Tonight I watched a documentary about the history of Live Aid.
It carried me back to my teenage years. Back then, the story seemed simple. Millions of people were starving. The world came together. Musicians sang. People donated. Food would reach those who needed it.
That was enough for a teenager.
Adults, unfortunately, don’t get to keep many simple stories.
Watching it now, I found myself noticing things I never would have seen then. Not just the images of hunger, but the people standing around it. The officials. The governments. The negotiations that always seem to appear whenever suffering becomes visible enough for the world to notice.
One interview stayed with me.
An Ethiopian official seemed more struck by Bob Geldof’s appearance—his long hair, his beard, the fact that he wasn’t wearing a suit—than by the catastrophe unfolding around him. Maybe there was context I didn’t see. Maybe there was more to the exchange than the documentary showed. But it left me unsettled.
I found myself looking less at Geldof and more at the official.
As a teenager, I probably wouldn’t have noticed him at all.
As an adult, I couldn’t stop noticing.
His appearance stood in sharp contrast to the images of starving people surrounding him. Fairly or unfairly, I found myself wondering how someone could stand so close to such unimaginable suffering and seem so emotionally distant from it. It felt, at least to me, as though the people who were starving had become something to point toward rather than people to grieve.
I eventually turned the documentary off.
Not because I couldn’t bear to look at the victims.
Because I couldn’t stop thinking about everything happening behind the camera.
Over the years, I’ve worked alongside more people from different parts of Africa. I’ve learned how deeply history, politics, ethnicity, and tribal identities have shaped many nations there.
That complexity leaves me with questions I cannot answer.
How much suffering was caused by drought alone?
How much by war?
How much by corruption?
How much by governments that placed power above people?
History is filled with stories of trucks waiting at checkpoints. Food sitting only miles away while paperwork, politics, greed, or war decided whether starving families would eat.
How much of that food never reached the people it was meant to feed?
Perhaps that is what disturbed me most.
Not simply that people were starving.
But that even starvation can become something to bargain over.
A convoy waits.
Someone demands payment.
A permit.
A tax.
A favor.
And while adults negotiate, children continue waiting.
Live Aid showed the world extraordinary generosity. Millions of ordinary people opened their wallets because they believed another human being deserved to live.
The people who donated weren’t thinking about politics. They were thinking about hungry children. They believed compassion could bridge the distance between their table and someone else’s empty plate.
I hope that generosity reached those it was meant for.
I also hope history continues asking difficult questions about the systems that allowed so many people to suffer in the first place.
I miss believing that kindness was enough.
Because feeding the hungry is an act of compassion.
Asking why they were hungry for so long is an act of responsibility.
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