The urbane, effete meets the naive, gritty. The topic is the lost peoples of Africa.
Graydon Carter, the polished, cynical editor of "Vanity Fair" will yield his duties onetime to Bono. Bono is the crusading rock star who has recently discovered the woes of Africa. He will do a guest editing project highlighting those problems and his solutions in an upcoming edition of the magazine.
It appears that Mr. Carter would like to finesse this project to someone who eagerly embraces the challenge. Also, it's a cinch that Carter's staff would not get the circulation boost that Bono might give. I believe that both Carter and Bono mean well. But as the saying goes, " The road to perdition is paved with good intentions".
Simply, Bono's answer to Africa's problem is more of the same, I.E. an industrialization of Africa and massive amounts of aid that only serve to addict to dependancy people who need something else. Africa is different. It's peoples have in large part rejected the western civilization's economic model. The aid that has been indiscriminately despensed to African nations this past 40 years ( amounts to app. $600 billion in todays dollars) has been gobbled up or misused by corrupt governments. The diseases that ravage the African continent have only gotten worse. Of these scourges, malnutrition is the biggest killer. Overpopulation in dry-land ecosystems is the reason.
Africa's salvation lies in an African model not a western civilization model. Africa should be conserved and it's peoples should be the stewards. In this pursuit the west could help by promoting conservation, family planning and tourism
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