Bono

by Michka Assayas

  Such examples exist, and this is part of the reason the level of aid over the last twenty years has shrunk. We’re trying to reverse that trend. It is not fair to point all the time to such exceptions. They are not the rule these days. I don’t appreciate Theroux’s comments, because they feed into the sort of ignorance about Africa and the continent—the “money down a rat hole” argument. I understand his frustration with corruption. Corruption is probably the biggest problem facing the continent, but it is not the only one. As I keep telling you, there are new ways to deliver aid, where it does not prop up a corrupt government, but it rewards governments that are tackling corruption and have poverty-reduction policies in place. That was the Millennium Challenge Account [MCA], which was the first major thing that we were involved in with the Bush administration [see Chapter 4]. Its concept was to reward good governance, transparency. Countries would get a special grant if they really were serious about tackling poverty, and were open to criticism, encouraging civil society, a free press, et cetera. If a government is doing the right thing by its people, they should be fast-tracked in increases in aid. [pause] That said, I should be fair here. It might be interesting to talk about revisiting Ethiopia, just because in a way Ethiopia is the best case for Theroux’s argument—and mine.

  And why is that?

  Because after years and years of aid, the country is still in deep crisis. And after all that stuff, all that attention on the famine in the eighties, in the nineties, when I got back, maybe three years ago [circa 2002], I was amazed, because Addis Ababa was a very different city. It was obvious that there’d been huge migration from the countryside, and so there were new ghettos everywhere, shocking ghettos. And I met prostitutes in the ghettos—no idea about using condoms, and were HIV-positive, but not telling their customers. All the degradation that poverty can bring to a people was present in Addis. And I had visited there when the Communists had it by the balls. Now I was meeting the guerrilla leader who fought against the Communists.

  Meles Zenawi.

  Yes. And he’s a very impressive man. He’s a brilliant macroeconomist. He taught himself whilst leading a guerrilla war. He taught himself on BBC’s Open University. He studied economics, apparently the brightest student they ever had. He’s a brilliant man. I spent some time with him, it was very interesting to hear his stories, about how he studied economics and political science. “In Ethiopia,” he said, “you learn everything by living with the farmers, because the farmers in Ethiopia are the smartest people in the country.” I said: “But why is that?” And he said: “Because if you aren’t smart, you starve.” So you have the most innovative people. They can make something out of nothing. He’d learned an awful lot about the country from hiding out in this guerrilla war. But I could see that after the war, they really haven’t recovered, and, still, though making great progress in a lot of respects, he wasn’t really encouraging the civil society. He still had a little bit of a Leftist control. For a guy who fought the Communists, he was not so committed to a free and open press as we would have expected. I think, though, in essence, he is a very, very good man, maybe even a great man. It’s just fear of losing control of the country. Time will tell.

  So what did you think of the regression in Ethiopia?

  What I’m saying to you is that there’s both: regression and progression. Two steps forward, one step back. Remember, it’s a war- and famine-ravaged country. Still, hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved that would have been lost. But Theroux would argue that hundreds of thousands of other lives are in danger because the Ethiopians and our NGO communities failed to put the mechanisms in place to stop that happening again. A wasted opportunity.

  So he was right, there.

  Yes. But recently, that’s changing, and let me give you a few examples on the micro and macro levels. Take Sister Jemba, who works in Addis at a very grassroots level with communities to improve their housing and sanitation in a sustainable way. It’s a bottom-up approach, and as I say, sustainable. At the macro level, there’s a group called REST: Relief Ethiopian Society of Tigre, this funded again by NGOs and donor governments in the north of Ethiopia. Their long-term integrated rural development programs working with communities and farmers try to improve the productivity of the land. For example, in Degua, stone dams have been constructed to prevent further erosion of gullies catching rainwater and building soil fertility. What was previously barren land is now producing 1,500 barrels of good quality hay for livestock every year. This is not insignificant. Save the Children have a program which will impact the lives of 150,000 people in the Amhara region. It’s called Linking Relief to Development, where livestock is sold to buy food, protecting the assets of the Woredas of Sekota and Gublafto for three years till they are self-sufficient, ganging up on local problems across many different areas: soil and water conservation, micro enterprise, et cetera. I know this stuff and these extraordinary tribal names because I’ve been working on this this morning. This is not the old top-down type of development, where you arrive in town like a bull in a china shop, trampling all over the people you’re supposed to help.

