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| Oprah Winfrey started a school in South Africa. Denis Farell/AP |
Can celebrities really get results?
Different stars take on different roles when helping out in Africa, but assessing the long-term improvements isn't easy.
from the August 23, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 4
The "best" sort of celebrity involvement comes from those who "know their limitations better and are usually more genuinely interested in discovering how best to use their status," says Myles Spar, an HIV/AIDS specialist in Los Angeles who advises Doctors Without Borders.
Actors George Clooney and Don Cheadle, for example, have taken on advocacy for Darfur, as has actress-activist Mia Farrow, who – working with the Sudan expert Eric Reeves – is spearheading the "Genocide Olympics" campaign aimed at shaming China into pressuring Sudan's government to prevent violence in the troubled western region of Darfur.
And, famously, "Tomb Raider"-action-heroine-turned-UN-High-Commission-for-Refugees- (UNHCR)-spokeswoman Angelina Jolie has taken dozens of trips to refugee camps around the world and donated more than $6 million to help them. Ms. Jolie has said that she gets paid a "ridiculous amount of money" for what she does, and donates one-third of it to charity.
"We cannot close ourselves off to information and ignore the fact that millions of people are out there suffering. I honestly want to help," Jolie explained at a press conference when joining UNHCR in 2001. "All of us would like to believe that if we were in a bad situation, someone would help us."
Not surprisingly, influential public figures who don't get much coverage in such magazines as People and Rolling Stone typically offer more consistent and serious involvement in Africa.
Former President Jimmy Carter, for example, has dedicated a good portion of his post-White House years to such activities as monitoring complicated elections (68 to date), building houses, and eradicating Guinea worm, hardly the most glamorous of projects.
Mr. Carter, who, like Clinton, left the White House while still in his mid-50s and set up a foundation, has set the bar high for post-presidential public service. But it's not a do-gooder contest, he notes.
"Every former president is just as different as two people that you might meet going down the street," he says in an interview in Johannesburg, South Africa. "It's very good to have some element of competition among former presidents, but I think it is also ... important for each former president not to try to duplicate what the others have done, but to carve out some new arena in which they can be most effective."
Clinton, during his presidency, was not particularly known for his attention to the continent. He made two long visits here, forgave the debts of several nations, and pushed for closer trade ties. But, by his own admission, he failed to do enough to fight the growing AIDS pandemic or to respond to the 1994 genocide of more than 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda.
"If I had moved as soon as possible on Rwanda, we could have saved half or a third of those who were killed," he says. "We cared a lot about it, but we were obsessed with Bosnia and Haiti, and Congress was mad about what had happened in Somalia. It's something I will have to live with. It's hard to believe there would be that colossal a mess-up."
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