Leaving Live8 and politics to one side, Bob Geldof makes a personal journey through Africa to understand ordinary Africans and, through their experiences, understand the forces that make the continent tick.
Life in Africa has always been a battle against nature, climate and geography. Bob Geldof follows the evolutionary trail of mankind from our 'Rift Valley' origins in the Laetoli Gorge, Tanzania to the point on the north-eastern coast of Africa where people first left to colonize the rest of the world. En route he travels through the Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Masailand and encounters a group of the last few hundred remaining Hadsa people who still live as man did fifty thousand years ago. His journey finishes amongst the warlords in the harsh burnt lands and disputed border territory of Somalia.
Bob travels along the West African coast in a battered old Peugeot 504 with his driver Ossie. On his way through Ghana he visits the old British slave fort of Cape Coast, a real life 'Willy Wonka' cocoa plantation in Bisiasi where he's inaugurated a king and the Vatican City of Voodoo, Ouidha in Benin. He reflects on the horrors of past and present slavery to the crippling modern day trade restrictions placed upon African countries.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a country badly in need of government, any government. Bob journeys north up the river Congo on a UN patrol boat reflecting on the political chaos that rips Africa apart perpetuates corruption and stifles hope. He visits the City of Kisangani, not to long ago a Hollywood haven for stars like Humphry Bogart and Catherine Hepburn and investigates a rumour that here, AIDS began as a result of trials of Western medicine, today this rumour prevents people trusting modern cures for disease. He also talks to real life Harry and Harriette Potters in a Congaleese Hogwarts where he meets children who still believe that the supernatural is more powerful than medicine and science.
Bob leaves the silence and emptiness of the Sahara desert from an isolated settlement of sand covered buildings that are the town of Arouane. He travels 250 kilometres south to the legendry City of Timbuktu, the gate way to the desert, where he reflects on traditional and modern ways of education, largely believed to be a key to Africa's success. He then journeys by river to the cosmopolitan port of Mopti and on to the largest mud building in the world, a mosque, in Djenne. He finishes his journey on the spectacular Bandiagara escarpment in Dogon country, Mali, where he stumbles upon a modern day tribe of slaves trying to break free from their chains through learning.
War, Famine, Plague & Death are the four horsemen of the Apocalypse and these days they're riding hard through the back roads of Africa. Bob begins in northern Uganda where there is a little heard about war going on and to his disgust learns of the carnage and monstrous atrocities conducted by the Lord's Resistance Army towards children. Only three hundred and fifty miles away is Uganda's' capitol Kampala, a modern city akin to many in Western Europe with all the trappings and convenience of the modern world. Kampala was at the epicentre of the spread of AIDS but in recent years has had the biggest success in reigning in the disease. Moving across the border into Northern Kenya Bob visits the largest UN relief base in the world, Lokichoggio then heads into one of the most dangerous places on the planet the Sudan on a UN relief mission.
Ethiopia. Where Bob's personal long march for justice began. On this the twentieth anniversary of Live Aid he returns to the country that first triggered his and our indignation over the mass famine and the dieing tens of thousands in Northern Ethiopia. But there is another Ethiopia, an Ethiopia as diverse and as rich with its cultures, peoples and histories as any in Europe. As well as personal favourites: Addis Ababa and the ancient cathedrals of Lalibella carved deep into the rocks, Bob visits new places. In Gondar the medieval castles that would be more than at home as a backdrop for King Arthur. In Harar a 'Khat' market, the bewildering new trade in the amphetamine drug now grown and exported more than coffee and in the south the Mursi tribe a people who only learnt they belonged to a country in the 1970's.