Nairobi — Could it just be me, or is Tinseltown's canoodling with African orphans getting a tad melodramatic (with the pun intended)? Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie is one of the most famous benefactors, but she's hardly alone in opening her home to dirt-poor African children. Ms Jolie, whose estranged father is the Oscar winner Jon Voight, is one half of the most talked-about couple in Hollywood.

It's not even two years since she went to Ethiopia and picked up a baby whose teenage mother was about to turn her over to an orphanage. Zahara, she was christened, and while the little girl cannot claim to have been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, you can bet she's eating with one now. Zahara has a "brother", four-year-old Maddox, formerly of Cambodia. In June, their new parents declared their intentions to forage the world for some more adoption opportunities, just a month after they had their own child. Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt reads like a mathematical formula, but anyway.

Long before Ms Jolie, there was another actress, Mia Farrow who pioneered these celebrity adoptions in the 1970s and ended up with at least 10 severely handicapped (both mentally and physically) children from around the world. In an incestuous twist that even Hollywood couldn't have scripted, Soon-Yi Previn, one of those Farrow "children", left her mother and married a man who is 34 years her senior.

That man happened to be the neurotic funnyman Woody Allen, who soon became Ms Farrow's "ex". Earlier this year, another actor, Ewan McGregor adopted a Mongolian child with his wife, while When Harry Met Sally star, Meg Ryan also got her own Chinese bundle of joy.

But they don't come bigger than the Material Girl. After some prevarication - she will; she did; she didn't; she might - Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, better known by her first name, finally conceded this week that she had joined the orphanage business. The most successful female singer of all time adopted a one-year-old African boy whose mother died of childbirth complications, although she apparently wanted a girl until three weeks ago (a rather ominous sign of things to come, don't you think?)

Soon after landing in Lilongwe (via private jet of course) and travelling by road to Mphandula village, where she sponsors the Raising Malawi Centre (that provides for Aids orphans), it is time for the Madonna Lotto. Because, that is what it eventually becomes if your adopted mother has $372 million (Sh27 billion) in the bank. She had called ahead for the Malawians to select 12 one-year-olds, and picked her latest child from there.

"I am the father of David, who has been adopted," 32-year-old farmer Yohane Banda, told newshounds on Tuesday. "I am very, very happy because as you can see there is poverty in this village and I know he will be very well looked after in America." Mr Banda is probably right about everything except one: Madonna moved to Britain (some say permanently) more than five years ago to live with Guy Ritchie, her film producer husband and father of one of her two biological children.

So now we ask: what's this latest clamour for darkies? One answer can be found in the life and works of three men who share more than just the 'B'- Bono, Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. The three (and to a less extent, Bob Geldof and Prof Jeffery Sachs of Columbia University), are kings-of-the mill in the aid business. Bono (real name David Hewson), is the lead singer of the superstar Irish rock band U2. But he is now as famous for his relentless campaign to force rich nations into providing debt relief and Aids treatment for Africans. He attends special UN summits, the prestigious World Economic Forum, and even G8 meetings, as a matter of course. The two Bills are of course the richest American on one hand, and arguably the most famous on the other. All three have done good by us.

So there we have it: some observers think this rush to Africa is the latest manifestation of "envy". While, Tony Blair or George W. Bush can pledge billions of dollars (or Pound Sterling) to Africa, and actually make it happen, Angelina Jolie can't. And while Gordon Brown, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, appear to get some real work done at the end of each day, George Clooney appears to accomplish nothing when he's on a film set. And so on and so forth. Moreover, with a few exceptions - feel free to insert John F. Kennedy and Clinton - politicians and top business people lead fairly bland private lives and eschew the over-the-top lifestyles of Hollywood celebrities (I mean what's up with Elizabeth Taylor getting married eight times; including twice to one guy?)

It's therefore a cocktail of pressures that has turned our continent into a stomping ground for adoption-crazy celebrities - a desire to appear normal; a chance to escape the harsh northern winters on UN-sponsored junkets; and perhaps some mild interest in black people. But I've got to say this, it's getting gooey.

Child adoption is not common in Africa because our traditional family systems ensured that an orphaned child would be provided for wherever she was carted off, be it at an aunt's, uncle's or grandparent's. The HIV/Aids scourge has torn up part of this social fabric, but we all probably know someone who is still growing up in a home other than her own.

Such an extended family structure is non-existent in the west, where a man and his wife have their two children, and visit each set of in-laws for Thanksgiving dinner in alternate years. The pressure on children to leave home is often irresistible, with many families even charging them rent as soon as they hit 18 or leave school (whichever comes sooner).

The child of course gets her "revenge" years later when she carts off her now senile 80-year-old mother to nursing home for the elderly, where she visits and brings flowers once every quarter. It's not all bad, either. They are all just trying to survive in a society that celebrates individual achievement above all else.

But do you really think someone socialised in this way would be naturally inclined to adopt a young black stranger with cerebral palsy? To be fair, many stars often use their celebrity status to turn the spotlight on causes that are often ignored in rich nations. Landmines, river blindness, informal settlements, drought, famine, genocide - all are familiar themes in Africa.

But the world was probably less complicated before every Tom, Dick and Harry Belafonte decided to set up a personal orphanage in Beverly Hills.