'The ancestors are an immediate & accessible reality': poetic licence, a conversation with Sir Bob Geldof--on his new book/TV series, Geldof in Africa, and other matters. "Every time I go to Africa, I feel renewed--quite the opposite to what you would expect." Arise Sir Bob!

It took all my courage to approach Sir Bob Geldof, even at a London party. After all, he had once called a notorious Horn of Africa factional leader "a f--k", and on TV too. It had stopped an embarrassed interpreter dead in his tracks. "Go on," said Sir Bob, "translate it."

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Here, the setting was slightly different, the elegant British Library Reception Room, where Geldof had just recited Keats to a packed house. It was the novelist Josephine Hart's celebrated Poetry Hour, attended by the great and the good--and me. Alone and palely loitering (like Keats' Belle Dame Sans Merci in one of the poet's best loved verses), I clutched my BBC World Service mike which had travelled all over Africa with me, and headed for the scrum around Sir Bob.

But I was full of trepidation. Might the former Boomtown Rat, known as much for his expletives as for his tireless campaigning for Africa's poor, decide to "make Hordern history"? Would he still be in the Keatsian mood? His passion for the poet was not widely known. What if that was deliberate and he took offence at my plying him with questions on Africa?

I'm 6'2", but he, sylph-like, towered over me. He was also henna-haired. A recent visit to India during the Holi Hindu festival was the cause, where the sub-continent's custom of spraying everyone with coloured water and dried flowers had evidently gone to Sir Bob's head. His familiar once-grey locks were now all shades from pink to purple. His looks caught me off guard. How would he react to a microphone thrust?

"How are you, Sir Bob?" "Fine, thank you," he replied. So far, so good.

"A great night tonight. I thought there were lots of echoes of Keats in your Geldof in Africa." "Wow!" he countered. "That's flattering. I didn't intend to. That's fantastic!"

Sir Bob needn't have been so amazed. He was merely carrying on a tradition. Keats, Byron and Shelley were the equivalent of today's pop stars--the latter coined the phrase, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". Like these modern troubadours, they had more contact with the general population and in many cases exercised greater influence than politicians.

The former pop star has been visiting Africa for 20 years. Perhaps the seminal moment for him (like others) was the BBC's Michael Buerk's reportage of 23 October 1984 from Ethiopia, accompanied by sickening images of infants with protruding rib cages, fly-covered eyes, actually expiring before the camera: "Death is all around. A child or an adult dies every 20 minutes. Korern, an insignificant town, has become a place of grief," Buerk intoned.

The worst hasn't blunted Geldof's optimism. "Every time I go to Africa," Sir Bob told me, above the cocktail chatter, "I feel renewed--quite the opposite to what you would expect," he said. "Ay, on the shores of darkness there is light. Here is a budding morrow in midnight." Geldof organised the recording of a fund-raising record, Do they know it's Christmas? He castigated those in authority for standing idly by. "Thou answer'st not; for thou are dead asleep."

Live Aid was watched in 108 countries and raised $100m. Another $1bn was allocated for relief assistance to Ethiopia by governments and NGOs in the West. Twenty years later, in 2004, with the tag, "Make Poverty History", Live 8, broadcast to 140 countries, Africa was catapulted to centre stage in front of two billion people.

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For the book/TV series Geldof in Africa, Sir Bob's travels took him through 13 African countries where he was able to contrast first-hand the harsh realities of modern-day existence juxtaposed with the relics of a magnificent past. In this and his former African journeys spanning 20 years, Geldof travelled over regions that saw Man's earliest footprints (3.6 million years old!) at Laetoli in northern Tanzania; he saw the effect of the genocidal behaviour of Sudan's government in Darfur, where only a short distance away, lies the ancient royal city of Meroe, 100 miles north of Khartoum.

