The Frontman

by Harry Browne

  Sociologist Zine Magubane, noting how Bono regularly deploys his Irishness as a signal of his understanding of colonialism, conflict, famine and development, says that even as his Vanity Fair chose to give strong emphasis to humanity’s common ancestry in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, it denied equality to contemporary Africans:

  [W]hile it appears to be bringing Africa up to the level of the West, indeed making Africa responsible for the genesis of the West, the ultimate effect of the discourse is a complete denial of coevalness. There is no possibility for communicative interaction because the salient parties – the ‘small group of hungry Africans’ [the original humans] have all died millennia ago. Their present day ‘cousins’ are atavistic throwbacks, awaiting the arrival of a Western savior … Africa’s contribution came millennia ago in the form of a genetic gift given to the peoples and cultures that are destined to sail forth and make history. People living on the Continent today, must simply sit and wait, with the hope that someone will take pity on them and write them into history.138

  The critique of Bono’s Vanity Fair was largely confined to academic and blogging circles. By 2010, when Bono and Geldof ‘edited’ a special section of the Toronto Globe and Mail, it was striking how strongly that sort of critique had embedded itself among a larger community of readers. The two celebrities had sharpened up their act to the extent that they hired an actual Kenyan blogger, Ory Okolloh, to handle the online edition. Bono’s big contribution was a deeply banal Barack Obama ‘interview’ (email again looked the likely medium for the paragraphs of familiar boilerplate, probably authored by an Obama speechwriter, though the introduction highlighted the men’s meeting). Despite such efforts at relevance and respect for its subjects, before the edition had even appeared a local Canadian blog reported: ‘Comments on the Globe’s post asking readers to send questions in to the stars have already been disabled because “an overwhelming number of readers were making offensive statements about other commenters and/or the individual or individuals mentioned in the story” .’139

  MORE BAGGAGE: SETTING THE AGENDA

  There is no need to paint Bono as somehow awful in unique ways. Just as there are ways of interpreting his thoughts on our common African ancestors in ways that are different from – and more benign than – Magubane’s analysis given above, representing them as something resembling racism, there is also room for honest differences about what really constitutes the best set of policies to promote African development and overcome the serious obstacles to it. Bono does, after all, regularly harness ‘expert opinion’, basing many of his arguments less on sentiment than on technocratic confidence that there is a way beyond political nostrums and polemical stances to sort out these problems. He is not necessarily either a fool or a knave, though at times he has seemed to deserve both labels.

  But – fool, knave or neither – Bono has found himself so deeply invested in the nostrums of a Western elite conception of African development that he has been prepared to shout down an African to protect it. This example of his devotion to such a party line came in the summer of 2007. The occasion was a prestigious TED conference in Arusha, Tanzania, full of visiting Silicon Valley types, and the speaker was Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda, who had only recently been jailed, briefly, by his government. Mwenda was laying out his African perspective on the catastrophic failure of Western aid – it has made things worse, he said – and on the special problems created when development agencies work with African governments. Bono piped up from the floor, ‘Bollocks!’ And for the benefit of those present who had grown up removed from a British colonial vocabulary – at least one American blogger reported that he mentioned ‘bullocks’ – he added: ‘That’s bullshit.’140

  When Mwenda invited the audience to name a country where international aid had led to development, Bono reportedly stuck up his hand and cited Ireland during the Famine141 – which, if he really said it, would be taking postcolonial revisionism-in-the-name-of-reconciliation to brave new heights. The reports of his intervention are sketchy, so, to give Bono the benefit of the doubt: perhaps he was referring to the widespread historical view that the British government of 1845–46, led by Robert Peel, was more active in bringing famine relief to Ireland than its successor, which under John Russell took the view that the markets and nature should be allowed to take their course – a course that was catastrophic for the Irish people. This wouldn’t have amounted to a case for international aid having promoted Irish development – especially since the British were actually governing Ireland at the time – but it would make some sense as a critique of free-market attitudes to relief.

