Interventions

by Kofi Annan

  For far too long, the UN had been considered the sole prerogative of states and their representatives. And it showed. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and young people on every continent were challenging with passion and effectiveness outdated dogmas and unjust practices, but were deemed unworthy of serious engagement. The dynamism of the private sector that was revolutionizing business in the developed world and markets throughout the developing world was rarely to be seen. Instead, stepping into a UN hall often felt like entering a time machine to the most arid North-South debates of the 1970s about power and justice, capitalism and development.

  From my first days in office, I reminded the heads of state that the first words of the UN Charter did not refer to them—indeed, they were written in the voice of “We the Peoples.” From the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to revitalizing the struggle against HIV/AIDS, from disarmament and humanitarian assistance to engaging the private sector and business through the Global Compact, I wanted to bring the UN closer to the people we were there to serve. Instead of leading an organization dedicated to the governments of the world, I would put the individual at the center of everything we did.

  A United Nations for the twenty-first century would have to create new partnerships, respond to the needs of individuals, and stand for the principle that national sovereignty could never be used as a shield for genocide or gross violations of human rights. It would have to advance a much broader view of security that integrated peace, development, women’s empowerment, and human rights if it were to address successfully the challenges of a global age. It would have to make a difference in the four key challenges of the twenty-first century: peace and security, growth with development, respect for human rights, and the rule of law.

  All this I knew to be fundamental to the UN’s future relevance and effectiveness. But even as I fought to maintain our focus on these long-term aims, I found myself time and again as secretary-general drawn back into the vortex of conflicts that threatened entire societies with destruction. If the United Nations truly was to reflect a humanity that cared more, not less, for the suffering in its midst, and would do more, and not less, to end it, the organization had to be an agent of intervention in every sphere of human security.

  I

  INDEPENDENCE

  African Beginnings

  My father, Henry Reginald Annan, was not a rebel by nature. A Ghanaian executive of a European trading company, a Freemason, and a devout Anglican in a culture of tribes and ancestral worship, a hereditary chief in a time of radical change, he was not one to make a point. And yet he gave each of his children African names, a signal departure for a man of his background and position in the Gold Coast of the 1930s and 1940s. To him there was no contradiction in being African in identity and European in outlook, a nationalist as well as a traditionalist, a proponent of political change and an upholder of those values of respect, dignity, discipline, and hard work that had sustained his own life and career. But by naming his five children Nana Essie, Essie, Kofi Atta, Efua Atta, and Kobina, he made an unmistakable wager on behalf of a proud and independent African future for his children.

  To H.R., as he was known to friends and associates, crossing over—and back again—was inherent to his life, heritage, and political outlook. H.R. refused to choose—between radical change and the status quo, traditional and modern, tribal and national, Fante and Ashanti, African and European. Instead, he insisted that the only sustainable kind of change toward self-government was one that would honor the proud heritage of Ghana’s people and ensure a balanced society able to stand on its own feet and make of independence a success. He managed to be both a pillar of society and a builder of multiple constituencies across tribe, class, and profession.

  A business executive who went to work in a dark suit and broken collar every day alongside European managers, he was also a traditionalist in his home, with his base being my grandmother’s extended family in Kumasi. In a society where people identified closely with tribe and village, he was himself a product of a marriage between a Fante and an Ashanti, and among his wives were both Fante and Ashanti women. H.R. had four wives who bore him five children, including my twin sister, Efua, and myself.

  My father worked as an executive of the United Africa Company, a subsidiary of Lever Brothers, the Anglo-Dutch multinational corporation that later became known globally as Unilever. His job kept us moving from city to city, town to town, throughout my childhood—from Kumasi to Accra and Bekwai, from Koforidua to Nsawan and Nkakaw—and in this shifting panorama of home and belonging, no part of Ghana was foreign to us. My own mother, Rose, lived in Cape Coast with my half-sister, Ewura Efua. My twin sister, Efua Atta, and I saw very little of her growing up, until we went to boarding school in Cape Coast in our early teens. Instead, a vital constant throughout this nomadic period was the family home in Kumasi to which we would always return, meeting with three generations of aunts and uncles. At the many precarious moments of childhood, there would always be somebody to go to for guidance and love, when the subtle messages of traditional proverbs would be used. “You don’t hit somebody on the head when you have your fingers between his teeth” was one such proverb, a concept that reminded us that even when in dispute we remain bound to each other.

  Every day would bring a new face, a different language or tribal tradition into our home, and teach us a life lesson about the richness of the mix and mash of cultures and peoples. As a consequence, we were raised nontribal in a tribal society, political moderates in an era of radical activism, conciliators in a time of choosing sides.

  —

  This was the Gold Coast in the late 1930s and 1940s where a small British colony in West Africa became consumed with the prospect of independence. Growing up in the twilight years of the Gold Coast—destined to become the first independent country in sub-Saharan Africa and to be renamed Ghana—was to experience a complete change in culture and society. By the time I was ten, in 1948, the independence movement was in full force, and as I came of age, so did Ghana as a free republic, in the vanguard of an African emancipation that would bring sixteen new African nations into the United Nations within two short years.

