Opiyo Oloya

PERSPECTIVE OF A UGANDAN IN CANADA

Employing celebrity power to champion causes in Africa is not new. In July 1985, Irish singer Bob Geldof, a relatively unknown leader of the unknown band Boomtown Rats organised Live Aid that brought 40 pop musicians to raise money and awareness for the starving people of Ethiopia.

In January 1997, a year before her untimely death in a car crash, Princess Diana made a widely publicised trip to land-mined areas of Huambo region of Angola, bringing awareness about the problem. More lately, Bono, the front-singer for Irish pop group U2 has perfected the art of needling world leaders to do more to cancel debts and increase aid to the world’s most impoverished nations, many in Africa.

However, it is relatively new for Hollywood celebrities to go sticking their slender necks in Africa for various causes. Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover lent their names early on in the fight against apartheid in the 1980s. More recently, Angelina Jolie, currently camped out in Namibia with her hubby Brad Pitts and two adopted children (one from Ethiopia) has been speaking strongly about the rights of refugee children. But it is Oscar-winning actor George Clooney who seems to garner immediate impact.

After he and his father Nick Clooney visited Darfur in mid-April, and using hidden cameras to document images of extreme suffering, George Clooney has been on the attack. On April 30, Clooney was the key speaker at the well-attended ‘Save Darfur’ rally in Washington D.C. to wake up the Bush administration of the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. He has made numerous media appearances including the influential Oprah Winfrey show since returning from Sudan.

“Two years ago, the world acknowledged there is ethnic cleansing happening in Darfur yet the world has not responded,” Clooney said to the thousands who gathered in Washington to hear him speak of the atrocities in western Sudan where an estimated 180,000 have died and two million left homeless.

Suddenly, the world is talking about Darfur again, and yes, stung by the accusation of inaction, Washington put enough pressure on the Sudanese warring factions meeting in Abuja, Nigeria late last week to cobble together a peace agreement.

Even before the ink was dry on the deal signed between the government of Sudan and the numerous rebel groups, many observers agreed that Clooney’s Hollywood star power made it happen.

However, Hollywood’s apparent about-face toward Africa is not entirely out of deep conviction about doing the right thing. That is not how Hollywood operates.

Instead, it has a lot to do with the bottom-line. Foremost, the world generally and America specifically is slowly warming up to environmental and global development issues. What used to be discussed in church basements is now openly talked about in schools, on radio and on television.

To have a cause has become the in-thing, essentially what separates those who breathe air to live and those who breathe air to think more clearly about the world we live in.

Naturally, sensing the new mood favouring issue-based films, Hollywood has shifted gear toward the continent that once spawned lost-in-dark-dangerous-Africa adventure films like Tarzan the Apeman (1932), King Solomon’s Mine (1950) and The African Queen (1951). In quick succession, it launched issue-laced films like Hotel Rwanda (2004), Lord of War (2005), and The Constant Gardener (2005).

Meanwhile, The Blood Diamond being shot in South Africa starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a juggler who gets mixed into dirty business in war-torn Sierra Leone, will be released in 2007. In all these films, Africa presents the right ingredients for blockbuster — villains, money, power, sex, wealth, corruption, megalomania, tragedy, hubris and so forth. In the Lord of War the Nicholas Cage character quickly realises that if he does not sell the guns to the murderous regime, someone else will.

In the Constant Gardener, the Ralph Fiennes character exposes despicable, self-serving, and murderous big pharmaceutical companies after his wife is murdered. What is more, people are watching and Hollywood is making money. At the Box Office and in VHS rental, Hotel Rwanda has so far grossed about $25m, the Constant Gardener $60m and Lord of War $70 m.

But even at the personal level, Hollywood stars are not associating with Africa because of altruistic motivation. After all, the powerful visuals of Clooney roughing it in Darfur, Don Cheadle mopping sweat in refugee camps in northern Uganda, and Angelina Jolie cuddling some forlorn orphan in Ethiopia make the stars look, well, human in a world where the plastic surgeon rules.

By embracing Africa, the stars break free from the negative image of the ego-driven, pompous, party-going and highly pampered Hollywood cats. Suddenly, in addition to being good public relations, those images taken in Africa allow the stars to come across as three-dimensional, real, down-to-earth, in-sync, with-it and, perhaps, more intelligent than they appear on television and in the films.

Moreover, it adds to their allure in show-business and with fans. That is not to say that these stars are not sincere in what they are doing to promote the causes in Africa. Far from it, many are serious in what they are doing to help in Africa.

Nonetheless, it is also important to acknowledge the symbiotic relationship they are forming with Africa — the stars help highlight causes in Africa and, in return, derive something more tangible than merely feeling good after doing good. It is good for their pocketbooks.

Opiyo.oloya@sympatico.ca