In November 1984, BBC journalist Michael Buerk presented a series of dispatches from the small town of Korem in northern Ethiopia. He described the scenes he encountered as a famine of “biblical proportions” and that aid workers in the region had told him it was “the closest thing to hell on earth”.
The broadcasts had a profound emotional effect upon viewers in the UK, many of whom had not seen full colour images of a famine before. They inspired two popstars – The Boom Town Rats’ Bob Geldof and Ultravox’s Midge Ure – to write the charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas? It was hastily recorded by the super-group Band Aid.
But the lyrics did not paint a full picture of the famine. They recycled many of the old colonial tropes of Africa as a barren land requiring western salvation. In this case the famine was primarily the result of mass migration and destitution caused by a war involving Ethiopia and Tigre and a near total disregard for human life by the combatants.
