Bono punts Ghana

Africa is not just Barack Obama’s homeland. It’s ours, too. The birthplace of humanity. Wherever our journeys have taken us, they all began there.

SHOOT: The neglect of Africa and its problems speaks accurately about the reality of humanity today. We tend to think of America and cinema and TV as reality. The average reality of the human condition - found in South America, in India and China, in Indonesia and Guinea, and large parts of Asia - is ordinary poverty. Ghana is an aberration. So is Botswana. But I believe Africa knows how to suffer, whereas the West has, since WWII, forgotten.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Despite Kenya’s unspeakable beauty and its recent victories against the anopheles mosquito, the country’s still-stinging corruption and political unrest confirms too many of the headlines we in the West read about Africa. Ghana confounds them. On a visit there, I met the minister for tourism and pitched the idea of marketing the country as the “birthplace of cool.” (Just think, the music of Miles, the conversation of Kofi.) He demurred ... too cool, I guess. Quietly, modestly — but also heroically — Ghana’s going about the business of rebranding a continent. New face of America, meet the new face of Africa. Ghana is well governed. After a close election, power changed hands peacefully. Civil society is becoming stronger. The country’s economy was growing at a good clip even before oil was found off the coast a few years ago. Though it has been a little battered by the global economic meltdown, Ghana appears to be weathering the storm. clipped from www.nytimes.com