Feed the World: Birhan Woldu and Live Aid. Oliver Harvey
and shouting and arguing – if, after all of that, it had all only resulted in the single life of this woman, then just for that one life, just for that single human being, it would have been worth it.
Birhan survived because of Brian Stewart, a wonderful reporter for the CBC, who made the original film we showed that day at Live Aid in 1985. He made sure she was cared for and supported throughout her life. Oliver Harvey then brought her to the attention of the world again. All you can say is ‘Thank God’ – for her and for both of those men.
This is Birhan’s extraordinary story told with profound respect and clear emotion by a man who has obviously imbibed her culture and come to love and respect it. Oliver fills his narrative with erudition and explanation. He has come to love Ethiopia – the most beautiful of lands – as does anyone who goes there.
When I first met Oliver I thought he was the most unlikely of candidates to ever ‘get’ what was going on. It crossed my mind that his parents had to have had a vivid sense of humour when they named him, more or less, after one of the greatest funny men of all time. Was this ‘another fine mess’ he was going to get me into?
Oliver was the very model of the model of the British journalist. Straight out of Evelyn Waugh. Crumpled, sweaty, dressed in an off-white linen suit and inappropriately heavy brogues. Weedy rather than skinny, blinking constantly behind thick glasses, thinning hair sweat-plastered to a damp skull and hesitantly asking frankly silly ‘human-angle’ tabloid questions. I saw him again a week later. Same clothes. Same sweat. Same discomfort. Different questions – this time penetrating, clever, full of understanding, curious. He was a journalist. He was hooked. Africa had got him.
It was Michael Buerk, though, who made the agony of the Great African Famines a televisual reality for us in the 1980s. Paul Vallely, now Associate Editor of the UK’s Independent newspaper, gave us the insights and realities of the hunger through his broadsheet journalism. Oliver just helped make the individual tragedies a clearly understood reality for millions of Britons through his great tabloid reporting.
Like thousands of others who engaged with this ‘story’ Oliver got hooked. He realized that he could use his talents and job to achieve something greater than the momentary satisfaction of a ‘good story’. He could actually help to change things. He did so by making the vast readership of The Sun newspaper understand and identify with the immeasurably brave souls and their torture in the parched lands of Ethiopia. As a result, no politician could safely ignore this concern.
To its undying credit and pride, Britain, despite its often difficult economic circumstances, has pledged itself – through several governments of all political hues – to maintain its promises to the poor. In this it is wholly supported by the majority of the public and the media. It is now among the world leaders in the area of development and assistance to developing countries – with all the attendant and immense benefits of ‘soft power’ that come with the strength of doing what you say and of holding to your political convictions.
Over the years I’ve seen Oliver bed down wherever there was space. Mud floors, wooden benches, low-powered mosquito-humming hot rooms, wherever. He never stands aloof. He literally seems quite at home amongst the most fantastical of peoples and actively participates in whatever is going on with them like he’s having the absolute best time of his life. He is never patronizing. Rather he’s laughing, chatting, accepting and being accepted and loving it.
He’s a hard nut and I have a deep respect for him as a man and as a reporter. One never hears the expression ‘Fleet Street’s finest’ any more. It has become an oxymoron. But in the unlikely circumstance that the dignity and pride of the British press is ever restored, it will be quite right to say of one O. Harvey that he is, indeed, one of Fleet Street’s finest.
In this book Oliver tells the tale of his greatest story – the life of Birhan Woldu. The story of the life of a dying child, whose image so appalled the world that it could not stand by and let it pass without action. And the world has been repaid times over for its compassion. In Birhan, this glorious human being, the world has the perfect exemplar of what it is to be human and alive.
AUTHOR PREFACE
IT’S A MERE SEVEN-and-three-quarter-hour night flight from London to Ethiopia over the bumpy heat thermals of the Sahara. You land in a nation literally out of time. Setting off from a cloudy Heathrow in 2011 you touch down in capital Addis Ababa’s gleaming and impressive Bole airport in 2004. Ethiopia has never switched from the Julian calendar like Europe did in 1582 and so is permanently seven years and eight months behind. You might even have landed in Ethiopia’s extra month. It gives rise to the tourist board’s boast of ‘13 months of sunshine’. The clock on the wall is confusing too. There is a 12-hour day, beginning at dawn and ending at sunset.
Ethiopia is a land apart. Tourists expecting a country of barren desert are confronted by soaring peaks, lush river valleys and reed-fringed lakes. It has been called the ‘Cradle of Humanity’, where modern humans first evolved. It is the world’s second oldest Christian country and was never properly colonized in the Scramble for Africa. It has an ancient written language Ge’ez; there are medieval stone castles in Gonder and rock-hewn churches in the holy city of Lalibela, often described as the ‘eighth wonder of the world’. The fiercely proud and profoundly religious people can look as Arabian as African.
A further hour-and-half flight from Addis brings you to Mekele in Ethiopia’s mountainous north – this is the home town of Birhan Woldu. Mekele, capital of Tigray Province, is now a thriving city of over 200,000. Visible on the horizon are giant white wind turbines, which are being constructed above fields tilled by oxen-dragged wooden ploughs, a method unchanged since the Iron Age. Cement and tile factories line the Chinese-built highway. Camel trains, laden with salt blocks cut in the distant Danakil Depression, plod towards the city’s market past expensive villas with satellite dishes bolted to their walls for their expat owners to catch the latest game while on vacation from London, Toronto and Seattle. In 1984 the tinder-dry plains around the city were the epicentre of the 20th century’s worst humanitarian disaster. A ‘biblical famine’ in which an estimated one million people died. It could have been far more – nobody really knows for sure. Like thousands of others, Birhan and her family came here seeking salvation when their crops shrivelled in the sun and their grain stores emptied.
I have a dear friend, Anthony Mitchell, to thank both for introducing me to this amazing land and for helping me find the path to Birhan and her family. A former foot-in-the-door hack at Britain’s Daily Express newspaper, Anthony had moved to Addis to be with his future wife, Catherine Fitzgibbon, who worked for Irish charity Goal and later Save the Children. In 2001 Anthony and I enjoyed a Boy’s Own adventure, trekking and camping in the breathtakingly beautiful Simien Mountains. We hired a cook, a guide and a AK-47-toting guard while our mules were laden with wine and whisky, blankets and fresh food. Passing through the upland villages, it was the warmth, easiness and the sheer joy of living shown by the Ethiopian people that stayed with me.
When I returned to Ethiopia in 2002, to write development features for my newspaper The Sun, the UK’s biggest-selling paper, Anthony was on hand with his by now expert knowledge of the region. In the parched Awash district in central Ethiopia I witnessed for the first time the horrific sight of proud but malnourished families queuing at feeding centres. Ethiopia still couldn’t feed itself nearly 20 years after the famous Live Aid concert.
In the following year Anthony and I were both part of a press pack shadowing Bob Geldof as he criss-crossed the country. Anthony would later be forced out of Ethiopia after the government accused him of ‘hostile’ reporting. He would never leave his beloved Africa, however. Anthony was one of 114 people killed when Kenyan Airways flight KQ507 plunged into a mangrove swamp in Cameroon on May 5, 2007.
In September 2004 though, I had rang Anthony to ask him to help me set up an interview with Birhan Woldu who had been seen close to death in the famous film of starving children screened at Live Aid. The idea