Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - May 21, 2006
Julian Rademeyer

ALONG a dusty road with no name near Lesotho's capital, Maseru, the diplomat became a rock star. Stripping off the shirt and tie he had worn to a meeting with King Letsie III, U2 front man Bono glanced around, self-consciously, and donned a rumpled black T-shirt.

Clark Kent had become Superman.

"Wherever you go in Africa, there's Irish nuns and priests jumping out from behind bushes. Now there's rock stars," he had quipped the night before. "Forgive us. It is because we love the continent of Africa. We're here as servants and students of the people of Africa."

Bono radiates a missionary zeal and the people he wants to convert are the leaders of the world's most powerful nations. "I'm absolutely sure rock stars can't save the world," he told the Sunday Times at a school near Butha Buthe in the north. "But rock stars can point the people who can in the right direction."

With Africa once again sliding off the world's agenda, the "rock god" has embarked on a six-nation African tour, which kicked off in Lesotho on Tuesday.

"We feel all the opportunities and all the challenges ahead of the continent are here in microcosm in Lesotho. If the interested world and the movement of activists and the G8 governments working with [the Lesotho] government cannot make a marked difference in the lives of people, the Basotho people, then what chance has the rest of the continent?"

He has vowed to "keep the pressure up" and slammed the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee, which has shaved $2.4-billion off President George W Bush's $3-billion foreign aid request.

Bono said the committee recently "welcomed us with open arms, patted us on the back and shook our hands and their eyes misted up at the right place. When we left town they slashed the budgets."

His arrival in Lesotho coincided with a key conference held by the international Multi-Fibre Arrangement Forum, whose aim is to boost the local textile industry in the face of competition from high-volume producers in Asia.

Lesotho's textile industry came dangerously close to collapse as cheap imports from China, India and Bangladesh flooded US markets last year. This was exacerbated by a strong local currency.

Close to 15000 employees at textile factories found themselves unemployed. In many instances factory owners had simply locked up shop and "vanished" over the December holiday season.

"Employment in the sector went from 53000 to just below 40000," Andy Salms, regional textile and apparel specialist with the ComMark Trust - an initiative set up by Britain's Department for International Development - said this week.

But in recent months Lesotho has seen a resurgence in the industry, the major formal employer in the landlocked kingdom. It produces 26 million pairs of jeans a each year and 80 million knitted garments. "We figure we're back over the 45000 [employee] mark now," Salms said.

But the industry faces another crippling threat: Aids, with a third of the workers thought to be HIV-positive.

In Maseru, Bono threw his support behind a new initiative by the ComMark Trust to launch an industry-wide fight against Hiv/Aids.

It has been 10 months since Bono, Bob Geldof and friends organised the Live 8 concert and mounted an ambitious campaign to "make poverty history". Three billion people tuned in across the globe to watch the concert. Thirty million signed a petition, which was handed to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who chaired the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, last year.

In response, the G8 leaders pledged to ensure $50-billion more aid a year by 2010, debt cancellation for 38 countries, primary education for every child by 2015, universal access to Aids medication and help in doubling the size of Africa's economy and trade by 2015. But the leaders endorsed only just over 50 of the 980 recommendations made by the Commission for Africa, established by Blair to find ways of ensuring the continent's long-term strength and prosperity.

Promises are easily made. "Politicians like to sign cheques, but they don't like to cash 'em," Bono said in a BBC interview in Lesotho. "We could be in a catastrophic situation come the anniversary of Live 8 unless something happens quick."

Speaking to the Sunday Times this week, he said Lesotho deserved debt cancellation. He remarked on the irony that the "only reason it hasn't [qualified for this] ... is because it is such a good financial manager and has been prudent".

It has been a roller-coaster week for the Irishman with the devilish charm, trademark rose-tinted shades and designer stubble.

On Monday he guest-edited a special edition of London's Independent newspaper to promote his Product (Red) campaign aimed at raising money for the Global Fund To Fight Aids. He came up with the front-page headline himself. In bold and in the shape of a cross, it read: "No news today." Below in smaller type was the punchline: "Just 6500 Africans died today as a result of a preventable, treatable disease".

In his editorial, Bono wrote: "May I say without guile, I am as sick of messianic rock stars as the next man, woman and child." But he added: "We have to keep our marching boots on and hold our leaders to account for the promises they made to Africa."

By Tuesday, as the paper hit the streets, he was heading for Lesotho on a chartered Boeing 737. Over the next two days he toured factories, a clinic and a school. Everywhere he went he was met with singing and ululating, prompting him to remark: "As a singer, can I say, we would never - with all the training in the world - be able to sing like this."

Bono's interest in Lesotho goes further than a meet-and-greet stopover. Accompanied by his usually publicity-shy wife of 24 years, Ali Hewson, he visited a factory that makes part of the couple's designer Edun clothing range.

Cheekily, the name is "nude" backwards and a play on Eden, the biblical garden of paradise. The clothing company calls itself "socially conscious". Aid to Africa should be supplanted by trade, the couple believe.

"Shopping is a political act," said Hewson. "Where you spend your hard-earned dollar or pound says a lot about you ... People want to know more about where their clothes come from."

It is an effort to bring a new morality to an industry dogged in the past by exposure of brutal exploitation in sweatshops.

And, said Bono: "We think it makes clothes more desirable if they are made in Africa because we think Africans are just ... cooler."

According to Lesotho's Trade and Industry Minister, Mpho Malie, the new morality is having an effect: "There has been a change of heart in the way the big companies operate. They feel they have a social obligation to the people who are supplying them and making these products. I think there is that new morality."

Unlike Bono, Malie believes rock stars can change the world. "They have done so in their own way, you only have to go back to the Beatles and Mick Jagger. They have had influence in the world and they meet very influential people. Bono knows what he's talking about. Just because you're a rock star doesn't mean you don't have the mind of a genius. He is certainly focused and passionate."

Salms was equally impressed. "His knowledge of the issues is quite extraordinary and [he has] an ability to cut to the core of what is going on. He operates at a fairly stratospheric level, which does open so many doors."

At a school in Butha Buthe, dozens of children waited in driving rain for the Coming of Bono, their teeth chattering, their clothes spattered with red mud.

"Bono, Bono, we thank you," they sang.

Looking down at the huddled mass, the rock star said God had spoken with the rain. "He must want a new school hall. We'll find that for you."

Then he was gone, bound for Rwanda.

Gone where there are more flames to reach out to, on more streets with no names.

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