Robert White
Guardian Unlimited
June 27, 2006

This time last year, I spent a fruitless Saturday night touring pubs in Nairobi trying to find a Kenyan who was watching Live 8. There were plenty watching Wimbledon, but no one who had even heard of Bob Geldof.

When I explained what was going on in Britain, they replied briskly that pop music was for children – and if you borrow money, you ought to pay it back.

Away from the sports bars there were, of course, Africans who had heard of both Live 8 and the Gleneagles summit. For the most part, they said it was a bit of a struggle trying to connect with events that saw them chiefly as objects of pity.

Live8 and the political summit in Scotland were acts of political theatre aimed at a western audience, a group hug from which Africa was excluded.

Most people who knew anything about the continent knew that a big bang was never going to happen.

If a place so vast can have a single characteristic, it is resilience. Africa has seen off the slavers and the colonisers; its people have overthrown white-settler kingdoms in Zimbabwe and South Africa, the cousins of those that endure in the Americas.

It is also slow to change. Drive an hour out of most big cities, and the way of life is largely unaltered since the advent of iron tools. Women carry firewood on their heads, boys herd cattle, and villagers’ lives turn on a good rain.

Since the colonial era, the state has been a foreign, interfering power in these people’s lives. With an increasingly free African press reporting the misdeeds of their leaders, there is plenty of cynicism about their own politicians and western leaders.

So what has changed since the G8 met? There is a smattering of good news. A recent Oxfam report found that debt relief had enabled Zambia to scrap fees for basic healthcare and raise funds to recruit more than 4,500 teachers, while in Nigeria a poverty action fund will channel debt relief cash into teacher training.

But the charity warned that some western countries were counting debt cancellations as part of their aid to Africa, masking the fact that in some cases the real amount of aid had fallen.

Elsewhere, the picture is reliably bleak. Last month, the UN’s world food programme cut back its food supplies in Darfur because donor countries had given less than half the money needed. Despite a peace agreement, Janjaweed atrocities continue. In Kenya, MPs recently tried to force the government to increase their mileage allowance, blocking a national budget that included aid to drought victims.

The key to saving Africa – a fair trade deal – remains out of reach, after the World Trade Organisation’s Hong Kong meeting last December failed to reach an agreement that would help developing countries. And politicians once considered to be in the vanguard of an “African renaissance” – Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni – have proved as reluctant to surrender, or even share, power as were the worst of the old “big men”.

The conspiracy theory is that the west wants to keep Africa poor. Actually, it’s more of an ongoing cock-up: a combination of farm subsidies that help a small number of western producers while doing a disservice to consumers and African farmers; aid bureaucrats who keep shovelling money towards corrupt regimes because doing that is better for their careers than closing programmes down; and western politicians making empty promises with an eye to their obituaries.

So what can the ordinary citizen do to help? Well, being sceptical about our politicians, our pop stars and even some of our charities is a good starting point.

But there’s more. With some exceptions, Africa is not yet the place to build a call centre, or even a trainer factory. Even if it could compete with Chinese prices, most of the continent lacks a power supply free of blackouts and pothole-free roads. But sub-Saharan Africa could be Europe’s granary.

The trade in fruit, vegetables and flowers between south and north can make a real difference to African lives. Buy all the Fair Trade coffee you can drink.