Niall Ferguson: Africa has always generated hot air
Like Mr Blair, Wilberforce had his roots in the north of England. Like Mr Blair, he did not distinguish himself at Oxbridge. Like Mr Blair, he lost no time in entering politics, where his affability ensured rapid advancement. And, like Mr Blair, Wilberforce was strongly influenced by the Evangelical movement.
The revelation of "the infinite love, that Christ should die to save such a sinner" came to Wilberforce like a thunderbolt after he had entered Parliament.
But he was persuaded by (among others) the repentant slave trader and composer of Amazing Grace John Newton, that he could "do both": politics and God's work. It took a few false starts before, alerted to the atrocious conditions aboard slave ships making the transatlantic "Middle Passage", he found his cause célèbre.
The moral transformation of England achieved by the Evangelical movement, without which the law abolishing the slave trade would never have been passed, has its echoes in our own time.
Today, of course, most English people are faintly embarrassed by religion and regard Americans as rather absurd for reading the Bible. Nevertheless, the English retain an authentically 19th-century enthusiasm for moral crusades. Part of Mr Blair's original appeal as a politician was precisely the impression he gave of being able to lead one.
In our time, as in the 1800s, Africa has an especially strong appeal to the Evangelical sensibility. There is something irresistible about being able to feel simultaneously guilty about the continent's problems ("I once was blind...") and capable of solving them ("... but now I see").
The problem is, of course, that generation after generation thinks it has found the solution, and generation after generation is disappointed. Wilberforce and his friends were convinced that abolishing the slave trade, and then slavery itself, would do the trick....
[HNN: Ferguson goes on to argue that no amount of British aid to its former colonies in Africa has provided much help.]
On the sole occasion when the British intervened to end violence in one of their former colonies, Sierra Leone in 2000, the results were dramatic [however]. Freetown in the late Nineties had witnessed scenes out of Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
But when I went there not long after the British intervention, it was safe to walk the streets."Thank God for Britain!" an elderly man exclaimed when he heard where I was from. I never expected to hear that in Africa.
Credit where credit is due. It was Mr Blair who sent the troops to Sierra Leone and ended the anarchy there. So I don't begrudge him his visit to Freetown last week. It was surely the most richly deserved ego-trip of his entire Sinatra-like farewell world tour.
Moreover, Mr Blair proceeded to give a speech in South Africa on Thursday which, as messianic speeches on the subject of Africa go, was one of the best I have ever heard from a Western leader."Africa," he declared,"has been a prime example of a foreign policy that has been thoroughly interventionist. I believe in the power of political action to make the world better and the moral obligation to use it."
Great stuff. And pure Wilberforce. ...