Leaving Live and politics to one side, Bob Geldof makes a personal journey through Africa to understand ordinary Africans and, through their experiences, understand the forces that make the continent tick. Travelling through West Africa (Ghana, Benin and Mali), Central Africa (DR Congo and Uganda) and East Africa (Ethiopia, Tanzania and Somalia), Geldof explores the continent that the rest of the world seems to be leaving behind. Geldof says of his experiences: "In Europe, we live in effect East to West - across one vast temperate climate zone. Africa, on the other hand - lying North to South - has the lot: desert with its vast seas of sand; tropical with its jungles; equatorial with its rainforest; savannah and coastal with its animals and fish. In fact, practically everything except Arctic. "And within this immense continent more peoples, more language, more cultures, more animals than anywhere else on our world. It is quite simply the most extraordinary, beautiful and luminous place on our planet." "Most of us see Africa as an object, a single, blighted place burning in the relentless glaring heat. For others it occupies a romantic space in our imagination of child-like primitives and wild, beautiful animal creatures. "For still others, it's the dark sides of our minds, the impenetrable place, the unknowable mind, the hoards of walking skeletons too weak to swat the flies tat cover them, in the stinking squalor of the relief camps. Or the disease-stricken people fleeing yet another nameless battle between countries, tribes, clans or warlords. And all of this is partially true too much of the time and we will come back to it. "But there are other Africas. "Africa, like the other continents is not static, but perhaps unlike them, it has had to adjust and change more simply in order to survive. And it's kept its cultures and its electric vitality and its own ideas and systems that have allowed it to exist despite everything that nature and history has assaulted it with. "It exists for itself and within itself. But just to live, just to grow food and perhaps develop an economic life like ours, the continent was dealt a lousy hand. From the beginning, geography stood against Africa."