AS the first black president of the UN General Assembly, he had a front view seat of some of the most momentous events in mid-20th century history, not as a spectator but as a mover and a shaker in the world of global politics.
From the very beginning, Alexander Quaison-Sackey seemed to be blessed by providence as well as a first class brain as he went from a school pupil in need of a pen to career diplomat in soon-to-be independent Ghana, and thence to the top of the tree as Kwame Nkrumah’s foreign minister.
He tells his extraordinary story in a memoir that was launched in Accra in August by Dr Mohamed Ibn Chambas, head of the UN Office for West Africa and Sahel, who described him as a “a pioneer who projected the African personality on the international scene.”
Quaison-Sackey unexpectedly died in 1992 before completing his life story. It ends abruptly in 1966 when he is detained by soldiers in Accra before being allowed to travel to the UK following Nkrumah’s overthrow by the military. He left the hand-written manuscript with his daughter, Awo Aferba Quaison-Sackey, with instructions to get it published.
Don’t be put off by the book’s somewhat mundane title, The Makings of a Diplomatist. Quaison-Sackey was a witness to history, conveying the hope and vision of a generation of people who fought for their country to be born and then enter the world stage.
The book opens with his childhood days in the coastal town of Winneba, where he was born in 1924, with a fascinating account of his family’s history going back deep into the 19th century
From the beginning, he seemed to have a sense of his own destiny, writing to his father from his secondary school in Cape Coast with a request for a pen, saying, “What if I am destined to become somebody great but I am not able to write my exams because I do not have a pen?”
He continued his education at the famous Achimota School near Accra where he became swept up by the events of 1948 when the nationalist movement “spread like wildfire” under Nkrumah’s leadership. Nicknamed “the young statesman” because of his fondness for talking politics, he describes how thrilled he was to meet Nkrumah during his visit to the school. “These events fortified me in my conviction that I would in the future have a role to play in the affairs of Ghana but that I needed to be fully equipped intellectually and ideologically.”
That came when the colonial government awarded him a coveted scholarship to study PPE at Exeter College, Oxford, where he served as president of the West Africa Students’ Union. By now married and a father, he returned home to work as a labour disputes officer, a job that gave him a crash course in the art of diplomacy.
He had already begun to make an impression in government circles. In 1955, with independence just around the corner following Nkrumah’s election as prime minister in the new all-African legislature, Quaison-Sackey was handpicked to train as a diplomat in the UK. After work experience in the British Embassy in Brazil, he returned to London to serve as second secretary at the new Ghana High Commission on the very day the country became independent, March 6 1957.
From there the only way was up. Two years later, he was appointed Ghana’s permanent representative to the United Nations. The weighty issues confronting him concerned the fate of millions of people – the Cuban missile crisis, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Sharpeville Massacre, Patrice Lumumba’s murder, to name but a few. He was under no illusion as to the enormity of the task ahead of him but believed that Ghana, having taken a “revolutionary path to independence,” should be a standard bearer in the struggle for world peace and the liberation of oppressed and colonised peoples.
Popular, well respected and aged only 40, he was voted in as president of the UN General Assembly in 1964, the first black African to so serve, receiving a standing ovation when he made his first speech in the role, wearing traditional kente cloth.
These days, the UN has come to have lost its sheen, seen by many as an adjunct of US hegemony. For the author it was an “international ship of state” which he sincerely believed could help change the course of history. At the time, the Non-Aligned Movement, which represented the interests of the developing world, was a force to be reckoned with, and one can imagine his fervour as he mobilised around it, helping to set the tone for struggles ahead, not least in apartheid South Africa
He rubbed shoulders with some of the world’s great leaders, including Castro, Che Guevara, Nasser and Nehru, as well as deepening his relationship with Nkrumah. He was also full of admiration for US civil rights figures, writing of “my friend Malcolm X”, having lunch with Martin Luther King and hosting Paul Robeson and his wife at his residence. “I felt home in America, we felt part of the struggles that were raging,” he says.
He comes across as a dedicated public servant, one who away from the travails of the office, would have made genial company. He doesn’t seem to have a bad word to say about anybody, but perhaps that is a mark of a true diplomat. Although restrained and sometimes pedantic in his writing, there’s no mistaking the dramas that he witnessed at first hand.
In the last few pages of the book, he describes Nkrumah’s reaction to the news that he has been overthrown in absentia. It was February 1966, and as Ghana’s newly appointed foreign minister, he was accompanying the president on a peace mission to Vietnam. It is a painful read and for Quaison-Sackey it must have been painful to write because Nkrumah later accused him of betrayal, something he denies. His sense of disappointment that Ghana’s independence did not meet the expected high hopes is palpable but the book suggests that as long as there are people like himself around, there are good grounds for optimism.
The Makings of a Diplomatist: The Memoirs of Alexander Quaison-Sackey is published by DigiBooks, Ghana
This review is republished from the September-October 2022 edition of the Africa Briefing Magazine