  For Ghanaians, these were days of extraordinary hope and promise, the expectation that Africa was about to take off, and that we finally had an opportunity to create for ourselves all that we had accused the colonial power of denying us. For me, the personal coming-of-age was indistinguishable from the independence struggle. Politics had a meaning and purpose above and beyond tribe or ideology or the division of spoils that in so many other African societies since has become the norm. There was a complete mobilization of society as everybody joined the struggle in his own way to bring independence to life. Leaders of the movement would end up in jail only to emerge as future prime ministers and judges and military chiefs.

  In Ghana, the process of decolonization was defined more by a struggle among different groups within the country than one of blacks against whites. The mosquito saw to that. Although the slave trade thrived over many centuries, there were very few white settlers because of malaria and yellow fever. Instead, the struggle was between Ghanaians—radicals and gradualists—and my father became a prominent figure among those who sought change through a process of steady, measured transformation.

  Ghana’s independence struggle was defined by this duality of the traditional and the modern, the educated and the working class, the Ashanti and the coastal tribes. As in many other African colonies, it was soldiers returning from the Second World War, who had served in the British army, who began to question more fundamentally the iniquities of colonial practices. They witnessed white British soldiers alongside whom they had fought and bled receive generous pensions, land, and other benefits in Africa—none of which were available to Africans. Together with leading members of Ghana’s professional classes—lawyers, doctors, and engineers—these veterans began a campaign for independence
. As conservative members of society—by definition, those who had status and assets and privileges even under colonial rule—they were looking for a cautious, methodical change of regime. Their independence slogan was—tellingly—“Step by Step.”

  This was the group that formed the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) as their party, and decided to appoint as secretary a fiery, courageous activist, Kwame Nkrumah. A member of one of Ghana’s smaller tribes, and the son of a village goldsmith who had gone on to educate himself in the United States and Britain, Nkrumah brought to the cause an impatience and a passion that could not, in the end, abide the gradualist tempo of Ghana’s elite. Tired of their condescension toward him and their dismissive attitude to what they considered his rabble-rousing supporters, he broke away from the UGCC to found the Convention People’s Party. Nkrumah possessed more than just impatience, however; he had a keen strategic mind and an ability to organize people that far surpassed that of his former colleagues. He soon became the indisputable driver of Ghana’s independence.

  For my father—one of the few African trading executives of a European company, a leading member of the UGCC, and a close friend of the Ashanti king, the Asantehene—this was a time of careful balancing. Our house in these days became a gathering point for senior members of the UGCC—to the point where Nkrumah activists would hold rallies in the park across the street. As a young man, I was deeply influenced by the discussions going on at home with my father and his friends. At the same time, I was emotionally drawn to the passion and urgency of Nkrumah’s calls for “independence now.” Some of the statements that he was making—that we must stand on our own, that we must have our destiny in our own hands—resonated deeply with me.

  All this taught me, in the way only a lived experience can, that peaceful change—even transformational change—is possible. After watching the first-ever Ghanaian police commissioner, or first Ghanaian head of the army, being sworn in, suddenly nothing seemed impossible. A sense of pride and, most of all, opportunity filled everyone of my generation. As I embarked on an education that would take me to the United States and Europe, and an early career that included working for the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, the UN Economic Commission in Addis Ababa, the UN headquarters in New York, the United Nations Emergency Force based in Cairo, and the Ghana Tourist Development Company, this belief in transformational change remained constant.

  In Ghana, as in other African countries at the threshold to freedom, the struggle for independence led to the creation of a national movement, as opposed to political parties in the more traditional sense. After independence, leaders would argue that the people should unite behind a single national organization, with the inevitable result of a one-party state. The UGCC represented more than just a contrast to Nkrumah’s view on the timing and manner of independence, but a deeper-seated belief in more traditional values and practices with strong roots among ordinary Ghanaians. A blessing for Ghana was that both sides sought the widest possible constituencies and therefore never based their appeal on tribe, protecting the country from the traumas of tribal conflict, which has bedeviled so many of its neighbors on the continent.

  This difference in outlook and experience was reflected within Ghana, too—between those tribes concentrated at the coast and the northern region, and the Ashanti in the center of the country with their capital of Kumasi. Though my family was a mix of Fante and Ashanti, I was born in Kumasi, and the Ashanti heartland was my father’s principal area of influence and economic activity. Because the Ashanti had long enjoyed an extensive degree of autonomy—and not experienced the daily interaction with European traders and soldiers familiar from the coast—they had to a far lesser degree than other Ghanaian tribes internalized the prejudices and presumptions of a racist Europe in its dealings with Africans.

