Daily Nation, Kenya
What is this Hollywood Clamor to Adopt 'Darkies?'

By Simwogerere Kyazze  
October 15, 2006
Kenya - The Nation - Original Article (English)



Actress Angelina Jolie with her
adopted Ethiopian daughter, Zahara.


----------------------------------------------------------

Nairobi: Is it just me, or is Tinseltown's canoodling with African orphans getting a tad melodramatic (pun intended)? Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie is one of the most famous benefactors, but she's hardly alone in opening her home to dirt-poor African children. Ms. Jolie, whose estranged father is Oscar winner Jon Voight, is one half of the most talked-about couple in Hollywood.

It's hasn't even been two years since Jolie traveled to Ethiopia to pick up a baby whose teenage mother was about to turn her over to an orphanage. She was christened Zahara, and while the little girl can't claim to have been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, you can bet she's eating with one now. Zahara has a "brother," four-year-old Maddox, formerly of Cambodia. In June, their new parents declared their intentions to forage the world for yet more adoption opportunities, just a month after they had their own child - Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt. The name reads like a mathematical formula, but in any case ...

Long before Ms. Jolie came along, there was another actress, Mia Farrow, who pioneered this type of celebrity adoption in the 1970s. She ended up with at least 10 severely handicapped children (both mentally and physically) from around the world. In an incestuous twist that even Hollywood couldn't have scripted, Soon-Yi Previn, one of those Farrow "children," left her mother and married a man who is 34 years her senior. That man happened to be neurotic funnyman Woody Allen, who soon became Ms. Farrow's "ex."



Mia Farrow and some of her children
adopted from around the world (above)
and Woody Allen with his former
step-daughter and now wife. (below).



--------------------------------------------

Earlier this year, another actor, Ewan McGregor adopted a Mongolian child with his wife, while When Harry Met Sally star, Meg Ryan also got her own Chinese bundle of joy.

But they don't come any bigger than the Material Girl. After some prevarication - she will; she did; she didn't; she might - Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, better known by her first name, finally conceded this week that she had joined the orphanage business. The most successful female singer of all time adopted a one-year-old African boy whose mother died of complications at childbirth, although until three weeks ago, she is said to  have wanted a girl (a rather ominous sign of things to come, don't you think?).

Soon after landing in Lilongwe (by private jet of course) and traveling by road to Mphandula village, where she sponsors the Raising Malawi Centre (that provides for AIDS orphans), it was time for the Madonna Lotto … Because that's what it eventually when your prospective adopted mother has a $372 million (Sh27 billion) bank account. She had phoned ahead to have the Malawians select 12 one-year-olds, and she picked her latest child out of these.

"I am the father of David, who has been adopted," 32-year-old farmer Yohane Banda, told newshounds on Tuesday. "I am very, very happy because as you can see there is poverty in this village and I know he will be very well looked-after in America." Mr. Banda is probably right about everything except this: Madonna moved to Britain (some say permanently) over five years ago to live with Guy Ritchie, her film-producer husband and father of one of her two biological children.

So now we ask: what's this latest clamor for darkies? One answer can be found in the lives and work of three men who share more than just the same first initial - Bono, Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. In the aid business, the three (and to a lesser extent, Bob Geldof and Professor Jeffery Sachs of Columbia University) are the kings-of-the hill. Bono (real name David Hewson), is the lead singer of the superstar Irish rock band U2. But he is now as famous for his relentless campaign to force rich nations into providing debt relief and AIDS medications for Africans. As a matter of course, he attends special U.N. summits, the prestigious World Economic Forum and even G8 meetings. The two Bills of course are the richest American on one hand, and on the other, arguably the most famous. All three have done good by us.



Malawi and Environs.


Children from the Kondanani orphanage in Bvumbwe, on the outskirts
of Malawi's commercial capital Blantyre. Madonna is said to have
chosen her son out of a group of ten of the children at the orphanage,
which were selected beforehand by the Malawians. (below).






Madonna visits the orphanage earlier this month.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So there we have it: some observers think this rush to Africa is the latest manifestation of "assistance envy." While Tony Blair or George W. Bush can pledge billions of dollars (or Pounds Sterling) to Africa and actually make it happen, Angelina Jolie cannot. And while Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown or Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi appear to get some real work done every day, George Clooney appears to accomplish nothing when he's on a movie set … and so on. Moreover, with a few exceptions - feel free to insert John F. Kennedy and Clinton - politicians and top business people lead fairly bland private lives and eschew the over-the-top lifestyles of Hollywood celebrities (I mean what's up with Elizabeth Taylor getting married eight times; including twice to one guy?)

It's therefore a cocktail of pressures that has turned our continent into a stomping ground for adoption-crazy celebrities - a desire to appear normal; a chance to escape harsh northern winters on U.N.-sponsored junkets; and perhaps some mild interest in black people. But I've got to say, it's getting gooey.

Child adoption is rare in Africa because our traditional family systems have always ensured that an orphaned child would be provided for wherever she was sent off to, be it an aunt's, uncle's or grandparent's home. But the scourge HIV/AIDS has shredded part of this social fabric.

Such extended family structures are non-existent in the West, where a man and his wife have their two children, and visit each set of in-laws for Thanksgiving dinner on alternate years. The pressure on children to leave home is often irresistible, with many families even charging them rent as soon as they hit 18 or leave school (whichever comes sooner).

The child of course gets his or her "revenge" years later when she carts off her now senile 80-year-old mother to a nursing home for the elderly, where she visits and brings flowers once every quarter. It's not all bad, either. They are all just trying to survive in a society that celebrates individual achievement above all else.

But do you really think someone so socialized would be naturally inclined to adopt a young black stranger with cerebral palsy? To be fair, many stars use their celebrity status to turn the spotlight on causes that are often ignored in rich nations. Landmines, river blindness, informal settlements, drought, famine, genocide - all are familiar themes.

But the world was probably less complicated before every Tom, Dick and Harry Belafonte decided to set up personal orphanages in Beverly Hills.