Meroe was tagged "the Birmingham of Africa", the 2,500-year-old techniques of iron manufacture only equalled by Britain toward the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

Geldof visited Tanzania where Kilwa Island, one of the African eastern seaboard's 35 coastal city kingdoms, for centuries before the arrival of the Europeans, traded luxury goods with India, China and Persia; these ports were supplied from deep in the interior with gold and ivory from Great Zimbabwe whose palaces and stone buildings were replicated in 150 sites--some built almost a millennium ago by descendants of today's Shona people.

He also visited Timbuktu in Mali, which in 1486 was already a major trading centre of international fame, when the Benin Empire, whose bronzes would later excite admiration the world over, exchanged ambassadors with Portugal. "The list is endless," admits Sir Bob. As he relates in his book: "The Westerners leapt to the conclusion that these people were clearly pagan without any discernible theology," and that these people should be "saved".

"Anything remotely sophisticated was dismissed out of hand or some earlier whites had got there first," he added. Contrasting Ireland's reverence for storytellers and bards of oral history, the West condemned Africa's same tradition, describing the continent's 2,000 languages with separate cultures, as somehow primitive and inferior.

By 1910, 16,000 missionaries were stationed south of the Sahara, who taught their new subjects to despise their ancestral culture as worthless and to look only to Europe for the true path. It was the brazen lie that led to occupation. Joseph Conrad's description of Leopold's Congo Free State as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of the human conscience", is a paradigm for the Western rape of an entire continent.

Respect for Africa's traditions reverberate throughout Geldof's book. His description of the dead affecting the living, is uncannily echoed by Keats:

  "As every African understands, the ancestors--that is all those who
have died--are an immediate and accessible reality. They are not dead as
such; they have merely slipped through to the immaterial and
insubstantial. It is not a question of triumphing over anything; it is
the exchange of one actual existence for another and neither is capable
of denying the other. Indeed the opposite for both, like an eternal
tango, forced to work alongside and with each other. The ancestors are
annoying and can be annoyed, but, crucially they are also the medium of
negotiation between the substantial world and the gods. The spirit world
impinges upon the material. It is there to be recognised and to be
negotiated with." (Geldof)
  "Here, your earth-born souls still speak
  To mortals, of their little week;
  Of their sorrows and delights;
  Of their glory and their shame;
  What doth strengthen and what maim.
  Thus ye teach us, every day.
  Wisdom, though fled far away"
  (Keats)

"I'm always struck by the innate majesty of Africans," I told Sir Bob, and asked him, "Is it due to being so often first of so many cultural advances compared to the rest of the world?"

Replied Geldof: "Africa's first by virtue of producing the first man. I think there is an innate majesty simply in their carriage, which is borne out of necessity. Unlike ours, which isn't elegant at all! We fumble and are erratic and jerky because we are rushing to get in out of that cold, damp weather. So we come inside to these cosy, red-lined pubs and dark oaken rooms, and that's what suits us. Because outside it's miserable and we're bundled up and rampant.

"And they're unbundled and loose-limbed and poised brilliantly between sky and earth, anchoring the two together. You know, extraneous movement is of net economic detriment to the movement of the body. Women moving in a lullaby sway from their hips, just elegantly. People standing absolutely still on one leg for hours. You can over-romanticise it. It is a virtue and a necessity of the environment--that sort of behaviour, as ours is. The thing is you can still retain that but you don't have to be the victim of that environment. So how do you retain it and cease to be a victim of that same thing which is so beguiling."

Geldof is himself a beguiling man, jovial even. He often uses four-letter words to get his point across--a compassionate being with vastly more culture than he lets on, evidenced in his award-winning musical composition and performances, erudite book on Africa and delight in Keats. The latter, who also met foot-dragging in high places, provides an epitaph for his fellow campaigner, as he "who startles princes from their easy slumbers".

Geldof cannot disguise his passion for Keats. He says self-deprecatingly: "I'm crap at presenting ... I'm crap at reciting ..." He remains a pop star who has single-handedly devoted himself to the cause of Africa with great effect.