AFRICA TOPPED the bill in last week’s Davos love-in. Politicians, plutocrats and performers exposed a caring-sharing side as they pledged to fight poverty. And in Britain too, throughout the year in which we hold the presidencies of the G8 and the EU, Africa will continue to provide a political focus. To coincide with this, cultural institutions are joining forces for a massive nine-month festival. It opened last night with the launch of the British Museum’s Africa 05 programme.

A Tree of Life sculpture sprouts at the bottom of the sunbeam banner that streams down through the Great Court. Made of weapons decommissioned from the Mozambican civil war, it stands as a symbol which suggests that we should trade in our clichéd caricatures of Africa as a savage “dark continent” for a more fertile and creative image. “The British Museum”, says its director Neil MacGregor, “is the only place in Britain where you can walk around Africa and get an idea of the great range of its cultures.” Over the next few months, the sprawling complexity of these will be explored. Presentations of painting, sculpture, music, film, dance and photography will challenge the stereotype of the “basket-case” continent and reveal the imaginative fecundity and extraordinary ingenuity of its people instead.

But before we set out on this creative journey, the British Museum takes the spectator right back to beginnings. Its show, Made in Africa, gives Bond Street shop-window treatment to dusty bits of archaeology such as two million-year-old stone tools — among the most ancient objects in the world — brought back from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania go on display. “These objects connect us all to Africa,” says Jill Cook, the museum’s head of pre-history. “They remind us that all culture began in this continent, that it was the source of a common humanity.”

I handled a palm-shaped cutting tool. It felt as if I was holding on to something that was utterly fundamental. And perhaps the political world should take note. An ever more exasperating array of initiatives, from Gordon Brown’s International Finance Facility, to Sharon Stone’s mosquito-net auction, compete confusingly. Figureheads seem to vie in a popularity contest while the public are left bewildered as to how they can best act.

As the Africa 05 festival bursts vibrantly on to Britain, changing our perceptions and rousing enthusiasms to help, a united political programme must be in place to support it. Beneath all the hot air we need ground-level reforms to implement plans (and not just make endless promises) that will fundamentally renegotiate the terms of our relationship with Africa, that will reschedule debt, reduce trade barriers and support aid programmes. Or should we just jump on a plane to Africa carrying a goat?

• AT A recent meeting of the Herculaneum Society, the world’s leading classical scholars gasped like an audience at a firework display when they witnessed the magic effected by the new technology of multispectral imaging. Ancient texts written on crumbling carbonised scrolls, entombed for posterity by the eruption of Vesuvius as inscrutable black lumps, could be deciphered for the first time in two thousand years. This stirs a long-standing debate as to whether excavations at Herculaneum should now resume. Many scholars believe that an entire library containing lost works by Aristotle, Sophocles and Aeschylus may still lie there undiscovered. The importance of such a find can neither be exaggerated nor denied.

  But some some argue that, while Herculaneum remains so inadequately cared for, further excavations — which will cost upwards of £10 million — should be put on hold. In ordinary circumstances they would probably be right. Our contemporary society too often proves itself a dodgy trustee. Ancient sites in Iraq are undoubtedly best left for the time being under the protection of dry desert sands. Increasing pollution wreaks irreparable damage to cultural monuments.

  And yet seeing the way that George Bush handles the environment is like seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee. But the case of Herculaneum is different. Recently, renewed seismic activity has been recorded around Vesuvius. Another eruption could destroy the site forever. That is why its excavation now seems imperative.

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