  But even effective aid is not the long-run solution, is it, Bono?

  No. Commerce and good government. We should look at foreign assistance as kind of start-up money. Self-sufficiency is of course the goal. The funny thing was traveling with an “entrepreneur” like Paul O’Neill, who was the United States secretary of the treasury. All the time he’d been telling me the future of Africa is in the hands of business and commerce. And I knew that to be sort of true, but not as much as I needed to, and this opened my mind to subjects like unfair trade relationships. It’s a shock to discover that for all our talk of the free market, the poorest people on Earth are not allowed to put their products on our shelves in an evenhanded way. They have to negotiate all kinds of tariffs and taxes. It’s not a level playing field. We can sell to them, but they can’t sell to us. I started to realize that even the most friendly faces to Africa would in Congress obstruct trade reform. It was the Left that sponsored the Farm Bill in the United States, which subsidizes American agriculture and makes it impossible for African farmers to compete. Imagine the shock of walking through the markets in Accra, Ghana, where ghettos have been swollen with out-of-work rice farmers, to find cheap American and Vietnamese rice on sale to people who used to produce their own.

  You say commerce is the future. Is the future happening now?

  Yes, but it’s slow, agonizingly slow. I want you to understand, Michka, the free market unencumbered is not the solution either. All successful economies have protected their seed industries until they were strong enough to compete. We cannot deny for others what we demand for ourselves. Successful economies in Southeast Asia had a very careful, gradual journey to competitiveness. They’re the best example of how aid can work. Without it, they wouldn’t be where they are.

  So you’re describing an increase in aid that’s strategic and demanding of good government and in consultation with the people on the ground.

  That’s really it. As I already told you, a kind of Marshall Plan for Africa. Think back to the Second World War, think back to the United States that liberated Europe, but then rebuilt Europe, spending one percent GDP over four years. They were being strategic, it wasn’t all out of the goodness of their hearts, though it was that too. The U.S. were rebuilding Europe as a bulwark against Sovietism in the Cold War. This is what we need in Africa and in some parts of the Middle East—a bulwark against the extremism of our age in what I call the Hot War. This makes sense, not just as a moral imperative, but a political and a strategic one. It’s the right thing to do.

  So you’d like to see the military spending into a Marshall Plan–type investment. Is it realistic?

  What I’m saying is, one is bound up in the other. Might it not be cheaper to make friends of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later? When we started the century, people were still talking about Star Wars, they were talking about b
uilding space stations with nuclear capability . . . It’s a joke! Commercial airliners can be used to take down countries. On September 11, one of those airplanes was headed for the United States Congress, packed with people I know and respect and now work with. The whole of the United States Congress could have been taken out by just one of those planes, were it not for the bravery of some of the people on board. Star Wars? What were they thinking? This is a new era. We need tactical weapons in another sense. Take out hatred a different way. Destroy anti-American or anti-Western feeling by making sure they know who we are, working harder on the Middle East peace process, feeding people who are starving, bringing our pharmaceuticals to deal with the AIDS emergency. Africa is forty percent Muslim. For the price of the war in Iraq, the world could have been changed utterly, and people who now boo and hiss America and Europe would be applauding us. This is not fanciful, this is not Irish misty-eyed nonsense! This is realpolitik.

  You’re up to your neck in all this stuff! How did you get involved at such a level? It seems that it’s only happened over the last five years. Mandela was released in 1990, but you didn’t set foot in South Africa until the late nineties.

