Seeing Bono and Bob together backstage at the Edinburgh Live 8 concert in July 2005 shed light on a 20-year friendship powered by a common purpose and made all the richer for their contrasting personalities. They share a passion that has led them to devote their considerable talents to ending the crushing burdens of poverty in Africa, but their sense of urgency flows from very different sources.
There are obvious similarities: they are Irish rock stars with a surprising breadth of knowledge and intellectual curiosity. Invariably, a planned five-minute call to either about a malaria project or debt relief will turn into a much longer discussion of new aids drugs, biofuels or the damage done to Africa's poorest farmers by foreign agricultural subsidies. These are not occasional drop-ins to the fight against poverty.
But here the common portrait ends. One is an idealist, the other pragmatic; one without a hair out of place, the other with hair everyplace. Bono is deeply spiritual, gentle, inspired and inspiring acts of grace. Of course, the soft touch and kind heart have a clear, flinty-eyed purpose. He has extracted real increases in aid from even the most pragmatic of politicians. In January he launched the red campaign, with proceeds from the sale of certain products dedicated to buying aids drugs for those suffering in Africa.
Bob is a volcanic force of nature, a man who believes that life is short and the time for action shorter. He recoils from being described as an activist, a label he dismisses as describing a talker who gets nothing done. His fury at the world's apathy when famine was killing many hundreds of thousands in Ethiopia in 1984 inspired his fund-raising venture Band Aid and then Live Aid the following yearvisionary acts years before the Internet made global aid campaigns commonplace. He doesn't waste time making converts. He told me over dinner that, while Bono believes in the afterlife, he wants resultsand he wants them now!
Yet in the end, it's what binds these two that matters most. Besides their passion, their commitment, one characteristic draws me to them above all: their optimism. Bob has described Africa as "the illuminated continent." He and Bono are peerless in their resolve to make us see itand to make it so.
is president of the World Bank Group