The world was his theatre

THE life of Sir Shridath Ramphal, GCMG, AC, ONZ, OE, OCC, NIIV, OM, KC, FRSA, who gently passed away on August 30, aged 95, in Barbados, cannot go unremarked by this column.

His was an extraordinary public life by anyone’s account.

In 1990, Nelson Mandela said this of him, “He is one of those men who have become famous because, in their fight for human justice, they have chosen the whole world as their theatre.”

Guyana-born and fondly known as "Sonny," small in stature but a giant of a man, he came to mass attention in the 1970s when, as secretary-general of the Commonwealth, he locked horns with Ian Smith, who had defied British demands for majority rule as a prerequisite for independence and unilaterally declared independence in Southern Rhodesia and institutionalised racism.

Southern Africa received the same sort of media coverage then as Gaza and Ukraine receive now, and fully engaged the US and other world powers. Every evening our British TV news recounted the knife-edged battle for the future of the region where racist governments, from Rhodesia to Namibia, deprived native African peoples of their basic human rights.

The myth that those parts of Africa were uninhabited when European pioneers arrived was the basis of their challenge to native land rights. The formidable Mrs Margaret Thatcher, then British prime minister, was against trade and sporting sanctions in apartheid in South Africa and as a way of bringing Rhodesia to heel. Secretary-General Ramphal took her on.

It was the starkest example of how the interests of the developing world and those of our former masters were profoundly unaligned. On one side, we had Ramphal and the African leaders, from Julius Nyerere in Tanzania to Samora Machel in Mozambique, lined up behind him, espousing sanctions against their apartheid neighbours.

On the other were succeeding British governments, Labour and Tory, made up of people who had familial ties with white Africa. Their intense dislike of Ramphal was palpable, but he had the queen on his side, because she was always on the side of the Commonwealth, and her own dislike of Margaret Thatcher particularly was well known.

It is acknowledged that the rift between black and white Africa over the role of sanctions was so deep that without Ramphal’s acute diplomatic skills, the Commonwealth would have split asunder.

The Telegraph obituary of September 1 asserts that “it was Ramphal’s passionate opposition to racism and his espousal of third-world causes more than anything which kept the 'new' Commonwealth countries within the group at a difficult time. Indeed, under his stewardship the Commonwealth expanded from 37 to 49. If the price for keeping the show on the road was the estrangement of its founder member, Ramphal gambled on the fact that Mrs Thatcher, whatever her private views, was unlikely to risk a diplomatic rift by walking away.”

Ramphal proved the most effective and longest-serving (1975-1990) secretary-general the Commonwealth has ever had.

The British government accused him of being too big for his boots, behaving like a world leader when he was a mere civil servant. Ramphal was such a deft world player that he had to be contained, just like Dr Eric Williams had to be contained, for being an intellectual upstart and not knowing his place. Their ambitions had to be crushed.

British foreign secretary Lord Carrington, who played a key role in the elections that brought Robert Mugabe to power and wanted to keep it “a British affair” (according to archived academic research) did not appreciate Ramphal’s “unhelpful interference” in the matter, but, reportedly, Mugabe himself believed that but for the Commonwealth, and in particular the Commonwealth election observers, the history of Zimbabwe might have been very different.

Carrington is on record for warning Ramphal that he would swim the Atlantic if necessary to frustrate Ramphal’s ambition to become the next secretary-general of the UN in 1982.

Ramphal was thwarted, and it was the world’s loss that his UN leadership bid failed, but he spent much of his last years as secretary-general in the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa, playing a part in Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in February 1990, and Namibia’s independence in March.

Sonny then diverted his interests to concentrate on the many other matters that needed the attention of a brilliant mind and his unique experience.

Through my work I became interested in the selection of Ramphal’s successor, and it was a great pleasure and honour to spend time in the company of Sonny, who was perhaps the most accomplished diplomat our region has ever produced. Someone who had a penchant for a good laugh, a kind word, and whose sharp wit was always at the ready. He embodied a broad sense of community, equality and social justice.

On a personal note, Sonny Ramphal was one of the biggest intellectual and political influences of my life and he made me proud to be a Caribbean person. His Time For Action, the report of the West India Commission, remains, for me, one of the world’s seminal texts, a source of wisdom that every UWI student should read.

RIP, Sonny Ramphal.