  First time, I think it was on the PopMart tour. As I told you, U2 were frontline agitators for the anti-apartheid movement. We were the first artists invited to the new South Africa by the ANC [the PopMart tour stopped in Cape Town on March 16, 1998].

  So it was about thirteen years later. I think you offered an explanation, albeit unconsciously. I have here the speech you just made a couple of weeks ago when you received an honorary degree at the University of Pennsylvania, trying to raise the consciousness of future American decision-makers about AIDS in Africa: “I know idealism is not playing on the radio right now,” you said. “You don’t see it on TV, irony is on heavy rotation, the knowingness, the smirk, the tired joke. I’ve tried them all out. Idealism is under siege, beset by materialism, narcissism, and all the other isms of indifference.” What I’m underscoring here is: I’ve tried them all out. In the early nineties, U2 was very much into nihilism and irony. You and the band made a point of not being as earnest as you had been before. Does that account for your personally forgetting about Africa?

  Firstly, let me say the music was not ironic in that period—it was wrapped in irony. Actually, there was real blood going through those veins. Secondly, concerning the packaging, the presentation, I think even then it was ironic in a very idealistic way. As to forgetting about Africa, all through that period, Ali and myself were quietly involved. As I told you before, it was not part of U2’s agenda.

  So you really don’t think you lost your idealism, and to use your own kind of terminology, “surrendered to the world and its way,” which is surely the smirk?

  Look, we didn’t want to look like the group that was too stupid to enjoy being at number one! [laughs] There’s only so much people can take of four angry young men. We had much more dimension in our personal lives. We wanted to reflect that in our public lives. Laughter is the evidence of freedom. A sense of humor is not always defensive. It can be a great attack dog. I mean, we described Achtung, Baby as the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree. We had amassed a lot of moral baggage, and we just wanted to lighten the load a little bit for those four frozen faces on the cover of that album. We had painted ourselves into a corner. We needed to circle the square. Every sort of “Right On” movement was outside our door and knocking. We couldn’t let every serious issue in. We continued our work with Amnesty International and Greenpeace. That’s where we met the wider world, through those organizations. We stormed Sellafield with Kraftwerk and Public Enemy, and it was amazing. But I admit the period was more inward- than outward-looking, and at a certain point, maybe the worldview suffered, I’ll admit that. Compassion fatigue: I don’t think we had it, but it could have been an issue for our audience if we were to take on Africa at that period. I mean, I was reading about Africa in the newspaper or in the odd specialist publication, but I wasn’t anxious to stare at it for too long. I hadn’t heard any new ideas at that point.

  When you did Live Aid and the Conspiracy of Hope tour, humanitarian work seemed to be at the core of your music. But afterward, humanitarian work was the small print on the list of acknowledgments in your CD booklets. I was wondering if you were touched by that wave of self-disgust that was going on in the nineties. There was Nirvana, and with grunge came the business of self-loathing. I mean it was not a business, but it was a trend . . .

  [interrupting] No, it is a business! [laughs]

  OK. Let me put it simply. Did you go through a crisis of faith?

  Errr . . . a crisis of strategy more than a crisis of faith. I mean, taking a television station on the road, and spending a quarter of a million dollars a day wasn’t just a thrill. [laughs] It was a bit of a worry! I mean, we were burning money, a bonfire of our vanities. But we were at least spending it on our fans. We were risking bankruptcy for an art project.

  But hadn’t you stopped trying to change the world in the real sense? Art projects are not something people would associate with U2.

  Well you should, because it is one, and a commercial project, and a spiritual project, and a political project when it wants to be. We still had the idea in our heads that a rock star has two instincts: he wants to change the world, and he wants to have fun. If he can do both at the same time, that’s the way to go. But though we had a lot of interesting and arty ideas that were flashing around on our expensive TV sets, the mainframe of Zoo TV was still pretty radical. The siege of Sarajevo was going on, and we were broadcasting it.

