IF MADONNA wants to show off how much she cares for African orphans, why can’t she just wear a plastic wristband like every other moral poseur, instead of being photographed wearing a Malawian baby on her back in a native sling? An African baby seems to be the latest celebrity accessory.

Although Madonna’s entourage has yet to confirm it, everybody in Malawi says that she has adopted that year-old boy. If so, she follows the trend set by Angelina Jolie, the actress who adopted an Ethiopian baby (and one from Cambodia) then went to Namibia with Brad Pitt to have her own child.

The couple known as “Brangelina” got the Namibian Government to use immigration rules to protect them from the media. Now Madonna, the “Queen of Pop”, seems to think she is Queen Victoria, waiving the rules in Malawi — a former British colony — where foreign adoptions are supposed to be illegal.

But, the star’s defenders say, people like me are just cynics. After all, Madonna has pledged to help to fund a day centre to feed and educate orphans in that Aids-ravaged country. Apparently this will offer “Spirituality for Kids”, a programme based on the mumbo-jumbo of Kabbalah. She has also donated copies of her children’s book, The English Roses.

OK, let’s accept Madonna is sincere. But the attitude she embodies is condescending and slightly obscene. No doubt if she adopts the baby he will live in comfort. That is no excuse. Despite the headlines, this boy is not an orphan — his mother died and he lives in an orphanage because his father cannot afford to feed him. How is whisking him out of his village in front of the world media addressing that problem?

Campaigners point out that Aids has “destroyed many families” in Malawi. Solution? Let’s break up another family by adopting their kid! Local child advocacy groups protest that foreign adoption is not in the best interests of the child or the community. But what do they know? They never had a No 1 record.

When I was at school, there was a scheme called “Give a penny for a black baby”, where we picked a smiley picture of the African child to whom our penny would supposedly be sent. Nobody thought that they would get to keep the black baby in return for their money.

Her supporters say that when somebody such as Madonna (literally) makes a song and dance in Africa, it helps to raise awareness. Is somebody still unaware that many African children live in grinding poverty? The problem is that few seem to think it is possible to do much about it, beyond giving them a cuddle and a hand-out.

Madonna’s music has always been derivative trend-surfing. Now her African crusade is tail-ending not just Jolie, Bono and Bob Geldof, but the slightly less glamorous Gordon Brown. When she says with typical modesty that, since becoming a parent herself, she has “felt responsible for the children of the world”, she is singing from Father Brown’s song sheet.

They end up treating the whole of Africa as a helpless baby to be adopted by Western parents. Madonna’s child charity is called “Raising Malawi”, as if the country were a toddler to carry on her back. A century ago in The White Man’s Burden, his ode to imperialism, Rudyard Kipling branded colonial subjects “half-devil and half-child”. Is the vision of Africans offered in The White Madonna’s Burden any more enlightened?

• ACCORDING to my dictionary, “tolerance” means among other things “broad-mindedness”. But in the rows over such issues as the Islamic veil, we are offered two decidedly narrow-minded definitions. One says that we must tolerate any expression of cultural identity without criticism, in case we give offence. The other insists we must crack down on views that are not themselves tolerant. In either case, we are living in an age of intolerant tolerance.

  Genuine tolerance means living with the expression of views and lifestyles with which you disagree —while retaining the freedom to criticise them, regardless of who might take offence. Voltaire’s famously double-barrelled declaration, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, does not appear in his own works. It is a summation of his views, published in 1906 in The Friends of Voltaire. A century later tolerance could do with more such friends.

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