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KOFI ANNAN
Close to the end of his tenure, the Ghanaian diplomat and seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) is undoubtedly the most powerful black man in the world, rivalled only by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for impact.
Annan was born on April 8, 1938 to Victoria and Henry Reginald Annan in Kumasi, Ghana. His was an elite family; his uncles and both his grandfathers were tribal chiefs.
Annan attended the elite Mfantsipim School, a Methodist boarding school in Cape Coast founded in the 1870s. Annan has said that the school taught him “that suffering anywhere concerns people everywhere”.
In 1957, the year he graduated from Mfantsipim, Ghana became the first British colony in Sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence.
Following his undergraduate studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, US, in 1961, Annan, who is fluent in English, French, Kru, other dialects of Akan and several other African languages, started working as a budget officer for the World Health Organisation, an agency of the UN, in 1962.
After a brief stint as Ghanaian Tourism Director (1974 to 1976), he returned to work for the UN as an Assistant Secretary-General beginning his steady rise in the ranks until December 13, 1996, when he became Secretary-General.
Annan’s time at the UN has not been without controversy.
The 1994 Rwanda genocide happened on his watch as the then Undersecretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations. Ex-General Roméo Dallaire claims that Annan held back UN troops from intervening to settle the conflict and from providing more logistic and material support. In his book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, Dallaire claims Annan failed to provide any responses to Dallaire’s repeated faxes asking him for access to a weapons depository, which could have helped defend the Tutsis.
The 2003 Iraqi invasion also happened on Annan’s watch as did the Ruud Lubbers sexual harassment investigation.
NELSON MANDELA
There is not a political leader in the world who holds as high a standing in the opinion of most people than Nelson Mandela who, aged 75 on April 27, 1994, became South Africa’s oldest president.
Before his presidency he was a prominent anti-apartheid activist and leader of the African National Congress (ANC). He was tried and imprisoned for his involvement in underground armed resistance. The armed struggle was a last resort; he had previously remained steadfastly committed to non-violence.
Mandela’s 27-year imprisonment made him one of the most famous political prisoners in the world. Much of this time was spent in a cell on Robben Island.
Mandela was born to a Thembu family in the small village of Mvezo in the Mthatha district, capital of the Transkeian Territories of the Cape Province. His father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa, was a member of the royal council of the Thembu people, a position for which he was groomed from birth and which Mandela was also destined to inherit.
Mandela’s father was instrumental in the ascension to the Thembu throne of Jongintaba Dalindyebo, who would later return this favour by informally adopting Mandela upon Gadla’s death.
Mandela’s father had four wives, with whom he fathered a total of 13 children (four boys and nine girls). Mandela was born to Gadla’s third wife, Fanny Noseken.
His original name, Rolihlahla, means one who brings trouble to himself.
Aged seven, Mandela became the first member of his family to attend school, where a Methodist teacher gave him the name Nelson, after the British admiral, Horatio Nelson.
His father died of tuberculosis when Mandela was nine, and the regent Jongintaba became his guardian.
Mandela attended a Wesleyan mission school next door to the palace of the regent. Following Thembu custom, he was initiated at age 16, and attended Clarkebury Boarding Institute, where he learned about Western culture. He completed his Junior Certificate in two years, instead of the usual three.
On August 5, 1962, he was arrested after living on the run for 17 months and was imprisoned in the Johannesburg Fort for his anti-apartheid activities as the leader of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe.
It was during his trial on April 20, 1964 at Pretoria Supreme Court that Mandela made the defence speech that possibly turned the tide of the world in favour of ANC which up to then had been largely viewed as a terrorist organisation.
“During my lifetime,” he said, “I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island, where he was destined to remain for the next 18 of his 27 years in prison until the day of his release — February 11, 1990.
South Africa’s first democratic elections were held on April 27, 1994. The ANC won the majority in the election, and Mandela, as leader of the ANC, was inaugurated as the country’s first black president. He has been married three times. On his 80th birthday, he married Graça Machel, widow of Samora Machel, the former Mozambican president and ANC ally killed in an air crash 12 years earlier.