  Whatever rubbish Bono may or may not have spouted about Ireland – let’s face it, deploying Irish history rhetorically is a reflex for him – it can be plausibly stated that in this Tanzanian TED debate, where he stood up for aid, debt relief and good governments against a view that development would only come from private investment, Bono was taking something like a leftish posture. He certainly thought so himself, calling Mwenda an African Margaret Thatcher.142 Whether or not this was a fair characterisation of Mwenda, Africa is as entitled as anywhere else to its own Thatchers – and the failure of its own states and the Western multilateral institutions that have claimed to embrace the continent’s interests might well lead some Africans to a rejection of states in favour of markets as a means to genuine development. But you don’t have to think Bono was wrong, or even right but self-serving, in this argument to recognise that this was boorish behaviour. What kind of ‘bollocks’ does it take for a white European – a man with ready access to all the world’s media and a speaking slot of his own still to come at the conference – to visit Africa and heckle any African speaker, let alone one as obviously qualified to speak as Mwenda? More important than the arrogance on display is the obvious strength of his personal commitment to the idea that Western aid is vital to Africa – hardly surprising, given that he is for many people the very embodiment of that idea. It was important enough to him that he risked embarrassment in the elite circles where this event was being discussed and blogged in order to make his point, loudly.

  Did Bono do his sums and calculate that, on balance, Africa owes him? That is one explanation for an act that was more grotesque than his Arusha heckling. Late in the summer of 2010, Louis Vuitton released an advertisement for a limited-edition, monogrammed range of luggage, the Keepall 45, costing about $1,000 a piece. The ad shows Bono and his wife Ali Hewson striding across African grasslands carrying the bags, looking like they have just stepped off a tiny old-style propeller plane behind them. ‘Every journey begins in Africa’ says the ad’s tagline, lest we be in any doubt which continent was signified by the presence of Bono.

  The couple looks quietly glamorous – Ali shows a tiny shadow of cleavage – but deadly serious. This doesn’t look like somewhere they’ve gone on vacation: there’s nothing to be seen but grass, low mountains and sky. Surely we are being invited to imagine that a refugee camp or an orphanage, like the one they worked in all those years ago, is lurking just out of the shot, with children ready to be saved by the couple’s amazing grace.

  The only possible saving grace of the image itself is its obvious fakeness. It’s been softened and coloured like nothing natural, giving it a retro look. A video available online of the photo-shoot – with Annie Leibovitz, natch – underlines the artifice, showing the plane being rolled in, its visible wheel sprayed to look muddy, while Bono and Ali roll up in a four-wheel drive to mwah-mwah with their favourite photographer.143

  But nothing can save Bono from the plain and revolting fact that he used Africa as a prop for commercial purposes; that he directly exploited all that is known or believed about his relationship to that place and its people in order to help a multi-billion-dollar company sell expensive handbags. This was of course merely a variation of the (RED) shopping spree with Oprah, in which he did something rather similar; but the fact that this time the image is ‘on location’, somewhere on the
Dark Continent, gives it a stench that makes his previous efforts seem positively perfumed.

  The fact that he did this for Louis Vuitton lends added irony. As anyone interested in issues like African suffering and artistic freedom might have been expected to know, Vuitton’s lawyers had since 2008 been suing a Danish artist, Nadia Plesner, who painted an image of a hungry-looking African child holding a recognisably Vuitton bag, the stark juxtaposition being part of her efforts to raise consciousness about Darfur. Vuitton was seeking to hit her for hundreds of thousands of euros for violating its intellectual-property rights, embodied in the logo on the bag, though happily, in May 2011 (many months after Bono posed for Vuitton), a court in the Hague lifted the injunction against Plesner showing her work, Darfurnica, and it appears the bad publicity convinced Vuitton to let the matter lie there.144 There’s also another reason that Louis Vuitton was not entirely unknown in Africa: in 2001 its parent company, LVMH, had entered into a retail partnership with that longstanding paragon of ethical employment and environmental practice on the continent, the De Beers diamond company.145

