us in the West, but aren’t paid.
Lasting presence and involvement are the things that really count, don’t you think?
Well, for example, the Global Health Fund at the moment is a new and necessary approach that’s set in Geneva, to deal with AIDS, TB, and malaria. It’s outside of the UN, but Kofi Annan has asked for 10 billion dollars a year. It has a four percent overhead only, and out of the four percent overhead, they are hiring accounting firms like Price Waterhouse and Stokes Kennedy Crowley in every country that applies for this. And they police and audit where the money is being spent. This is a new approach to foreign assistance or aid. In the past, aid has been tied to commercial contracts: they’d give you five dollars, but four of them you’d have to spend on French or English or German products, or consultants. It was corrupt and rotten. But those days are over. There are people who are working on this a lot harder than I, giving their whole lives to champion reform of aid, who are not going to let that happen. There will always be abuses, but the increase in foreign aid will only be for places where there’s clear and transparent process, where there’s good leadership, and where we can see where the money’s going. The bright stars, if you like, they get hothoused. The countries around them that have no poverty-reduction programs in place and no good ideas on how to spend the money will lose out. They won’t be able to gain access to these new funds, because the people whose taxes they represent won’t let them, and they’re right.