Bono was right. In 1984, as Rolling Stone reports, the Irish singer joined an all-star group of English New Wave musicians — dubbed Band Aid — to record the benefit song but balked at singing a line that was both patronizing and an iconic moment in the song. He sang it anyway and “Do They Know It’s Christmas” raised millions for Ethiopians dying from famine, and spawned others benefit songs — including an American effort, “We Are the World” — and the hugely influential and important “Live Aid” concert.
The Ethiopian famine of the 1980s, as Worldvision, a Christian aid group, points out was “one of the worst humanitarian events of the 20th century,” with an estimated 1 million dying and millions of others being displaced. The response was slow, but ultimately involved a massive aid drive that generated both money and food, though there was “little concern for the local and global politics fueling the crisis,” as Andrew Skablund points out in an overview on Ohio State’s “Origins” history site.
Most international aid workers failed to realize that the governmental policies of the Ethiopian Derg, the communist and military committee that ruled Ethiopia, were playing a significant role in creating and exacerbating the suffering caused by drought.
The aid distribution also “exacerbated the Ethiopian Civil War,” Skablund says, which raged on into the 1990s, died down and continued on a low simmer for several decades.
Fast forward to today, and we are witnessing what aid organizations are calling “famine-like conditions” in Ethiopia, due in large part to a re-emergence of civil war in the same region where famine struck in the 1980s. The devastation is happening largely outside of the public’s view, with political leaders holding back on labeling it a famine or mustering a full-blown aid response, seeking to avoid a confrontation with the Ethiopian government. Many in the aid community, as the World Peace Foundation points out on the BBC, blame Ethiopia. A former UN official, he says, accuses the country of purposefully trying to starve the Tigray region and “to cover up what's going on.”
The U.S. State Department issued a statement last week on the conflict, without mentioning the “famine-like conditions,” but condemning reports of “mass detentions, killings, and forced expulsions of ethnic Tigrayans in western Tigray by Amhara security forces” and the displacement of 1.2 million people over the last year. have been forcibly displaced from western Tigray since the beginning of the conflict in November 2020. The Biden administration is calling for a cessation of fighting and a dialogue that brings together all parties, but humanitarian disaster unfolding has eerie echoes of the famine that prodded “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” into being and underscores how flawed our responses are to the confluence of natural and political devastation around the globe.
So, what does any of this have to do with a terrible Christmas song that remains part of the holiday canon? “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was written by Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats and Midge Ure of Ultravox. The pair’s intentions were good. There was a need for immediate help in the region. And the world responded.
In the end, however, the efforts were marred by a legacy of colonialism that the songwriters place front and center in “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” The song, a demand that we wake up and do something, cast the starving Africans as stock figures, presenting them in the same dehumanizing language used by the great English writers of the late-colonial period. It is a song that emphasizes difference, that underscores an us and them mindset. “There's a world outside your window,” the assembled vocalists proclaim, “And it's a world of dread and fear,” inviting the listening pity the poor folk from the “dark continent.” We can help them, the song says, though the reasons to do so are very much in keeping with Rudyard Kipling’s notion of “The White Man’s Burden” — that we have a responsibility, a burden, because we can and they cannot, because they are by nature, by place incapable. Artists like George Michael, Boy George, Phil Collins, and Paul McCartney lent their voices and credibility to the project, seemingly unaware of the ways in which the song cast Africans as “the other,” as “not like us.” Africa, the song tells us, is a place where the “The Christmas bells that ring / … are the clanging chimes of doom,” a place in which there is no rain, just tears.
The song chimes with doom and Bone steps to the mic: “Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you.” It is a line both became iconic and summed up the song’s snobbery. “Them instead of you.” Bono apparently balked at the line, telling Geldof he “didn’t want to sing the line.” He was told by Geldof “This is not about what you want, OK? This is about what these people need.”
Geldof’s language — he has not, to my knowledge, disputed Bono’s account from his autobiography — is key to understanding the attitudes that drive the song. “These people,” he says. It’s about what “these people need” — as if he should set the agenda, as if he knew better; it’s a sensibility that runs through the song, drawing a hard line between the Global North and Global South.
There won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time
The greatest gift they'll get this year is life
Life given by the donors, by these White musicians, who offer pity and money and ask little more of us, leaving the larger systems in place that have allowed these “natural disasters” that are anything but natural to repeat and repeat and repeat, even as the cliched melody and production attempts to inspire, and anthemizes condescension. “You ain't gotta feel guilt just selfless / Give a little help to the helpless” — a perfect encapsulation of the Reagan/Thatcher ethos of the moment.
I’m ashamed to say I didn’t hear any of this at the time. I either was incapable of seeing the song outside of the narrow window of American whiteness or was blinded to it by other factors — by the names of the musicians, by the images from the famine-stricken region (what is often called disaster or poverty porn). I hear it now and ask myself how, 37 years after its release, with multiple famines under our belt and the same Tigray minority being targeted by the Ethiopian government, it remains a staple of the holiday season. Perhaps it is because we’ve never bothered to really address the systems that create these famines in the first place, systems from which we in the Global North benefit even as the awful consequences get pushed onto those who live in what we often call the developing world.