Wangari Muta Maathai
Born April 1, 1940 in Nyeri, she is a Kenyan environmental and political activist and one of the most accomplished and formidable women in the world. In 2004, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace”.
She was the first African woman to receive the award.
Maathai is also an elected Member of Parliament and served as Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources between January 2003 and November 2005. After finishing school in Kenya, Maathai studied Biology in the US and Germany.
She received her Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Mount St. Scholastica (now Benedictine College) in 1964, and her Master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh, before returning to Nairobi, where, at the University of Nairobi, she earned the first PhD awarded to an Eastern African woman (in veterinary medicine).
In 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots environmental non-governmental organisation, which has now planted over 30 million trees across the country to prevent soil erosion. She has since come to be affectionately called “Tree Woman”.
During the regime of President Daniel arap Moi, she was imprisoned several times and violently attacked for demanding multi-party elections and an end to political corruption and tribal politics.
In 1989, Maathai almost single-handedly saved Nairobi’s Uhuru Park by stopping the construction of the 60-storey Kenya Times Media Trust business complex by Moi’s business associates.
In 2002, Maathai was elected to Parliament when the National Rainbow Coalition, which she represented, defeated the ruling party Kenya African National Union. She founded the Mazingira Green Party of Kenya in 2003.
On March 28, 2005, she was elected the first president of the African Union’s Economic, Social and Cultural Council.
In 2006 she was one of the eight flag bearers at the 2006 Winter Olympics opening ceremony. Also on May 21, 2006 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Connecticut College, where she gave the commencement address.
ALI MAZRUI
For many Ugandans with a TV, Mazrui is that white shock-haired guy who presented The Africans, a series on the passage of Africans from their beginning into the present world; a brilliant programme from a brilliant man whose achievements have been astonishing since he was born in Mombasa, Kenya, on February 24, 1933.
Mazrui, who is married and has five sons, obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction from Manchester University in England, his Master’s from Columbia University in New York, and his doctorate from Oxford University in England.
For 10 years he was at Makerere University, Kampala, where he served as head of the Department of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and from where he launched a professorial career that has seen him lecture in five continents.
Mazrui has also served as Special Adviser to the World Bank as well as on the Board of Directors of the American Muslim Council, Washington, DC, Islamic culture and the influence of Islam being one of his chief research interests.
He is also chairman of the Board of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Washington, DC, he is on the Board of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University in Washington DC, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Governance and Social Research, Jos, Nigeria.
He is currently an Albert Schweitzer professor in the humanities and director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is also Albert Luthuli Professor-at-Large in the Humanities and Development Studies at the University of Jos in Nigeria. Mazrui has more than 20 published books to his name.
DAVID RUBADIRI
A Malawian poet and novelist, he was born in Liule in Malawi and educated at Makerere University College, Uganda and later at King’s College, Cambridge. After serving as Malawi’s first ambassador to the US and the UN, he broke with the Kamuzu Banda regime and left the country to return to the academic world, where he remains.
He served as Professor of Education at the University of Botswana until Banda fell from power, whereupon he was reappointed Malawi’s ambassador to the UN.
Rubadiri’s only novel, No Bride Price (1967), reflects his early disenchantment with Banda’s post-independence style. It was well received and, with Legson Kayira’s work, was among the first Malawian novels to be published.
He also wrote a play, Come to Tea (1965), which was published in New African. He is best known, however, as a poet, and his work appeared in international journals such as Transition, Black Orpheus, and Présence Africaine, as well as Gerald Moore’s and Ulli Beier’s pioneering anthology Modern Poetry from Africa (1963), at a time when much African verse in English was still imitating Western models. Passionate about the place of African literature in the continent’s school and college syllabi, he emphasises the importance of suitable teaching texts. Thus he edited Poems from East Africa (1971) with David Cook and Growing Up With Poetry: An Anthology for Secondary Schools (1989) for Botswanan students.
Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa
Born November 17, 1952, he is a South African lawyer, trade union leader, activist, politician and businessman. He was born in Soweto, near Johannesburg. While Ramaphosa was previously a major figure in South African national politics, he has in recent years become a prominent figure in the business community.
Widely respected as a skilful and formidable negotiator and strategist, Ramaphosa is best known for building up the biggest and most powerful trade union in South Africa — the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) — as well as for the crucial role he played, with Roelf Meyer of the National Party, during the negotiations to bring about a peaceful end to apartheid and steer the country towards its first democratic elections in April 1994.
He is married to Dr. Tshepo Motsepe and they have four children.
Ramaphosa studied law at the University of the North (Turfloop) in 1972. It was while at university that Ramaphosa became involved in student politics and joined the South African Students Organisation and the Black People’s Convention. This resulted in his arrest. He was held in solitary confinement for 11 months in 1974. In 1976 he was detained for a second time, and held for six months. After his release, he became a law clerk for a Johannesburg firm of attorneys and continued his studies through the University of South Africa, where he obtained his B. Proc. Degree in 1981.
After obtaining his degree, Ramaphosa joined the Council of Unions of South Africa (CUSA) as a legal adviser. In 1982, CUSA requested that Ramaphosa start a union for mineworkers; this new union was launched in the same year and was named NUM. Under his leadership, union membership grew from 6,000 in 1982 to 300,000 in 1992, giving it control of nearly half of the total black workforce in the South African mining industry.
As General Secretary, he also led the mineworkers in one of the biggest strikes ever in South African history. Subsequent to his election as Secretary General of the ANC in 1991, he became head of the ANC team that negotiated the end of apartheid with the National Party government. Following the first fully democratic elections in 1994, Ramaphosa became a member of parliament; he was elected the chairperson of its Constitutional Assembly on May 24, 1994 and played a central role in the government of national unity.
After he lost the race to become President of South Africa to Thabo Mbeki, he resigned from his political positions in January 1997 and moved to the private sector. However, he remains a National Executive Member of the ANC.
The media continually speculates on Ramaphosa joining the race for the presidency of the ANC in 2006, before the 2009 South African Presidential Elections and with Jacob Zuma almost out of the race, this possibility gains more credence everyday.
However, he has stated that he is not interested in the presidency.
In 2004, he was voted 34th in the top 100 great South Africans.
Desmond Mpilo Tutu
Born October 7, 1931, he is a South African cleric and activist who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid. Tutu was elected and ordained the first black South African Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, and primate of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa, South Africa’s church body comprising the worldwide Anglican Communion. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
He was generally credited with coining the term Rainbow Nation as a metaphor to describe post-apartheidist South Africa after 1994 under ANC rule. The expression has since entered mainstream consciousness to describe South Africa’s ethnic diversity.
Born in Klerksdorp, Transvaal, Tutu moved with his family to Johannesburg at age 12. Although he wanted to become a physician, his family could not afford the training and he followed his father’s footsteps into teaching before he decided to do further studies in theology. In 1960 he was ordained as an Anglican priest. He became chaplain at the University of Fort Hare, a hotbed of dissent and one of the few quality universities for black students in the southern part of Africa, the real beginning of dissident activities.
After returning to South Africa in 1975 Tutu was appointed Anglican Dean of Johannesburg — the first black person to hold that position. Hardly a year had passed when Tutu was enmeshed in the anti-apartheid struggle.
On October 16, 1984, Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee cited his “role as a unifying leader figure in the campaign to resolve the problem of apartheid in South Africa”.
But his achievements were hardly over. Tutu became the first black person to lead the Anglican Church in South Africa on September 7, 1986. In 1989, Tutu was invited to Birmingham, England, as part of Citywide Christian Celebrations. Tutu and his wife Leah Nomalizo Tutu, to whom he has been married since 1955, visited a number of establishments including Nelson Mandela School in Sparkbrook. They have four children.
