Shridath Ramphal – Remembering Sonny times

My first meeting with Sir Shridath ‘Sonny’ Ramphal, in 1984, in his elegant offices in Marlborough House, had been relaxed and enjoyable. His charm and his erudition were immediately apparent. But other elements of the selection process seemed to me far less successful, and I had concluded that my application to work in the Commonwealth Secretary-General’s private office was doomed to fail. I duly heaved all the papers I had accumulated on the appointment into the wastepaper bin and resolved to look elsewhere for my next job. Several weeks later I was both pleased but also considerably mystified to receive an official letter, on the Commonwealth Secretariat’s blue notepaper, appointing me as the Secretary-General’s Special Assistant.

While I remained in the grip of imposter syndrome for the early months of my new employment, there was no mistaking the excitement and exhilaration of working in close proximity to a figure who had already built a substantial international reputation as an advocate of the developing ‘south’ and for the causes of racial equality and global justice. It was nearly twenty years since the establishment of the Commonwealth Secretariat and nearly ten since Sonny had been elected the Commonwealth’s second Secretary-General at the 1975 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Kingston, Jamaica. Chaired by Michael Manley (and with representatives of Rhodesia’s liberation forces in the summit’s wings), the character of the Commonwealth had changed markedly, with a majority of its membership now drawn from recently independent nations in all parts of the world, outside the longstanding dominions of the ‘old Commonwealth’.

After the pioneering work of Arnold Smith to establish the Secretariat and its independence, it was Sonny who fashioned the organisation in a way that enabled it to make an international contribution to many of the global issues of the age, far beyond its size and modest resourcing. In 1977, after the Soweto rising of school students in South Africa the year before, Sonny used his first Commonwealth summit (and its Scottish retreat) to broker the Gleneagles Agreement extending the international boycott on apartheid sport. In 1979, with the incoming Conservative government in the UK, and its new prime minister Margaret Thatcher, poised to recognize Rhodesia’s ‘internal settlement’ and Bishop Abel Muzorewa’s flawed election, Ramphal helped to deflect that decision and instead bring the issue to the forefront of the Lusaka CHOGM. Thatcher’s initial suspicions of the Commonwealth were allayed by a charm offensive, led by Zambia’s president, Kenneth Kaunda, the summit’s host. She was quick to appreciate that, while a Rhodesian peace settlement, and independence, would be driven by the UK as the former colonial power, the Commonwealth could clear the way for the full involvement of the liberation forces in talks and for international support for the outcome.

Announcement of the death of Sir Shridath Ramphal (includes updated tributes and articles by and about Sonny Ramphal)
Sir Shridath Ramphal – A tribute by Richard Bourne (includes newspaper obituaries)

Both in the Commonwealth’s 1979 Lusaka Agreement and in the Lancaster House peace negotiations giving birth to an independent Zimbabwe, Sonny’s dynamic diplomatic method was increasingly evident. This was all the more extraordinary, given that the latter was a British-hosted conference to which the Commonwealth was not invited. And yet, the external influence of the Commonwealth, sometimes expressed through the intervention of individual Commonwealth leaders and sometimes through the collective impact of their High Commissioners in London, was crucial to its success.

I was shortly to witness a quickening and deepening of the Commonwealth’s campaign against apartheid (and sharp disagreements between the British government of Mrs Thatcher and the rest of the Commonwealth over sanctions), but this was not the only issue in Ramphal’s in-tray, even if it was the most notable. As well as his passionate activism, he also provided intellectual leadership to the Commonwealth, as a member of a series of international commissions such as the Brandt Commission on world poverty and the North/South divide (reports in 1980 and 1983), the Palme Commission on disarmament and security (1982) and, later, the Brundtland Commission on Environment and  Development (1987), as well as a host of Commonwealth Expert Groups, assembled by Ramphal. This underpinned early initiatives on international recognition for the special vulnerabilities of small states, and on tackling the crippling debt burden for developing nations. Within a year, I was to hear Ramphal urging sceptical Commonwealth Health Ministers to respond to the emerging menace of HIV/Aids, which, initially dismissed by some as a gay plague from the USA, was a decade later to ravage a number of countries in Africa and become a devastating global pandemic. Likewise, it was an Expert Group headed by British Scientist, Martin Holdgate, which in its 1989 report first urged the Commonwealth to highlight the existential threat of global warming and sea-level rise.

