She turned from the British Prime Minister’s gaze and clicked her slender pale fingers. Around her, the eight most powerful men in the world sat open-mouthed, gawping at the generous dollops of souffle laid before them. Click. ”There they go,” Gina said, her delicate features flushed with quiet rage. Click. ”And another one.”
Britain’s Prime Minister stared at the floor. Across the vast dining table, his Chancellor buried his face in his palms. They knew precisely what the three clicks meant. They knew that every three seconds of every day a child in Africa dies from extreme poverty. And as they gaped at the lavish banquet to mark the final supper of the G8 summit, they too knew that the 100-million African youngsters on the brink of starvation would never dare dream of the scraps they would leave.
Gina is an unemployed young woman played by Kelly Macdonald in a forthcoming film written by Britain’s most successful screenwriter, Richard Curtis. The Girl in the Cafe is a poignant 90-minute romantic tale starring Bill Nighy, of Love Actually, as a bashful civil servant working for the Chancellor who whisks Gina on an unlikely break to a G8 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Sure, there is love and there are laughs, but Curtis’s latest work is no Notting Hill or Four Weddings and a Funeral. Instead the plot explores the cynicism of global politics and its ultimate victims; the voiceless people of Africa.
Next month, The Girl in the Cafe will be broadcast by the BBC. Days later, on 6 July, the leaders of the eight most influential industrial countries will gather again for dinner at a G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland — only this time it will be for real. Chairing the gathering will be British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has sworn to amend the moral weakness of the West by finally eradicating the ”scandal” of Africa’s poor.
For the continent’s 800-million people it promises to be the defining moment of a dark and troubled recent history. Just over 20 years after Live Aid thrust the scars of Africa before a mortified world, Blair stands on the brink of an agreement that would, according to campaigners, be recalled in history along with the abolition of slavery and the extinction of apartheid.
Today The Observer joins the campaign to Make Poverty History, a coalition of 450 charities and development agencies that is already the biggest movement of its kind in British history. In just over 50 days time when Blair sits down alongside his peers in the oak-panelled opulence of the Gleneagles Hotel banqueting suite, the campaign expects to have the support of 10-million Britons.
By then, a sixth of Britain’s population will know that 120 000 African children will have died from poverty during the four-day talks.
Curtis, who co-founded Comic Relief and has met both Blair and Nelson Mandela several times to discuss Africa’s suffering, is among those convinced that G8 provides a final but realistic platform to halt a crisis that claims far more victims each year than died during the Holocaust.
He told The Observer: ”We have to look very hard at ourselves and 30 years from now our children laying wreaths on the tomb of the unknown child in Africa and saying there was a holocaust and nobody thought it was worth bothering about.
”If 50 000 people died in London on Monday, in Rome on Tuesday, Munich on Wednesday, in New York on Thursday and in Paris on Friday, they would find the money and the solution to the problem as they walked from the lift to the breakfast bar, they just would.
”There is no way they wouldn’t find it and the thing is to try and say to people that we care as much about these deaths happening elsewhere as we would if they happened on our front doorstep. We don’t have to be condemned by the fact that 20 years ago it wasn’t possible to do something big and structural. It is possible now. A huge amount is at stake for a huge amount of people.”
A multi-coloured cloud of petals cascaded over the mourners gathered in St Paul’s Cathedral last Wednesday. In total, 275 000 fluttered down from the building’s famous dome, each one a vivid symbol of every victim of the Asian tsunami, whose devastation extracted such an extraordinary, generous response from the British public.
Although it already seems otherworldly, the year had begun dominated by searing images of waves crashing against the Asian coastline, an unprecedented event that few believe will be repeated in our lifetime. Yet the start of 2005 also marked the beginning of another event that could change the planet even more profoundly. Six days after the earthquake off northern Sumatra had propelled a vast curtain of water with such fury, eight million Britons settled down for Curtis’s BBC sitcom The Vicar of Dibley.
During the New Year’s Day episode, actress Dawn French performed a broadcasting first; her fictional character imploring parishioners to support a then unknown but grand-sounding campaign called Make Poverty History. At the time of transmission, the tsunami’s death toll stood at 150 000. A horrendous, shocking total, but still 100 000 fewer than the number who had died from poverty since the earthquake struck.
