Are Bono and Bob Geldof good for Africa?

By Barry Malone

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - "Ireland," I answered the taxi-driver's question when I first went to Ethiopia in 2006.

"You know ... Bob Geldof, Bono?," I continued, confident he would recognize me as a countryman of the two rockers who many Westerners think fed the world during the 1980s.

"Bondof?" came the puzzled reply. "Oh, Ireland! ... You mean Roy Keane! Gerry Adams! IRA!"

And so began a pattern of national identifiers that has lasted for my three years in this country the Dublin singers first introduced me to as a child during its ruinous famines.

Soccer legend Roy Keane. Political firebrand Gerry Adams. Irish Republican Army. In that order.

Rarely a "Bono' or a "Bob' spoken.

It's not just that the people of this beautiful Horn of Africa nation are largely ignorant of the two men who still say it affected them like no place ever has.

It's that, when they are mentioned, it's usually in a critical tone that would surprise most Westerners.

Journalists often peg stories about the continent to what two of its most visible advocates say. "Africa aid levels a disgrace, says Bono," "Give us your "effin money, says Geldof."

Some say we journalists are lazy, others say their fame gives us a convenient way of getting stories that otherwise might not be heard past our editors and into the Western media.

I've sat with Ethiopians in gardens lush with greenery and laughed about a land where, according to the pair's famous 1984 Band Aid song, "nothing ever grows, no rain or rivers flow."

And I've heard people, in this nation that is largely Orthodox Christian and Muslim, laugh at the inappropriate nature of the song's title for them: "Do they know it's Christmas?"

PERPETUATING STEREOTYPES

Jokes about the well-meaning poetic license of the duo's most famous fund-raising song are usually followed by the more worrying assertion that their pronouncements, and the fact those in power listen, actually damage the people they want to help.

"For most Africans it's a turnoff when Geldof/Bono are used to present a range of African issues," Max Bankole Jarrett, a Liberian living in Ethiopia responded to one story last month.