  But the advertisement with Bono and Ali was more than simply another celebrity endorsement for Vuitton’s vaguely humanistic Core Values campaign, to place alongside those from a motley assortment including Michael Phelps, Catherine Deneuve, Mikhail Gorbachev, Sean Connery, Francis Ford and Sofia Coppola, Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf.146 Nor was it anything so simple as Bono cashing in on his association with Africa. No, it was the cementing of what the couple were bound to see, given their corporate position, as an important corporate relationship. Indeed, the image can be read, like a Renaissance painting fast-forwarded into the age of brands, for its commercial iconography: the ring means this, the bag means that, the direction of their eyes suggests the other thing: it’s a veritable twenty-first-century version of the ‘Arnolfini wedding’ – Van Eyck’s great, densely symbolic portrait of a couple taking their place in the world.

  There is of course one crucial difference between the Van Eyck painting and the Leibovitz photograph: the decoding of the latter cannot be left as the preserve of an elite group of cognoscenti. For commercial reasons, its layers of meaning must be immediately unpacked for as many potential consumers as possible. Thus, no sooner had the advertisement appeared than Britain’s Daily Mail was fed the necessary information, in order to exult in its synergies:

  [U]nlike other images in the Core Values series of advertisements … the pair are not wearing clothes made by Louis Vuitton. Instead, they are wearing Hewson’s own organic and ethical label Edun, which she created in 2005 and aims to encourage trade in Africa. In fact it is the latest evidence of a love affair between the two brands – last year Louis Vuitton’s parent company LVMH acquired a 49 per cent stake in Edun. And now they have joined forces to create a limited-edition version of Louis Vuitton’s monogrammed Keepall 45 – carried by both Bono and Hewson in the new image. Each bag boasts a hand crafted charm created in Kenya for fairtrade jewellery label MADE, as well as a plaque with the inscription ‘Every journey began in Africa.’147

  The following day’s New York Daily News website – perhaps having been deprived of the ‘scoop’ – was a tad more cynical about this corporate ‘love affair’ rendered in photographic flesh, headlining its report: ‘Ad nauseum: How many messages can Bono, designer wife Ali Hewson and Louis Vuitton fit in one ad?’148 (Both newspapers managed to get fairly important things wrong: Edun makes no promises about ‘organic’, despite what the Mail said, and Hewson is ostensibly the boss but is not the designer at Edun, despite what the News headline stated.)

  It is, in any case, a funny twenty-first-century sort of love that consists of a massive multinational luxury-goods company (LVMH stands, dripping in excess, for Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy) flaunting a few of the products of a company that had effectively become its near-subsidiary in exchange for a relatively rare and treasured celebrity endorsement. In the real world of the Hewson marriage, Bono and Ali had their own complex nexus of corporate entanglements, and teaming up to promote Edun and its new ‘partner’ was an essential step in trying to make them pay their way.

  ANOTHER EDUN: ETHICAL BUSINESS

  Ali Hewson, it should be said, is the object of remarkably little resentment and begrudgery in Ireland. On the contrary, she is liked for her ‘ordinariness’ – ordinary, that is, apart from her beauty, which isn’t her fault, after all. She is even on the receiving end of popular sympathy for being, as Dubliners might put it, ‘stuck with yer man’. One hugely and typically sympathetic – nay, gushing – Irish newspaper profile contrasted him tearing around town in a Maserati with her collecting the children from school in an old Volkswagen Golf.149

  However, insofar as her business ventures are an extension of the Bono world-view, and a way of putting that world-view into action, then they are fair game for anyone seriously considering his place in contemporary global affairs. Moreover, Bono serves on the board of Ali’s Edun, and it was one of the interests by which he introduced himself in his Vanity Fair editorial: ‘the missus’s clothing line that wants to inject some dignity through doing business with the continent where every street corner boasts an entrepreneur’.150 (The rhetorical equation between Western capitalists and African street-traders is just another case of Bono chip-chipping away at his ideological work.)