Early into his tenure, Ramphal confirmed his reputation as a superb speaker and gifted wordsmith. One of my first tasks was to research material for what we dubbed Sonny’s ‘Roots’ speech. In it, he spoke of his Indian great-grandmother who, after failing to commit suttee on her husband’s funeral pyre, and shunned by her family, travelled with her son from India to work as an indentured labourer on the sugar plantations of Demerara, in present-day Guyana. To my acute embarrassment as a Liberal Party activist, the particular plantation concerned, Vreed-en-Hoop, was owned by Sir John Gladstone, the father of the great reforming Liberal Prime Minister, William Gladstone. The family accumulated fabulous wealth from slavery and was one of the largest beneficiaries of compensation paid by the British government to slave owners on slavery’s abolition in 1833. Ramphal delivered a version of the speech one night at Lancing College, in its historic chapel. His oratory that evening was spellbinding as he recounted the impact of slavery on his family and its modern manifestation in the form of apartheid in South Africa. At the end of the lecture, a softly-spoken man introduced himself as a former Headmaster of Lancing College and asked me if I had assisted Sonny with his speech. When I said I had helped with the research, he gently revealed an additional fact that I had missed: that he was in fact Sir William Gladstone and a great-grandson of the former prime minister. His son, Charlie, and his family have now disavowed John Gladstone as ‘a vile man’, issued a public apology and are paying reparations to anti-slavery projects in Guyana. Perhaps a seed was planted that night in the telling of Sonny’s story?

Sonny’s fluency and his engaging manner were also particularly suited to television and radio. As a result, he gave the Commonwealth an image and a profile which stretched across the association and, in particular, caught the imagination of a generation of new leaders.

While for most of his tenure, and for all of Margaret’s Thatcher’s time as British Prime Minister, the two were characterized as implacable foes, this was not always the case. They worked constructively together on ending the Rhodesian rebellion and paving the way for Zimbabwe’s independence. Ramphal performed a significant service to the British government during the 1982 Falklands War in mustering widespread Commonwealth support for the UK position at the UN. The 1985/6 mission to South Africa of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group to seek a negotiated end to apartheid could not have achieved what it did without Thatcher’s behind-the-scenes lobbying of President Botha. As it was, the group secured unparalleled access to all shades of opinion in South Africa and in the region, met Nelson Mandela in prison on three occasions and produced a blueprint for negotiations which formed the basis of a settlement five years later. It was the most substantial diplomatic initiative ever mounted by the Commonwealth and helped establish the tripartite relationship between Mandela in his prison cell, the South African apartheid regime and the African National Congress in exile which became the conduit for peace negotiations culminating in Mandela’s freedom in February 1990.

However, it was Thatcher’s opposition to economic and financial sanctions which, in the latter part of the 1980s, saw the breakdown of the Commonwealth’s consensual decision-making on South Africa and a further souring of relations between Thatcher and Commonwealth leaders. This unhappy period – of the ‘binary Commonwealth’ – only ended with the start of John Major’s premiership in 1990.

For those of us who were fortunate to work in Marlborough House in Sonny’s time, whether directly involved or not, he gave us belief, purpose and ambition through his extraordinary leadership. On a personal level, he was never short of a kind word and a broad smile; and of course his parties (at which he often cooked and concocted copious quantities of rum punch) were legendary.

Stuart Mole is a former chair of the Round Table editorial board and previously served in the private office of three Commonwealth Secretaries-General. He was also Director-General of the Royal Commonwealth Society and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.