THEY KNOW IT’S CHRISTMAS
Forty years have slipped by since Bob Geldof and Band Aid launched the hit single Do They Know It’s Christmas? in aid of an Ethiopian famine. Since then it has been through five new versions and even after thirty years, reached number 1 in 69 different countries.
And in that time the world has changed out of all recognition.
The BBC recently released documentary footage of the first recording in November 1984. Pop music in the UK – and perhaps around the world – was at its zenith. There were so many star egos present on the day, people worried it would all fall apart. The recording studio was dominated by white men in mullets and ponytails. The lyrics, earnestly meant, fell short: yes, they do know it’s Christmas in Ethiopia, having embraced the Gospel in the fourth century and no, it’s not right to thank God they are suffering rather than us.
The concept of white saviour had been around a long time by 1984, but few applied it at the time to Band Aid. White men coming conspicuously to the aid of helpless black Africans and doing so without being aware of the optics was of its day. Bob Geldof, in a typically profane and pithy rejoinder nevertheless called his white saviour epithet ‘the greatest load of ******** ever’.
Geldof is intelligent and informed and gets modern developmental dynamics better than most. What’s more, Band Aid in 2023 distributed more than three million pounds to initiatives supplying clean water and building schools. Since 2010, Band Aid has helped provide school meals to Tigrayan children. Geldof has a pragmatic and laser-like focus: money saves lives.
No-one could dispute the need to dispense with images of strong and healthy white men doing their bit for Africans portrayed as disease-ridden, malnourished and covered in flies. Development is about partnership, empowerment and choice. Indigenous African initiatives do not get much attention in the west but they are powering growth and hope in so many places. If anything, the media’s disinterest in Africa unless there are coups and blood is flowing is what sustains old fashioned and misleading stereotypes of violence and helplessness. Legacy media often lacks the resources to report the continent, new media is often self-absorbed, and populations quite parochial in how they consume news. Targeting ageing rock stars for supposedly antiquated views of Africa is lazy and wrong. And it is too easy to blame just the media as well. If anything, the wider public of which we are a part may donate money but is less keen to learn what’s really happening in Africa’s diverse and growing populations.
It helps to think about the environment in which Do they know it’s Christmas? was released. In the middle of the eighties, individualism and personal enrichment were dominant creeds; the existence of society itself was challenged. Band Aid, for all its foibles, dropped into a culture that sanctioned personal gain as the truest expression of life. Greed was not good. Charity was far better. It would be naïve to put a course correction down to Band Aid, but it played its part in reawakening consciences.
Perhaps today we need a similar kind of re-boot, especially in an era of nationalism. We can certainly look back and see how far we’ve come in cultural and racial awareness since 1984; the more interesting question is whether we can spot how the world might judge our today in 2064. That is part of the prophetic gift. In his letter, St James says:
If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? (2:15-16)
It reads like an expletive deleted Geldof. And it speaks to 2024, just like 1984.
