The New York Times - September 23, 2006
Virginia Heffernan

Like Bono, Angelina Jolie, Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, Ms. Amanpour has seen that Africa now offers clear opportunities to do some good with reports that, against the odds, offer hope.

Not long ago, Africa was the name for a problem without a solution. Hunger and war, which had seemed intractable on the continent since decolonization, had been compounded by the rapid spread of AIDS, for which there was no treatment. In those days - post-apartheid, post-Live Aid - Africa seemed to have exhausted the minds and the mercy of politicians, celebrities, relief workers, missionaries and journalists.

Instead, in the 1990's many in the grandstanding and ministering classes turned their attention to the Middle East, where peace seemed tantalizingly within reach, and where analysis - using principles of university-taught political science, and economics - seemed to pay off. For a time.

But then it didn't. And today, as the conflicts in the Middle East have come to seem increasingly opaque and unpredictable, some analysts, after many a dove-hawk-dove oscillation, have quietly thrown up their hands. It's just too demoralizing to be wrong over and over.

Africa has been an unlikely beneficiary of this demoralization.

Fresh from her special "In the Footsteps of bin Laden," in which Ms. Amanpour, like everyone else, failed to find Osama bin Laden, she now visits various regions of Africa where a measure of hope can be found. Not that it comes easy. The first half of the program lays out twinned problems: children who have lost their parents to AIDS and children who have AIDS.

As Ms. Amanpour announces at the top of the hour, Africa now has 12 million orphans ("And counting!" she shouts, her indignation persuasive). She talks to many, and to the grandmothers who, in many cases, have been left to care for them.

While the camera takes in the irrepressible beauty of the East African landscape, Ms. Amanpour visits a boy whose father and mother are dying of AIDS. "Muktar," she says, "can you tell me what you're thinking right now, what you're feeling?" Muktar, we learn, is feeling very sad.

Many of Ms. Amanpour's interviews proceed this way. Sometimes, as when she assumes that African grandmothers of small children must be aged (they look in their 40's to me), she seems disconnected from her surroundings. She also asks mannered questions that draw annoyed comebacks; to her credit, she leaves these exchanges in the documentary.

"Do you have enough food?" she asks one woman surrounded by skeletal and stunned-looking boys and girls.

"The children are dying of hunger, don't you see?" is the woman's incredulous response.

Ms. Amanpour does see. But she also sees, after a meeting with various relief workers, that some of this misery can be curtailed. Many organizations are working to get AIDS medicine to Africans who need it, and one, the Riders for Health, even goes out to rural areas on motorcycles to be sure it gets to those most unwell. One simple thing the motorcyclists do is to treat pregnant AIDS sufferers with anti-retroviral drugs, which prevent them from passing the disease to their babies. In small regions this has worked wonders, and most believe that the program can be successfully broadened.

As Ms. Amanpour talks to doctors and children, she seems exhilarated to be finding ways to improve the world, rather than just report on it.

But in other scenes, especially when she's pumping for good quotes, she seems to feign involvement in a way that may make you long for her authoritarian reports into the camera, delivered in her gloriously husky tones, which suggest that she never gets a word wrong. Here she's much more human, and extremely idiosyncratic, as when she asks a man whose wife has worked as a prostitute: "How could you send your women out to sell their bodies?"

"Your women"? "Sell their bodies"? This sounds more like a base provocation than a real concern.

No matter. Fortunately, the man has no time for debates about marriage, modesty, sex work. "We are hungry!" he says, which once again closes the case.

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