Bob Geldof has hit out at accusations he has a “white saviour complex” due to his charity work in Africa with Live Aid and Band Aid.
The 73-year-old Irish musician and activist has found himself described this way since the Eighties, when he first began raising awareness of the famine in Ethiopia.
“That doesn’t exist,” Geldof said of the term. “That’s just a word, a theory like Original Sin,” he added, in reference to the Christian teaching that all people are born into a state of sin.
U2 frontman Bono, 65, who worked alongside Geldof raising funds for Africa, admitted he felt some of Band Aid’s work had been tone deaf in his 2022 memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.
The musician, who famously sang the line “Thank God it’s them instead of you” in the 1984 charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, alluded he himself has been guilty of a white saviour complex at times.
Asked about his collaborator’s remarks, Geldof told The iPaper, “Well yeah, he probably believes it. But there isn’t such a thing. I’m not interested in political correctness, this certain woke stuff.”
He continued: “It’ll pass and you’ll still have hungry people. I’m only interested in stopping human beings dying of starvation. I’m not interested in boosting someone’s idea of their parents’ country.”
Geldof raised over $127m (£109m) for famine relief in Ethiopia by organising the 1985 Live Aid concert, which saw performances from the likes of Queen and David Bowie and garnered over a billion viewers.
The musician has previously addressed accusations that he suffers from a white saviour complex, telling The Times earlier this summer that it was media pressure that prompted him to visit Africa.
“I said, ‘I’m not the story. People are f***ing dying of no food in a world of surplus food, that’s the story.’ And they said, ‘We can’t keep doing the starving child, the starving mother, we’ve done it, Bob.’”
Last year, Geldof dismissed a critical comment fromThe Guardian, which highlighted how some viewed Live Aid as reinforcing “a patronising image of Africa as a continent desperate for, and dependent on, western aid” – as “the greatest load of b****cks ever”.
“If there was a famine in Italy and someone reacts and they’re white, are they a white saviour? Are the only people allowed to react to an African famine Black?” he said in response.
“Are they the only ones allowed to do it? Because, wow, people in Africa are Black, so it can only be a Black person who does that. If there’s a famine where people are green, do you have to be green to do it? This is a nonsensical, absolutely dismissive argument. It is. I think it’s rubbish.”
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