Bob Geldof has just seen Africa afresh. You might think that the ex-Boomtown Rat and hero of famine relief had already seen all a man could of the continent that cried out for Live Aid. Fifteen years ago his raw, straight-to-the-heart appeal raised an awesome $150 million to feed the Third World’s starving. When he got together an Eighties’ Who’s Who of pop – Midge Ure of Ultravox, Sting, Simon Le Bon, Bono, George Michael, Paul Weller, Phil Collins and Boy George – to make that historic Band Aid single, Bob turned the amplifier up – way beyond max – on global giving.

Factory workers across Europe worked free over weekends solely to press his record Do They Know It’s Christmas?. A newlywed couple sold their first home for the cause, and old ladies queued to give up their wedding rings. “That’s all they had to give away – an extreme sacrifice that represents all the love they’d had in their life,” says Bob, whose humanitarian efforts won him a knighthood and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

But this time round Bob was seeing Africa through the wide eyes of his children, first-time visitors to the continent he finds “the most beautiful and intoxicating in the world, Before their trip, the kids – like most people – only knew the Africa of horror, of decay,” he says.

But on safari close by the Sabi River, Fifi, 18, Peaches, 12, Pixie, ten and four-year-old Tiger saw the Africa that dreams are made of. For the girls, big game by day and vast starry night skies were the payoff for their dreaded immunisation jabs, producing what Bob describes as “a minor typhoid outbreak in Battersea. We all suffered the day afterwards and slept till about five in the afternoon, which was weird. The girls were mostly great about their shots, though Pixie did literally wrench the needle out of her arm and run out of the room pursued by the doctor!”

For the inside info on Bob and the girls’ trip, plus fond remembrances of their mother, Paula Yates, the new issue of HELLO! is on sale now.