We're all Africans now

Celebrities have found a whole new continent to colonise
    • The Guardian,
    • Jump to comments ()
There's a moment in When Harry Met Sally where Meg Ryan explodes: "Harry, you're going to have to move back to New Jersey because you've slept with everybody in New York!" Unable to countenance relocating to anywhere as infra dig as the Garden State, celebrity heiress Paris Hilton is to combat a similar sexual catchment problem by - in tabloid parlance - slapping herself with a nookie ban.

Naturally, any celebrity who takes a vow of celibacy cannot do so in private. Showbiz precedent (see Geri Halliwell, Robbie Williams et al) demands that the star in question formally announce they are depriving the world of the chance to get it on with them. And so it is that Paris has seen fit to issue the following statement: "I'm not doing it with anyone [for a year]. I just want to concentrate on work."

Anyone hit especially hard by the news should be reassured that the grainy amateur video One Night In Paris is still very much available. Watch it with a tear-salted Martini, listening to the Way We Were soundtrack.

In days of yestercentury, enormous importance was placed upon the Race to Berlin. These days, you have no hope of being a celebrity superpower unless you're involved in the Race to Africa. Clearly, the Soviet commander in this unseemly scramble is Angelina Jolie, whose occupation of Namibia is almost total, and to whom we'll return in greater detail later. Swooping in from another front like some exhibitionist Eisenhower is Madonna, who has earmarked Malawi for reasons we shall also come to shortly.

And now, approaching from the north - did we run out of allied generals? - is Gwyneth Paltrow.

I say "approaching" (you get the feeling she's masterminding the push from a gated bunker somewhere in Primrose Hill), in that last weekend she was unveiled as the star of a new ad, which in minuscule print features the website of an African charity, But mainly, it depicts Gwyneth, arguably the most WASPish looking woman in Hollywood, facing the camera in a beaded tribal necklace with a dash of blue warpaint across one cheek. The caption? "I AM AFRICAN."

Finally, a reason to care about the continent.

Of course, you can imagine the hilarity that has ensued. However, this has eventually given way to the suspicion that Gwyneth may have been attempting to make some kind of point, and although this column's resources do not stretch to enticing Bletchley Park to take up the case, after long contemplation it has become crystal clear.

She is parking her grass-skirted tanks on the sub-Saharan lawns of her celebrity rivals.

A year ago, that would have been unthinkable. That, of course, was before Angelina Jolie took Namibia, stopping only in Ethiopia to acquire an adoptive child. From there, she and Brad Pitt proceeded to the resort of Langstrand (via the promotional tour for their latest movie), where they prepared for the birth of their biological child.

The image presented to the world was that of two Hollywood megastars roughing it in the third world. The reality, I am crushed to inform you, was that they had rented the entire local five star hotel. The birth, which US tabloid readers possibly imagined to have taken place in a mud hut, with only a witch doctor for assistance, in fact took place in a first-class clinic, under the auspices of the obstetrician Angelina had flown over from Los Angeles.

"We had amazing doctors," she gushed, "and everyone was just so lovely." In recompense, she bestowed upon the country that most precious of late capitalist gifts: a swarm of photographers. Can you believe Namibia didn't have paparazzi before then? It's so sad. I have to turn off the news when I hear stuff like that.

Clearly, though, Angelina's annexing of this grateful country threw down a gauntlet to Madonna, who recently announced she had finally found "a big, big project" for herself. Which is certainly one way of categorising Malawi. So committed is Madonna to sorting out that country's ass that she's even planning to visit the continent for the first time this October.

And now comes Gwyneth - the latest celebrity bent on embodying that most meaningless of lyrics by Toto: "I bless the rains down in Africa."

Where will it all end? Looking at the map (and hey, how cool is it that they totally made us look at a map of the place?), Madonna could potentially get her Africans to march across Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Botswana to mass on Angelina's eastern border.

Gwyneth's reaction is a little tough to predict. But I'm going with some kind of bead sanctions.

Ashley to ashes:

Stop taking the anti-nausea pills: the relationship between movie star James Woods, 59, and "actress" Ashley Myrick, 20, is over. It's not for us to speculate on the precise skillset of Ashley (who, as a friend's daughter, Woods has known since she was five); what can be deduced is that it does not include a grasp of funeral etiquette. The burial in question was that of Woods's brother, which, an ally of the actor says, Ashley attended "in a 3-inch miniskirt and chainsmoking". "Jimmy was on his knees with tears staining his shirt," he rages. "She was showing magazine pictures of herself. She truly has the soul of a moth and the brain of a dead trout." Personally, I think they could have worked things out. But Hollywood's a lazy town.

Latest posts

Today's best video

Today in pictures