Kofi Annan
1938 – 2018 · Ghana
Known for: Seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations and Nobel Peace laureate of 2001
“Suffering anywhere concerns people everywhere.”
Biography
Kofi Annan was born on 8 April 1938 in Kumasi, in what was then the Gold Coast, into a Fante family in which both grandfathers and an uncle had been paramount chiefs. His names carry their own record: Kofi is the Akan name given to a boy born on a Friday, and Annan marks a fourth born child. From 1954 to 1957 he boarded at Mfantsipim, the Methodist school in Cape Coast, and said later that it taught him that suffering anywhere concerns people everywhere. In the year he finished, the Gold Coast became independent Ghana. He began studying economics in Kumasi, completed the degree at Macalester College in Minnesota in 1961 on a Ford Foundation grant, and went on to the graduate institute in Geneva.
His working life belonged almost entirely to the United Nations. He joined in 1962 as a budget officer at the World Health Organization in Geneva and rose through personnel, budget and administration to a directorship in the Secretariat in New York in 1983. In 1993 he took charge of peacekeeping, in the years of Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia, and afterwards spoke plainly about what the organisation had failed to do; of Rwanda he said in 2004 that he could and should have done more to sound the alarm and rally support. In December 1996 the Security Council appointed him Secretary-General and he served two terms, from 1997 to 2006. He reformed the bureaucracy, put the fight against HIV and AIDS at the centre of the organisation's work in Africa, and pressed the member states to accept that sovereignty carries a duty to protect. In 2001 he and the United Nations were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together.
He did not retire into silence. In 2007 he founded the Kofi Annan Foundation and took the chair of The Elders, the group of former leaders assembled by Nelson Mandela. Early in 2008 he led the mediation that ended the violence after the disputed Kenyan election, keeping the two sides at the table until they agreed to share power. In 2012 he served as joint special envoy of the United Nations and the Arab League for Syria and resigned after months of frustration at the absence of progress. In 2016 he agreed to lead a commission on the crisis in Rakhine State in Myanmar. Kofi Annan died on 18 August 2018 at the age of eighty, and Ghana buried him with a state funeral. He is remembered as a diplomat with a quiet voice who used it for people who had no one to speak for them.