Bob Geldof's Diary Notes from Africa

25 November 2009 is the 25th year anniversary of the recording of 'Do They Know Its Christmas?' by Band Aid on 25 November, 1984:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_They_Know_It%27s_Christmas%3F

Bob Geldof's diary notes from Africa re: the Ethiopian famine (reproduced in Live Aid DVD liner notes):

'I must try and show you this.

There is a child I think may be it’s four months old. The doctor says 'No its two years old'. It squats on baked mud a tattered dusty piece of cotton hangs from one shoulder onto its distended stomach. It’s face is huge. A two year old face on a four month body.

The eyes are moons of dust and flies caked by tears so big they don’t dry until they reach the navel.

It’s mother is squatting also, behind and slightly to his left. She is faint. She falls over a lot. I notice hundreds falling over.

The child stares. Between its legs flows a constant stream of diarrhoea. The immediate earth around its legs is damp with it.

I am watching a child die. In total silence and surrounded by its family it eventually begins to shit out its own stomach.

I am tired with grief and despair and a consuming rage for humanity.

He dies soon. He just dies. Big deal. A jumble of bones and dry skin, wet eyes, flies and shit. His mother hasn’t noticed. She is too weak. Eventually they will come and tie his hands and legs in the approved manner, wrap his weightless body in anything and he will be burned hurriedly in a fruitless attempt to lessen the disease that flies ceaselessly through the scorching air.

At 2 a.m. it is freezing. At 2.30 the noise begins. Bodies too small and skinny to produce heat, too impoverished to have clothing, too weak to be able to digest, too thirsty to do anything but croak, too cold to do anything but die, too full of despair and hopelessness to live.

At 10 am it is a cauldron. There is no noise except shuffle of feet moving forward in the endless procession of the intensive feeding lines, the soft keening of the bereaved, the moaning of the dying and the endless drone of the carrion flies.

It is a discreet, soft background sound, like afternoon tea in the Bath Tea Rooms I think. The almost soothing sound of famine. Inside the corrugated iron huts, it is beyond Dante’s Inferno. At night freezing, by day an oven.

The living lie beside the dead on the earth or concrete platforms. Expediency rules. Famine is not polite. There is no beauty but in the faces, there is no dignity but in the eyes, no nobility but in the bearing, no privacy but of the mind. There is little emotion but sometimes the heart bursts and then the sound is silence and hopeless, screaming despair.

In that place where humans have abandoned, humanity thrives. A handful of grain each. There is no water to boil and make a sort of porridge…or there is water but there is no fuel with which to boil it…or there is no fuel or water, just the grain.

You eat it. It is like consuming razor blades. It tears the walls of the stomach away, then passes through you, taking your innards with it, unconsumed and useless.

Or…you leave your dying village. You take your hungry children and you walk. Somewhere you have heard there is food. By instinct and desperation you arrive at a camp 2 weeks, a month later, with one child , the other having died somewhere in the desert. You wait faint and weak to be fed. You are not too weak to ensure your child is fed first. You die soon. Your child joins the endless intensive feeding lines of orphans. You’ve given it a 30/70% chance of life.

Or…you survive. After two months you must leave the camp. There is nowhere to go, no food, no water. You wander about in the devastation for a month or two. Soon you return almost dead again…and it goes on.

Or…there is a wall. About waist high. On one side about 10,000 starving, on the other a fresh-faced young nurse.

She has 300 tins of butter oil she can distribute. Who will she pick.

You hold up your child praying it at least can survive the holocaust. Who do you pick. Not looking you point your finger 300 times.

You have been picked. Tired feeling nothing but shame you shuffle to the other side of the wall and sit down your back to the other 9700 who are chosen for death. You cannot face them. You take your ration of oil and try to digest it.

You haven’t been picked. You feel nothing but shame and a hopeless inadequacy. No recrimination except a profound depth of failure that you could not even give your children life. The children who in exhaustion lower their oversized heads on the crumbling wall.

There is no riot. There is no pleading. Only shame. Shame shared by those chosen, unchosen and the chooser.

The shame is ours. A shame so fierce it should burn us like the sun that burns the desert.

All these things I have seen.

Eight weeks ago E.E.C. spent 265 million pounds in destroying 2 million tons of vegetable and fruit.

The shame, the shame, the shame.'