The Odd Couple African tour is over, and now we have to wait and see if tangible efforts flow from the aid-review trip taken by US Treasury Secretary, Mr Paul O'Neill, and Irish rock musician, Bono. Mr O'Neill dropped Bono off on his way back to Washington; the last words between them aren't known, but, despite reports of some tensions along the way, mutual respect remains strong.
It would have been a little too much to expect that these two would see eye to eye on either the causes or the solutions for the problems they were shown in Ghana, Uganda, South Africa, and Ethiopia. Mr O'Neill says he will be rigorously costing plans for more US aid. The differences between the two men embody a significant aspect of the aid debate of recent decades: should large sums be given to desperate countries, virtually unconditionally, to alleviate hunger and disease, or is it inevitable that such largesse will end up lining the pockets of dictators, while the ordinary people continue to suffer?
On their journey, African leaders were open about the shortcomings of the past. The Ethiopian prime minister, Mr Meles Zenawi, said Africans themselves have to take responsibility for their situation, and criticised systems of patronage. In Uganda, where the annual debt repayment burden is two and a half times as much as export earnings, President Yoweri Museveni was even more blunt, blaming mismanagement and bad post-colonial leadership for Africa's economic crises. President Bush however, may want more than mea culpas to persuade him to proceed with his recent proposal to ignore debt and make another 15 billion dollars available to Africa's worst cases.
Both African and western economists have been sceptical of the trip because of US protectionist policies which handicap African agricultural exports, pointing to last week's announcement of new subsidies to benefit the coffee, tea, and cotton producers of the American south.
One of the ironies of this tour was that, while it garnered much media coverage in the West, in the villages and townships of Africa the two men were often unknown. That difference symbolises another feature of development aid: the water treatment plant that might look great on the drawing board in Europe can easily end up a rusting ruin in the sub-Saharan village where there are no spare parts.
Bono burst into a few bars of the U2 song I still haven't found what I'm looking for at one stop in Soweto. He might not have found a pat response to his pleas for a more open-handed attitude to aid to Africa but there was a positive feeling in Mr O'Neill's acceptance that "The world has got to deal with this problem. ... This is doable." When the man who holds the purse strings of the world's richest economy says something can and should be done, that is a ray of light on the darkness of the vast continent.