After the fall of apartheid, he headed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for which he was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in 1999.
While he is widely loved by many people, Tutu has never shied away from expressing opinions that might cost him his popularity. For example Tutu believes the treatment of Palestinians by the Jewish state of Israel is a form of apartheid. He has repeatedly called upon the Israeli government to respect the human dignity of the Palestinian people, whether Muslim or Christian. Tutu has also urged divestment from Israel in protest at its policies towards the Palestinians.
Tutu has also criticised human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, calling Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe a “caricature of an African dictator”, and criticising the South African government’s policy of quiet diplomacy towards Zimbabwe.
Commenting days after the August 5, 2003 election of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man to be a bishop in the Episcopal Church in the US, Tutu said, “In our Church here in South Africa, that doesn’t make a difference. We just say that at the moment, we believe that they should remain celibate and we don’t see what the fuss is about.”
Ever one to speak his mind, on April 20, 2005, following the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, Tutu said he was sad that the Roman Catholic Church was unlikely to change its opposition to condoms in the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa.
YOWERI MUSEVENI
President of the republic of Uganda since January 29 1986 when he stormed to power on the crest of a popular five year guerilla war, President Yoweri Museveni’s 20 years at the helm have seen him become one of the most powerful men on the African continent as he radically transforms Uganda.
A true king maker in the East African region. Former comrade President Paul Kagame ascending to the highest post in Rwanda after serving under President Museveni. With the active support of President Yoweri Museveni, Laurent Kabila was able to finally kick the ageing Mobutu Sese Seko though Uganda would later bitterly fall out with Kabila.
Museveni, however, is most respected for transforming a country torn by civil war and political instability into one of the countries with the fastest growing economy. He is also regarded as one of the contenders for the best president Uganda has ever had as during his rule much of Uganda apart from the north has been relatively peaceful.
But Museveni’s stature extends beyond the continent. He is widely lauded as having led one of the best nationally coordinated responses to the threat of HIV/AIDS at a time when it was still taboo to talk about the debilitating disease. Museveni was once lauded as part of a “new generation of African leaders.”
Edmund Daukoru
He is the president of the Oil Petroleum Exporting Countries as well as Nigeria’s Minister of State for Petroleum Resources since July 2005.
Daukoru is the man in charge of overseeing Nigeria’s day-to-day running of the petroleum sector. The post had not been filled since 1999 because as President Olusegun Obasanjo explained at his nomination, “everybody” had considered this as a “lucrative” post and had wanted to have it.
A geologist in his 50s, Daukoru developed his career with Shell. He held the post of Nigerian National Petroleum Company group managing director from 1992 to 1993. He was chosen to the ministerial post because of his tribal background — to placate the restive Ijaw people in the Niger Delta. Daukoru is from the oil-rich delta state of Bayelsa, which is the country’s third largest oil producing region next to the states of Delta and Rivers.
He was born on October 13, 1943 in Nembe Bayelsa State, Nigeria. After obtaining a PhD in geology, he began his career as Team Geologist with Shell and rose to General Manager of Exploration. He held various posts at Shell International Petroleum in Holland, Ireland, Italy, Spain, France, Switzerland and Tunisia.
TIGER WOODS
Considered one of the most charismatic figures in golf’s history, Tiger Woods is one of the most accomplished sportsmen the world has ever seen. He is also one of the highest paid professional athletes, earning an estimated $87m in 2005 alone.
Born December 30, 1975 in Cypress, California, Woods was a child prodigy who began to play golf at the age of two. Competing with children older than he was, in 1984, he won the 9-10 boys’ event at the Junior World Golf Championships although he was only eight years old at the time. The 9–10 was the youngest age group available.
Woods went on to win the Junior World Championships six times, including four consecutive wins from 1988 to 1991.
Woods won the US Junior Amateur title in 1991, 1992, and 1993; he remains the event’s youngest-ever and only multiple winner. He then won three consecutive US Amateur titles over the next three years, the only person to achieve this feat. He was a member of the American team at the 1994 World Amateur Golf Team Championships.
