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For a moment, it seems that Graydon Carter, the veteran editor of Vanity Fair, has lost the plot. What could have possessed him to say "Yes", when a rock star from Ireland asked if he could kidnap his magazine for a month and dedicate almost all of its pages to Africa?
Vanity Fair chronicles celebrity and the high-jinks of the rich and over-pampered. It is more concerned with the goings-on in Malibu than those in Mogadishu.
The result of this one-off hijacking of the magazine is the July issue that hits news stands on Friday, and advance copies are lying across Carter's desk. There is not just one cover for the Africa special, but 20. You are meant to buy the cover you like best.
The guest editor of the Africa special is Bono. Otherwise employed as the lead singer of U2, he long ago committed himself to attacking our complacency towards Africa and its suffering. The cover pictures aren't half bad either, all taken by Vanity Fair's Annie Leibovitz, perhaps the finest portrait photographer in the world.
Carter knew that whatever cover they went for, it couldn't be an African landscape, and it would need a famous face or two with some connection to Africa. Bono had the connections to land them. "He had a reservoir of fascination and goodwill that would help us a lot."
It did, eventually leading to the multiple covers. Each of the 20 people who agreed to be photographed by Leibovitz was chosen because of his or her own interest in the African continent.
They include world leaders and politicians (George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama and Queen Rania of Jordan), musicians (Jay-Z and Bono), entertainers and artists (Chris Rock, Madonna, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle and Maya Angelou), philanthropists (Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates) and a sports icon (Muhammad Ali).
The premise is a visual chain-letter, a photographic discussion between these people about Africa.
Each person is featured on one cover but appears in a supporting role on the next in the series, the message being passed from one personality to the next. Obama listens to Cheadle, Ali to Obama, Queen Rania to Ali and so on.
"There is only one photographer who could do this," Carter says.
"If you see the miles she logged - it was something like 47,000 miles [75,000km] over a six-week period." The inclusion of Bush might seem a particular surprise, given Carter's track record of harshly criticising the US president in his monthly Editor's Letter, particularly over the war in Iraq.
But the selection of the cover faces fell to Bono - and he argued strongly for the inclusion of Bush.
"We talked it through, and he said Bush's record in Africa is really good." The Bush Administration, indeed, has quadrupled aid to Africa over the past six years. Four years ago, Bush also pledged US$15 billion ($20 billion) to fight Aids in Africa and later promised $1.2 billion to combat malaria in 15 countries where the disease is most prevalent.
In truth, Carter, for all his sniping at this White House, could probably have landed Bush for the issue.
"I have much more access with the Bush Administration than I did with the Clinton administrations, or the Hillary campaign now. They are much more controlling than the Bush Administration, in a strange way."
It was Bono who signed the president up, through his contacts with Karl Rove.
One person not on the covers, you may notice, is Tony Blair, who in recent weeks has toured the African continent, trying to burnish his Iraq-damaged legacy partly by focusing minds on what he has done while in power for Africa. "His name never came up," Carter reveals flatly.
- INDEPENDENT