  Yes, it’s true. I’m being unfair. You were still setting up these operations. But that is my point. They were operations.

  Heart wasn’t enough, you had to be smart in the nineties. We were trying something new. We were looking for hard juxtapositions, the kind you’ll find in conceptual art. It was uncomfortable. Because that’s the thing about television—you move from a kind of McDonald’s commercial to Africa in a second. And this sort of schizophrenic channel-hopping image of life that we were all leading was part of that whole thing. We needed new weapons for our arsenal. That was what Zoo TV was. We called it judo. Have we discussed that yet?

  Yes, using the enemy’s strength to defend yourself. What did you have to defend yourself against?

  Caricaturing in the media. We were being reduced to simple lines, there was no shading. We looked naive. Yes, that’s what was going on in that period. I don’t think it was a crisis of faith, no. Just looking for a new way to express old idealism.

  But didn’t you go through a period of doubt in your personal life? I have this feeling that you were a little lost at that time.

  On the contrary, I was going through a kind of glasnost. [laughs] The Politburo was coming out of the deep freeze.

  Same years, by the way: 1989–1990.

  I know. Of course I slept in Brezhnev’s bed. That must have been when all this started. I told you that, didn’t I? I went from the tents of Amhara to sleeping in Brezhnev’s bed.

  I don’t remember the Brezhnev story.

  When we were recording Achtung, Baby, the night we flew into Berlin was the last of the old divided city. And our tour manager, Dennis Sheehan, had found the old Soviet guesthouses for the old Soviet leaders. I happened to be sleeping in Brezhnev’s room. What a laugh! This was a brown room. All I remember is there was brown everywhere, and very large knobs on everything, even on the stereo. If I haven’t told you, I should probably. It’s a complete distraction to go back to Berlin, but if you want, I will, because the most extraordinary thing happened as we were living in that house. For our very first night, there were celebrations.

  Oh yeah, when you joined the wrong crowd and found yourselves with people who were demonstrating against the destruction of the wall. I’m not surprised that happened to you. [laughs]

  How perfect is that? U2 chills out. We want to be part of the parade and the fun, and have celebrations. We’re looking aro
und, and we’re going: “These people, they really don’t know how to have fun, do they?” We’d heard about Bierkellers and we thought: “This is not looking like the Berliners we’ve heard about . . .” Then we find out: “Oops! These people are protesting the Wall coming down. They’re diehard Communists.” It’s just a great photograph, isn’t it? “U2 protests Wall coming down.”

  You’re digressing again. In that speech at the University of Pennsylvania, you said: “I’ve tried them all out: the smirk, the tired joke . . .” What is it that you tried exactly?

  That smirk annoys me, whenever I see it. Mostly, it’s the sign that I’m uncomfortable. It’s like a nervous twitch. There was an amazing moment when we played the Super Bowl recently, the finale of America’s football league. It’s a hyper-event in the U.S., the biggest date of the year. We had to build the stage in six minutes. Our idea was to have a music crowd on the pitch and then walk through that crowd to get up on the stage. I had on these earphones that were wireless. The band are walking through the crowd and there’s a camera right in front of me, and the punters start slapping me on the back. I realize that the tiny wires of my earplugs are vulnerable. All one person has to do is pull the wire, and I’m off air. I would hear nothing. Off the air in front of a billion people! And this is going out live, and there’s nothing you could do. So because this wire had been left exposed, I just started to quietly panic. But if you look at the film of that, you’ll see me swaggering with the most annoying smirk ever seen. You just think: that guy is such a prat! [laughs] The confidence, you just hate it. I hate anyone with that much confidence. Confidence gets you not very far in this life. But for me, it’s a sure sign of pure panic.

  I still don’t know exactly what you were trying out with that smirk. You were suggesting an intentional change of image.

  I always felt like a part-time pop star, never fully comfortable with the role. For a few years, I put on rock stars’ clothes and a rock star confidence to see where it would get me. I was surprised.