  In Kumasi, there was no sense of being subservient or inferior to the European traders, and little taste of the racial discrimination experienced by people in Accra. There was, rather, great pride in the achievements of the kingdom and its warrior ethos that had fought the British a full generation longer than the coastal communities before surrendering in 1902 and being annexed into the colony. Unlike the coastal tribes of Ghana—and, even more so, the people of East Africa, who were dominated by large European settler populations—the Ashanti did not grow up with any sense of limits as to what they could do.

  Even as the Ashanti were known as a warrior people able to stand up to the British and dominate other tribes, among Ashantis themselves there was an important priority placed on compromise and negotiation. Indeed, the Ashanti king did not have his own army, but had to convince tribes and subtribes to provide troops in times of war and crisis.

  This tradition of political persuasion and contribution to a broader cause through dialogue and negotiation has set deep roots in Ghana’s society and informed greatly the traditions of peaceful coexistence. Later on, after independence, when my father was appointed regional minister of the Ashanti region, he was able to further this tradition in managing carefully the balance between the interests of the state and those of the Ashanti king with whom he had developed a long and trusting friendship. Modern ways of republican government had to be fused with traditional structures of authority. As someone who had always believed in the coexistence of these strands of life, he was in his element.

  My father in many ways embodied the possibilities and conflicts that this status permitted. As a leading professional of his community, he was deeply involved with Freemasonry and the Anglican Church. Working alongside European executives of the United Africa Company—and treated with complete equality as a fellow professional—he represented the African businessman to Europeans set in a tradition of dominance and superiority that was only slowly beginning to realize the dimensions of the change on the horizon.

  To be able to do both—to take part in his country’s struggle for independence as a leading member of the UGCC and also maintain his professional commitment to a colonial company—required patience, a calm disposition, and an ability to see value and merit in different contexts. With British managers on one side and Ghanaian revolutionaries on the other, he had to be very careful to balance his values and his responsibilities without ever compromising his dignity. It made of him a disciplined man with little patience for weakness or cowardice.

  In this respect, my father was representative of a deeper cultural tradition of patience, negotiation, and reconciliation. For Ghanaians, the concept of the African palaver tree has always been a tangible part of our heritage, and a source of the relative peace and harmony among myriad tribes and religions. A place to meet and talk, to seek compromise and settle disputes, to bridge differences and foster unity—this was the meaning of the palaver tree. Of course, this tradition coexisted with centuries of warfare between the Ashanti and other tribes, when compromise was elusive and force deployed. More recently, in the first decades of the republic, a series of military coups that scarred the character of the country and set back its development demonstrated our capacity to fail our heritage.

  Nonetheless, the act of talking under the figurative palaver tree has resonance even today, in twenty-first-century Ghana. If you have a problem and you can’t find a solution, you meet again tomorrow and you keep talking until you find a solution. You can disagree with behavior or a particular position, but you do not resort to calling an opponent worthless. This notion extends to the relationship between traditional chiefs and their tribes, where there is accountability in the case of abuse or arrogance, including providing for the removal of chiefs who have lost the trust and respect of their people.

  —

  By the age of thirteen, when I went away to boarding school, I had been exposed to a wide range of events and influences that would form a foundation of confidence, tolerance, and discipline. From my father I learned that it was possible to keep an independent mind even at a historical crossroads as defining as the c
ountry’s independence, and that a critical perspective amid supposed certainties and absolutes was essential. He taught me that when others insisted that sides must be chosen, and that it had to be either/or, there was another way that was truer to the reality of a complex world. His own life had been defined by the coexistence of tribe and language, place and purpose—the mix of heritage and hope that could bring Africa a new beginning, with dignity at its core.

  I was a member of Ghana’s “independence class” of 1957 at my boarding school, Mfantsipim, in the city of Cape Coast, and to me and my peers, politics and the fate of our country were never far from our minds. If the greatest legacy of Mfantsipim was to bring together boys from every tribe and region of Ghana and to make of us all young citizens of the nascent state, the life of the school, nevertheless, reflected the broader division then playing out in our society between the more fiery nationalists and the gradualists, then known as the “democrats.”

  Ghana’s oldest school for boys, Mfantsipim was founded by Methodists, and though it followed a standard British curriculum, the school was already run by Africans. We wore khaki uniforms, shorts, but no tie, except on Sundays, when we also wore a white suit. Every morning we gathered for prayer in a stark hall; on Sundays prayers went on longer. Everything was spartan: small wooden desks, stone floors, bare walls, corrugated iron roofs. Stoicism was prized, along with learning and character.

  Much as our teachers tried to keep our focus on our studies, the struggle for independence seeped into every lesson, every discussion, every playground argument. A favorite pastime was role playing, mimicking the debates of our elders about the manner and timing of independence, with factions forming on each side of the argument. We even held mock parliamentary elections, and as “deputy leader of the opposition,” I argued the gradualist case in debates with fiery nationalists on the other side. I quickly earned the nickname “Annan-Domo” reflecting my allegiance with the democratic side, which, of course, was the position my father was very publicly identified with.