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U2 is up for eight Grammy Awards this week for All That You Can't Leave Behind. The album and the band's live concerts--still the best in rock--became cultural touchstones following Sept. 11. U2 has, with a few bumps along the way, managed the nearly unprecedented feat of being musically--and politically--relevant for 22 years. Yet as big a rock star as Bono is--and he has no rival--he has grown even larger over the past three years, molding himself into a shrewd, dedicated political advocate, transforming himself into the most secular of saints, becoming a worldwide symbol of rock-'n'-roll activism. Part poet, part pol, he has taken his cause--solving the financial and health crisis in Africa--and helped put it onto the agenda of the world's most powerful people.
"I refused to meet him at first," says Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who last year joined Pope John Paul II, Bill Clinton, Jean Chretien, George Soros, Jesse Helms and Colin Powell on Bono's all-star chat list. "I thought he was just some pop star who wanted to use me." After their scheduled half-hour session went 90 min., O'Neill changed his mind. "He's a serious person. He cares deeply about these issues, and you know what? He knows a lot about them."
Rock stars tend to cast themselves as emotional savants, folks who feel the plight of vanishing rain forests and anguished Tibetans more acutely than the rest of humanity. Bono's involvement with Africa began in typical celebrity-dilettante fashion. In 1984, U2 took part in Band Aid and Live Aid, Bob Geldof's Ethiopian famine-relief efforts. While many of Live Aid's participants played their sets and moved on to the next cause, Bono and his wife Alison Stewart decided to find out just how bad the African famine was. They traveled to Wello, Ethiopia, and spent six weeks working at an orphanage. "You'd wake up in the morning, and mist would be lifting," Bono recalls. "You'd walk out of your tent, and you'd count bodies of dead and abandoned children. Or worse, the father of a child would walk up to you and try to give you his living child and say, 'You take it, because if this is your child, it won't die.'"
The experience remained with him through 1999, when he joined the Jubilee 2000 movement. Citing the Book of Leviticus ("Ye shall hallow the fiftieth year...and ye shall return every man unto his possessions"), Jubilee 2000's aim was to get the U.S. and other wealthy nations, as well as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to erase the public debt of 52 of the world's poorest countries, most of them in Africa. By wiping $350 billion from their books, these countries would be free to spend money on health care and education, rather than pay down the principal on loans floated by corrupt and sometimes long-gone governments. "We have squeezed these countries to the point where their health systems are absolutely unable to function," says Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard economist who negotiated a debt-relief package for Bolivia in 1986. "Education systems are broken down, and there's a lot of death associated with the collapse of public health and the lack of access to medicine. I don't think any American wants that."