Commemorating Live Aid: Celebrity Humanitarianism and the Failure of Western Aid

Last month, the British Broadcasting Cooperation (BBC) decided to broadcast a television series to mark the anniversary of the Live Aid concert, which took place in London on 13 July 1985, following the success of Band Aid single “Do they know it’s Christmas time” in December 1984, and its successor concert, Live 8, that took place 20 years later. Live Aid was organized by musicians Bob Geldof and Bono to draw attention to the famine taking place in Ethiopia and reported by the BBC journalist Michael Buerk.  In the UK, Live Aid is viewed through rose-tinted glasses as a demonstration of the willingness of UK celebrities to step up and help poor Africans abandoned by their governments. Despite the purported £40 million raised^[1], they did not alleviate the long-term suffering of the affected populations. Forty years on, in the Western colonial mind, Africans continue to exist in the shadows of white saviourism. This is even more problematic in the Global North where western governments and white supremacists have abandoned any pretence that aid can and was meant to save Africa.  From a Global African perspective, Live Aid was part of the machinery that strived to sap Africans’ ability to create their own futures, entrenched state corruption, and introduced consumer and celebrity humanitarianism as new effective modes of accumulation.

African voices are still suppressed in the discussion of African disasters. In 2005, I wrote a critique of Bob Geldof and  Live Aid, which focused on how their intervention could not be separated from neoliberal capitalist assault on African peoples.  The year 1985 was significant for Africa in terms of African states' economic subjection to the neoliberal policies of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and Western Governments. That year marked the next phase of the deliberate impoverishment of the African population through the imposition of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Structural Adjustment Programmes. African governments were forced to introduce cost reduction measures (now labelled austerity) that involved the abandonment of social welfare programmes. With the bulk of the African population living below the poverty line, these measures were inhumane and led to destitution. The private sector, and this includes non-governmental organizations (NGOs), were expected to fill the welfare gap.  Almost overnight, there was a rapid rise in NGOs, both international, with the latter receiving funds directly from western governments.  Funds that would have gone to the state for social programmes.  By the early 1990s, a few international NGOs had budgets larger than some African states, whose elites  responded by introducing  regulatory legislation in an effort to control them.

In academia, a spate of research on famine in Africa and its causes emerged from the 1980s onwards with virtually all coming to the same conclusion that while natural disasters may have caused crop failures and livestock deaths, famine was man-made. Scholars researching famine in Africa drew on the theory of famine advocated by the Indian economist, Amartya Sen, who noted in his 1981 book, Poverty and Famines, that famine was not the consequence of a decline in food availability, but the result of a loss of entitlement to food caused by a variety of reasons, such as disruptions to food supply and higher market prices, and the failure of the state to protect the access of the vulnerable. Famine, it seems, often occur when there is a surplus in food availability both regionally and internationally. The European Union and the USA had for decades subsidized their farmers to produce agricultural surpluses, which are then dumped on Africa, as part of their aid packages. In the US,  PL480 or the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954 (Public Law 480) was set up to address US food surpluses by dumping or selling them at reduced rate to other countries, euphemistically termed ‘Food for Peace’ or food aid.This policy undermined local production, yet was promoted by the  IFIS as enabling development through the free market.  Via structural adjustment conditionalities African governments were pressured to abandon their development goal of food self-sufficiency by removing subsidies, then considered too expensive, to their own farmers; and, instead, rely on cheaper imported ‘food aid’. The overall conclusion from many studies of famine is that famine is a political act and that participatory democracy is the vehicle through which the right to food can be protected.  Such forms of participatory democracy that will protect people’s access to food have yet to manifest in most countries, and would require the reform or abolition of the global watchdog institutions of capital.