  Ali Hewson herself has connected Edun directly to her husband’s activities: ‘Bono was working on a macro level with governments and debt cancellation. We wanted to see how the policies translate to factories and the ordinary worker and their daily lives. It’s such an incredible continent, so sexy and bright, and they want the jobs.’151 Even her strange and troubling capacity to find an entire continent ‘sexy’ is an echo of Bono’s own racially freighted words on a previous occasion to the same effect.152

  If the success of Edun was meant to offer some index of ‘how the policies translate’, the answer thus far is ‘not so well’. In an interview in 2011, six years after the company’s foundation, Hewson noted that Edun is not a charity but a for-profit company: ‘Only right now … there are no profits, just to let you know – but it’s a proper business.’153 In August 2012 the online store at edun.com was full of garments at slashed prices that were still out of the reach of the vast majority of people.

  But the problems with Edun go beyond mere business shortcomings. To begin to unravel them means starting not in Africa but in Ireland, where company accounts give some useful background on this particular investment vehicle (and help explain the screwy spelling of ‘Edun’). They also reveal that Edun’s partnership with Louis Vuitton is nothing unusual: in spite of the colossal piles of money he sits on, Bono rarely goes it alone when it comes to business. As we saw in Chapter 1, he partnered with sometimes-controversial property developers and financiers, but this was arguably to be expected when he was trying to run and expand a hotel. What is more surprising is to see the same pattern, with one of the same characters, in Ali Hewson’s ethical start-ups.

  Indeed, for whatever reason, Ali Hewson and The Edge emerged as the two shareholders in the musically named Lorijudd Ltd, through which Bono and The Edge had invested in the Clarence Hotel.154 And, lo and behold, property developer Paddy McKillen, a partner at the Clarence, returned the compliment by taking a one-third stake in Nude Brands Ltd,155 the London-based ethical, natural skincare company for which Ali was described as ‘investor and muse’.156 Bono also had a one-third stake in Nude, though he had stepped down as a director by 2010.

  Although Ali and her Nude company had a famous legal clash with Stella McCartney over the use of the word ‘nude’, there was apparently no fighting over it in the Hewson family: Bono’s brother Norman Hewson had been using the name Nude for many years for his struggling chain of healthy fast-food joints, which finally went to the wall in 2010. Norman was a shareholder in Ali’s fashion company Edun (Nude backwards, you see) for its first few chaotic years, but had passed his share to Bono in time for the Louis Vuitton partnership
.157

  Fashion designer Stella McCartney, meanwhile, had backed (RED) on its launch, but the legal battle between Nude Brands Ltd and Stella McCartney Ltd (and its partners Yves St Laurent and L’Oreal) saw celebrity blood-letting on the old red carpet. To read the rather stylishly written judgment of the British High Court after Nude sought an injunction against the 2009 launch of ‘Stellanude’ perfume is to get a little education in the reality of ‘ethical business’. The judge, Mr Justice Floyd, at times seems almost contemptuous of both sides: McCartney’s company had actually approached Nude in 2008 seeking their agreement for the use of what might seem like a generic word, but after the initial refusal it seems some of the communication got garbled and Hewson’s small company found itself, at the last minute, fighting in the High Court to block a multi-million-pound product launch.

  McCartney’s lawyers pointed out that Nude didn’t even make perfume, so they were in no danger of confusion with a competing product. Nude countered that plans were afoot to market one, but the judge wrote sardonically: ‘The evidence establishes that this is anything but imminent …’ (As of December 2012 there was still no fragrance from Nude.) Nude said that McCartney’s relatively low-end perfume would damage its reputation among the upmarket customers for its pricy skincare products. The judge noted that Nude had already licensed its name to a Dior make-up range: ‘The Dior licence shows that NBL are not able or concerned to protect the exclusive repute of the brand or prevent dilution. There are no quality control provisions in it.’ The Dior stuff even contained (whisper it, your lordship) ‘numerous synthetic ingredients’. Not that the judge was entirely convinced by Nude’s own communion with Nature: ‘Their products are marketed as being free of synthetic ingredients, although this is not always so as they include synthetic preservatives.’158