My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen!

What reserves of human endurance does it take to be the Secretary General of the United Nations? I ask this after seeing Ban Ki-Moon addressing the gathered talent which made up the African Union (AU) summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The television coverage showed Ban Ki-Moon arriving in the conference hall, progressing through the ‘dignitaries’, mounting the podium and looking out at his audience. There was then a ‘point of view’ shot of his listeners, with the camera lingering on some of the more choice specimens, sitting in sharp designer suits or colourful local dress or splendid military uniforms. And that brings me back to my opening question.

As he looks at the smug, murdering, callous, hypocritical, vicious, inhuman, and whatever other unappealing epithets you can apply to the men (mostly; exclusively?) who lead Africa’s nations, what sort of despair must grip his soul?

It’s easy to feel this way when we are constantly bombarded with the failures of Africa: from the relentless famine seemingly policed by AK47 toting gangsters; the interminable wars fought with hi-tec weaponry watched by starving civilians; the stark contrast of high rise buildings juxtaposed with squalid shacks; basic medical conditions exacerbated by bizarre local prejudice; religion in all its inhumanity being vaunted as a panacea, to the oleaginous faces of corrupt politicians sending their children to western finishing schools.

But it’s too easy to feel like this. My generation has grown up with our shouldering the burden of guilt in the form of Africa since our earliest schooling. Africa has always been the continent of need, the convenient depository for charity, the perennial black hole of deprivation.

Since that black hole can never be filled, it is a useful way of throwing away a few spare pence, confident in the knowledge that it will be just as black and just as empty tomorrow. Futility can have its uses: you pay a little money to assuage your guilt and, since nothing ever really improves, you don’t need to pay in a more realistic way. Corruption, nepotism, bribery, theft – all the abuses we used to list in history lessons for the pre-Reformation Catholic Church are alive and well and thriving in Africa.

But let’s put this another way. What does the Secretary General of UNO think when he speaks to the European Union? Does he feel any better? Is there any reason he should do? How is his view different? Fewer black faces? Fewer uniforms? The same suits, the same haute couture, and, the same corruption? Plus ca change, plus C’est la meme chose?

Well, no – I think that’s ridiculous. I am not one of those bleeding heart liberals who think that all our western systems, conventions, institutions, politicians, laws and parliaments are irredeemably and post colonially evil and no good can come out of them. But the idea that looking at the leaders of Africa and looking at the leaders of Europe are ‘the same’ is simply unhelpful.

I remember looking at a book about Africa (I think about Ghana) when I was in primary school and being genuinely shocked at a picture of a judge in full wig and gown; not so much because of the incongruity of the transplantation of western legal dress conventions, but rather because the judge was black. I couldn’t understand how it could have happened. How could a black man achieve the status of a judge? There were certainly no authority figures in my Welsh childhood who were black: no teacher; no policeman; no doctor; no dentist; no clergyman; no shopkeeper – and so the list goes on.

Hardly surprising that the childhood sense of wonder at any mimicking of the achievements of civilization by emergent African nations [please feel free to pepper the preceding statements with as many quotation marks as you think necessary] should, and must, inform and help explain my present day attitude.

A telling counterpoint to these ruminations occurred when I read the ‘Indie’ when sitting alone in the living room during the early hours when coughing in bed prone had lost all of its attraction. When you can’t sleep and the only thing you have to hand is a newspaper then you tend to read it all – from beginning to end. It was during this marathon sitting that a small photograph of a pair of feet caught my eye; sad feet, with socks, with two big toes poking out.

They turned out to be the stocking feet of a gentleman who had removed his shoes because of his visit to a mosque. He, it emerged, was the director, head, emperor of the World Bank. The head of the World Bank cannot afford, or doesn’t care, or has different imperatives, or . . . no, holes in his socks. Like the black judge, how could it have happened?

I am constantly unsettled by the incongruities of my understanding of life. The paradoxical basis of the use of ‘constantly’ in the previous statement is not lost on me either.

The constant tug of cynicism, the easy waving away of idealism, the depressing recognition of sad, bad scenarios continually playing themselves out could depress a more receptive person than myself, even without the constant tickle of an incipient cough to remind him of old mortality; but I think that I lack that necessary imagination to be a true depressive.

So I’ll smile instead.

And smile, and smile and smile.