ABSTRACT
This chapter understands the reliance on celebrity as a means of what Richard Rorty called "sentimental education", by which more and more people "expand the reference of the terms 'our kind of people' and 'people like us'". It perhaps less surprising that even an African celebrity activist's life work would be superseded by the impulse for direct European control. There is a structural link between the raising of consciousness by celebrity activism and the path of action to be followed, a path reliant on Western intervention in the form of education, tutelage, and provision. The emergence of Band Aid in the 1980s was thus neither new nor surprising in the ways that it framed African problems and advocated interventionist solutions. Finally, it shows that Bono's contemporary form of celebrity expertise on the issue of poverty is reminiscent of older models of humanitarian activism.
