Hearing the Voices Against Poverty: Oxfam's Sister Soul Summit

No cops in sight at the Sister Soul Summit Wednesday night in Berlin. But then the venue – the upscale, renovated “culture brewery” in Prenzlauer Berg – is not your typical bastion of dissent; it’s more a place where 25-45 year olds (yes, the very same strangely absent from Wednesday’s Potsdam demo) like to while away weekday evenings, sipping foreign beer under exposed brick walls and vaulted ceilings, or catch an early evening movie, play or touring band.

If present at all, any mood of resistance to the G8 meeting was muted at the Sister Soul Summit – a four-act concert featuring Angélique Kidjo, Pink Martini, Laura López Castro and Diane Weigmann. The event, organized by Oxfam, seemed to be about generating awareness of the issues of African poverty, alongside the G8’s potential to make real efforts to address the problem.

As such, the concert was fairly par for the course: a feel-good event, sprinkled with familiar faces, familiar arguments and polished music. That’s not to criticize Oxfam – an organization with a long history of addressing poverty and trade issues in Africa – nor to say that this kind of wide-appeal event doesn't deserve a place amid the “biodiversity” of G8-related events. But it seemed, much like the “Your Voice Against Poverty” campaign, primarily intended to reel in people who might like U2 records but who don’t think much about North-South relations.

But it wasn’t all soft-pitches from the performers. Headliner Kidjo used the spotlight at a pre-concert press conference to bluntly discuss the upcoming G8 summit, African poverty, debt, corruption and the ongoing pillage of the continent’s natural resources. At one point, the Benin-born singer even declined to answer questions about her music, saying that she had come to talk about Africa...

The problem we have in Africa is that people keep saying it’s poor, but yet there are big companies there that continue to take from us. So, it’s good to help Africa, but stealing more than we help doesn’t make any sense.

...and corruption...

People ask me all the time about the corruption of the leaders, and I will say ‘If there are corrupted people, there are corrupters.’ Who corrupted the African leaders? We don’t have the money to corrupt ourselves.

People keep putting their finger on African leaders. The one that comes to power to tries to change the power, they are killed. We know that. You know it, I know it. So, what we are asking from the G8 is to send aid to the right to the right people, to the right places to do the right things. And how can we all hold them accountable?

Between acts during the concert, German actress Katja Reimann gave a speech about female circumcision in Africa, recounting the story of how one doctor who performed this operation on young girls for over 20 years, suddenly quit her trade and started a peanut farm with microcredit from UNICEF. Then Pink Martini got onstage and ripped through a set of new material and old favorites which, for me, was the undoubted highlight of the evening, but not necessarily because it made me think deeply about fair trade and African debt cancellation.