And that was just in Africa. Thousands of kilometres from its epicentre, mankind was being reduced by a ”casual holocaust”; an entire continent joined in silent mourning. Disease, starvation and a lack of clean water has ensured life expectancy in some African countries has shrunk to a level last seen in AD 500.
The Make Poverty History campaign has so far attracted the support of at least 2,7-million Britons, an average of 20 000 a day since its launch. Those co-ordinating the campaign, like television and radio presenter Emma Freud, married to Curtis and fellow founder of Comic Relief, have been ”astonished” by the growth of a campaign whose symbol is a white wrist band.
Unlike Live Aid there are no demands for donations. Make Poverty History is about the sheer weight of support, the power of a people willing to express concern for the plight of a distant continent. By today almost three million Britons will have secured a wrist band. Another 300 000 have sent a text message to Blair demanding action.
On the eve of the G8 summit, at least 200 000 will converge on Edinburgh for a massive peace protest. Dressed all in white they will form a gigantic ”human wristband” encircling Scotland’s capital to coincide with the vital negotiations 80km north of the city, in Gleneagles.
The roll call of celebrities is impressive. So far 150 have pledged support, among them Kate Moss, Kylie Minogue, Damon Albarn, Emma Thompson, Helen Mirren and Jamie Oliver. Blair himself was regularly seen during the election campaign sporting a Make Poverty History wristband, an accessory many hope is a statement of intent rather than political expediency.
Clasping the hand of a man dying with Aids, a disease which kills two million in Africa each year, Gordon Brown was clearly struggling to control his emotion. ”We are all brothers”, the Chancellor said. When he visited Africa a fortnight after the Make Poverty History campaign began, Brown’s eight-year crusade to persuade the wealthiest nations to write off the continent’s crippling £140-billion debt had become more than a distant moral crusade. Finally he had seen at first hand the pain of abject poverty.
Like Blair, Brown is haunted by past failures, particularly the promises delivered five years ago by world leaders to halve the number of people living on $1 a day, pledges that have already unravelled. Oxfam says the West’s overseas aid is equivalent to the cost of a cup of coffee per person. Unless rich countries double the amount they spend on overseas aid, more than 45-million children are predicted to die over the next decade. As the world’s population is projected to increase to about nine billion by 2050, the number of people born into dire poverty will grow exponentially.
At the heart of the Brown-Blair proposal to maximise Britain’s chairmanship of the G8 are plans to raise an extra £30-billion a year in overseas aid over the next decade. Known as the International Finance Facility, it would pool rich countries’ aid budgets to generate a huge injection of cash to be paid back over the next 25 years. France and Germany have already said they will back the plan, but Brown has secured little enthusiasm in Washington.
Brown, concerned that for every £1 in grant aid given to developing countries more than £13 bounces back in debt repayments, wants to eradicate almost £100-billion of the debt owed by poor nations to major banks. The worry persists that giving extra billions of pounds to Africa is throwing good money after bad. Since the Fifties, around £200-billion has been offered as aid only for much to be siphoned off by corrupt regimes. Even leading African politicians now believe that this could be their last chance to convince the public in the wealthiest countries that they will not waste the West’s cash.
Moeletsi Mbeki, deputy chairperson of the South African Institute of International affairs and brother of the South African president, said: ”To me the critical issue is how to improve African countries’ administration. If extra aid puts money into the hands of some incompetent civil servant then any additional money will not add up to anything.”
They walked proudly into Downing Street last Thursday, their traditional African dress providing a dash of colour on an otherwise drab May afternoon.
Balanced precariously on the heads of the six African women were traditional carrying bowls, each overflowing with almost half a million Make Poverty History signatures, the first tranche of what will be the biggest petition ever received by a British Prime Minister. The women met Blair and swapped ideas on how best to tackle debt, aid and restore trade justice. Pamela Malo of Kenya was smiling afterwards. ”As chair of the G8 Blair has the power”, she said. ”It’s whether or not he can deliver without compromise.”
In The Girl In The Cafe Nighy says: ”We acknowledge the extent to which we have failed; everyone licks their wounds and heads for home.” During his words another African child will have died. Another 200 or so will have lost their fragile grip of life during the time it has taken for you to read this article. Tomorrow 30 000 African youngsters will die. The same as today. And the day before. – Guardian Unlimited Â