Live Aid failed to question the political economy of the food production and distribution network, or the role of Cold War geopolitics in destabilizing governments or sustaining authoritarianism in Ethiopia. Instead, it presented African peoples as helpless, depoliticised, and barely human, devoid of agency, and vulnerable to the evil machinations of their own leaders. In 2005, the Pan-Africanist Tajudeen Abdul Raheem, who once clashed with Bob Geldof on British television, wrote in his postcards that Live Aid or western charity cannot address the problems Africa faced, yet Africa is saddled with ‘aid-addicted Africans and western aid pushers’.^[2]  Abdul-Raheem challenges this infantilization of Africans and  argues that shifting the debate away from aid will help Africans to recover ‘some of the loss of their self-respect and dignity’.^[3] 

Live Aid was also complicit in equating Ethiopia with Africa, contributing to the view in the Global North that ‘Africa is a country’, not a continent of 56 states. Critical scholars, poets, and writers have challenged the blanket homogenization of the continent. Indeed, Africa is a continent of diverse peoples and environments, including ones where snow does fall in the southern hemisphere winters. The late Kenyan Writer Binyavanga Wainaina^[4]  was one of those who challenged this depiction of Africa and Africans. In an article entitled, ‘How to Write about Africa’,  in the UK-based literary magazine Granta, he wrote:

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering. Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and who is concerned for your well-being. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them, bathe them, feed them; he carries lots of babies and has seen Death. Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic international celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction).

Live Aid may have also sparked the trend in consumer humanitarianism, where buying a product that purports to save lives, is equated to having empathy and bestows moral gratification. Overconsumption in the West becomes an ethical act that probably stimulates the production of endorphins (feel good hormones). In 2013, I published an article^[5] on how celebrities were instrumental in promoting forms of ethical consumerism. Live Aid and Live 8 were followed by numerous campaigns often targeted at refugees and famine in Africa.  I analysed campaigns by Paul David ‘Bono’ Hewson (Product Red TM), George Clooney (Save Darfur Campaign/United to End Genocide and the Satellite Sentinel Project), Raise Hope for Congo, 50 Cent (Street King high-energy drink), Ben Affleck (Eastern Congo Initiative), and Invisible Children (Kony2012).  Ethical consumerism became a new business model that blocked questions of the extractive nature of capitalism.  By doing so, “celebrity humanitarianism helps to further entrench non-Western others in globally unequal relations.^[6]

Live Aid also pushed the concept of celebrity humanitarianism to its maximum limit.^[7] Not only were individual celebrities fronting their own personal charitable projects, but international NGOs courted them to front advocacy campaigns.  Along with professional NGO employees, celebrities became part of the Global North’s power architecture that has undermined the capacity of people in the Global South to improve their well-being whilst purporting to be benevolent. 

Celebrities, like humanitarian agencies, seek to appear politically neutral in domestic politics, as they garner support and funds across the political spectrum and adopt technical and managerial solutions that often do not reflect the realities on the ground. As cultural elites and products of global capitalism, they do not challenge the inequalities of global power relations but work with them to produce new disciplinary networks of governance of the global civil society.^[8]

Celebrity humanitarianism is a racialized project. Even though celebrities in the USA racialized as Black participated in their version of Live Aid, it did not obscure the racial dimension of who held the power to bring about change. In 2013, I contended:

Humanitarian work is presented as if it is in isolation from the hegemonic discourse of race and the spatial hierarchies of power embedded in such action. In the context of Africa, celebrity and humanitarian activities are predicated on economic power and ideologies of race and place. Celebrities can demonstrate their marketability by claiming power over life and death in a ‘remote’ Africa, in which Africans remain as ‘docile bodies’. Claims of unaccountability, false authority and racism are brushed aside as minor, because of the urgency of the need to save lives.^[9] 

Live Aid, as Abdul-Raheem notes, was just a “repackaging of the ‘white man’s burden’ ideology”.  In 2025, with white supremacy nakedly apparent in the Global North, there is no need to sanitize the exploitation of the continent that has been obscured by ‘soft power’ aid concessions. The complicity of aid projects in the violence on the continent, ranges from the Rwandan genocide of 1994 to the twenty-first century War on Terror in The Horn and West Africa to the so-called ‘African migration crisis’. 

Band Aid was a soothing activity for western public conscience, not an avenue for  global social transformation. Only African people’s mobilization can bring about the structural change that is needed to rid the continent of famine. In 2005, Tajudeen Abdul Raheem wrote: “No amount of marches in Europe and global concerts for Africa will end poverty in Africa, if Africans are not marching in their millions demanding and enforcing pro poor and pro people policies and governance from their own governments and institutions. We cannot be spectators in our own affairs.”^[10]

Patricia Daley is a Professor of Human Geography of Africa in the School of Geography and the Environment. 

Endnotes