With his first US Amateur win in 1994, he became the youngest player ever to win that event. In 1994, he enrolled at Stanford University where he stayed two years, winning one NCAA individual golf championship. His teammates jokingly nicknamed him “Urkel”, a reference to the nerd character Steve Urkel from the 1990s sitcom Family Matters. He left college after two years to become a professional golfer.
Woods became a professional golfer in August 1996, playing his first round of professional golf at the Greater Milwaukee Open. Woods tied for 60th place in his pro debut, but he would go on to win two events in the next three months, and was named 1996’s “Sportsman of the Year” by Sports Illustrated. He was also named PGA Rookie of the Year by the PGA Tour, and is the only golfer to win PGA Player of the Year in the year following his rookie season. The following April, Woods won his first golf major, the Masters, by a record margin of 12 strokes, and in the process set 20 Masters records and tied 6 others. On June 15, 1997, Woods rose to the number one spot in the Official World Golf Rankings for the first time.
/ELLEN JOHNSON-SIRLEAF
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is the world’s first black female President, elected November 23, 2005 to lead Liberia and also the first female African President. Often referred to as the Iron Lady, Johnson-Sirleaf beat popular footballer George Weah to win the hotly contested presidential campaigns that threatened to throw Liberia into a fresh spate of civil war after the forced departure of ex-President Charles Taylor.
Born October 29, 1938, Johnson-Sirleaf is a BBA in Accounting graduate who plunged into politics after acquiring her Masters in Public Administration from Harvard beginning as Assistant Minister of Finance in President William Tolbert’s administration. She was however soon on the wrong side of the new President, Samuel Doe, who had overthrown and brutally murdered Tolbert, a fate he would share. After serving a short part of her 10-year jail sentence for questioning Doe, she fled to Washington DC and would not return to Liberia until 1997 when she ran against then President Charles Taylor. She lost that election but began to lay the groundwork that would see her ascend to the highest post in the land when Taylor was forced out of Liberia.
OPRAH WINFREY
Born January 29, 1954, Oprah Winfrey is one of the most recognised faces on the planet. She wields enormous influence through her multiple-Emmy Award winning show and her various media interests that include magazines, film companies and charity organisations. Oprah’s show is the highest rated talk show in television history. Through her show, she is also an influential book critic. She is an Academy Award-nominated actress most famously for her role in the film The Color Purple. According to Forbes magazine, she was the richest African American of the 20th century and the world’s only black billionaire for three straight years. Life magazine has ranked her as the most influential woman of her generation and Time magazine has ranked her as one of only four people in history to have shaped both the 20th century and the early 21st.
Hers has been a near unbelievable rise to the top tier in the world for a girl who was molested by her cousin, uncle, and a family friend. The daughter of Vernita Lee, a housemaid, and Vernon Winfrey, a coal miner, Oprah was born in extreme poverty and should not have made it. But she did, willed to greatness by a steely resolve. After brief teenage acting up which involved running away from home and living on the streets, her frustrated mother sent her to live with her strict but understanding father whom she had separated from and from then on, Oprah was determined to be “somebody in the world” after seeing her own father rise from being a coal miner to barber to city councilman.
Her media career began at age 17, when Winfrey worked at a local radio station while attending Tennessee State University. Working in local media, she was both the youngest news anchor and the first black female news anchor at Nashville’s WLAC-TV. In 1983, Winfrey relocated to Chicago to host WLS-TV’s low-rated half-hour morning talk-show, AM Chicago. The first episode aired on January 2, 1984. Within months after Winfrey took over, the show went from last place in the ratings to overtaking Donahue as the highest rated talk show in Chicago. It was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show, expanded to a full hour, and broadcast nationally beginning September 8, 1986. Its first show was about marrying the right person. With this, the legend of Oprah was fully on its way to making her one of the most important people in the world.
Published on: Saturday, 18th November, 2006
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