The central focus of the long international career of Sonny (Shridath) Ramphal, who has died aged 95, was undoubtedly his time as secretary general of the Commonwealth. It was in this period, from 1975 to 1990, that the reputation of the Commonwealth as a proactive postcolonial institution that could play a mediating role between developed and developing world was formed.
This was particularly due to the central part Ramphal played in helping to broker the decolonisation of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe in 1980, and in furthering the ending of apartheid in South Africa 10 years later.
His reputation was also founded on his vision concerning fraught regional integration in the Caribbean, and in trying to forge an equitable relationship between the enlarged European Community and developing countries in the early 1970s.
When Ramphal went to Marlborough House, the Commonwealth secretariat’s London headquarters, in 1975, the intractable Rhodesia crisis, which had for years seriously bedevilled Britain’s relations with the Commonwealth, was coming to an end.
The Labour government was fairly Commonwealth-minded, although the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had been seriously burned by the Rhodesia affair. But the foreign secretaries James Callaghan and David Owen, appointed to the post after Anthony Crosland’s death brought his brief tenure to a close in 1977, were easy to work with, even if their efforts to cut the Gordian knot were a failure.
Paradoxically it was Margaret Thatcher, seemingly prejudiced on southern Africa in favour of the white minority, whose government from 1979 onwards saw the matter through, producing, probably to her own surprise, a black government under Robert Mugabe in 1980. But in the diplomacy of the Lusaka Commonwealth heads of government meeting, the Lancaster House Conference and after, Ramphal was consistently there, working for the solution he was seeking in favour of the African majority.
It meant that he was seriously unloved in the upper echelons of the British government, but this was a burden he bore with equanimity. It came with the territory. In the course of helping push through the settlement, he both earned an enormous reputation in the developing Commonwealth, and built up the position of secretary general as pro-active and dynamic, much more than a mere bureaucrat.
This was a spirit with which he was able to infuse his team and came to be used to great advantage in the 80s, when the Commonwealth took on the monster of apartheid, and played a significant role in its demise.
This also meant taking on Thatcher, especially at the 1985 heads of government meeting at Nassau, where she made the small concession of allowing an eminent persons group to visit South Africa the following year. They were the first outsiders to meet Nelson Mandela and set out a negotiating position for both sides.
Members of his team confirm both Ramphal’s commitment to the cause of the struggle “armed and otherwise”, and the vitriol that was fed against him to the British media. One paper accused him of “creeping over the walls of Buckingham Palace to give the Queen, head of the Commonwealth, poisonous advice on the issues at stake”.
He did have good friends in the media, such as the Guardian’s Patrick Keatley, at whose memorial service in 2005 Ramphal paid heartfelt tribute to the journalist’s belief in the Commonwealth.
Obviously many forces were at work in South Africa, but the psychological role of the Commonwealth under the guidance of motivated heads of government, and spurred on by Ramphal and the secretariat, made these the glory years for the organisation. It was fitting that he should still have been in office when finally a light appeared at the end of the tunnel, and Mandela was released early in 1990.
Sonny was born in New Amsterdam in what was then British Guiana, now Guyana, a descendant of indentured Indian labourers who had arrived there in the 1880s. He was the eldest of five children of Grace and Jimmy Ramphal, a pioneer of secondary education in the colony, who later became the first Guyanese person to be appointed to a government post when he was made a commissioner in the department of labour soon after the outbreak of the second world war.
After attending a private school founded by his father in Georgetown, and secondary education in the capital, Sonny went to London University in the late 40s to study law at King’s College, being called to the bar in 1951.
Filled with the idealism of the postwar generation of new West Indian graduates, wise to the changes taking place in the colonies and to the potential of integration in the Caribbean, Ramphal returned home in 1952 to work for government, and two years later found himself drawn to the secretariat of the new West Indies Federation, which he went on to serve as a legal draughtsman (1956-59), and then, after two years as British Guiana’s solicitor general, as the West Indies’ assistant attorney general.
He had done a master’s dissertation on the subject when he was in London, and was always committed to the federal cause. He said later: “I have been a West Indian from the first moments of my rational awakening.”
With the collapse of the short-lived federation in 1962 he took a Guggenheim fellowship at Harvard in 1962-63, and then tried law practice in Jamaica. But the prospect of independence of his homeland encouraged him to take the risk of joining the government of Forbes Burnham as attorney general. It was a period not without travail. The wily Burnham had made severe compromises in his bid to achieve and stay in power, had been involved in bringing down the Indian-dominated government of Cheddi Jagan in 1964.
The appointment in 1965 of Ramphal, known to be a genuine nationalist, showed Burnham’s efforts to engineer reconciliation before the colony became independent as Guyana in 1966. However, Ramphal was not without criticism in the Indian community, for he had never been an elected grassroots politician, and was always more of a visionary technocrat.
Independence, and the offer to take charge of the new ministry of foreign affairs, gave him the chance he needed to distance himself from the hornet’s nest of Guyanese politics, and carve a role on the international stage.
Burnham had grand ambitions, which took him enthusiastically into the Non-aligned Movement and the Group of 77, the developing countries at the United Nations, but it was nearer home that Ramphal first made his mark. As what Eric Williams, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, called a “labourer in the vineyard” of Caribbean integration, Ramphal was one of the prime movers in the establishment of the Caribbean Free Trade Area in 1968, and then, five years later, the emergence of the Caribbean Community and Common Market (Caricom).
This creative diplomacy, for which he always had Burnham’s unstinted backing, saw him at the centre of an even more remarkable initiative, the piecing together of the coalition which became the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group.
This had come about because British entry to the EEC in 1973 had left many Commonwealth countries in danger of severe losses from the ending of Commonwealth preferences and the Sugar Agreement, of direct importance to a sugar-producing country like Guyana.
An opening had been left to the affected countries in Britain’s treaty of accession, but it was left to diplomats such as Ramphal to combine with the Africans to put together a united front to negotiate terms with the EEC.
It was his own initiative to convene ministers in Georgetown in 1975 to formally constitute the ACP group, with a secretariat in Brussels. And he was deeply involved in the 18 months of talks to put together the Lomé Convention of February 1975, a trade and aid package that at the time seen as a model, somewhat imperfect, for developed-developing country relations. Not quite the new international economic order, but a start, was how he felt.
It was also a platform on which to mobilise support for his candidacy for the plum position that became available that year, the replacement of Arnold Smith as Commonwealth secretary general. The support of Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, was influential, but as a Caribbean of Asian origin, with strong African and Pacific support from the Lomé days, he had all the constituencies covered and was selected unopposed at the heads of government meeting in Kingston, Jamaica. This was truly a “third world” takeover of an august institution.
The next few years after his departure from the post saw him as active as ever, taking on the chairmanship of the West Indies Commission charged with plotting the course for the region in the 90s, and he was appointed by Caricom as their chief international negotiator.
His status as an international statesman had been established by his membership of the independent commission chaired by Willy Brandt; he was a major contributor to Brandt’s 1980 report, North-South: A Programme for Survival.
The report’s ideas were ahead of its time, and was temporarily blocked by the ideology of the 80s, but this did not stop his participation in other great initiatives of the 80s, such as Olof Palme on disarmament and security (with a report in 1982) and Gro Harlem Brundtland on sustainable development (with a report in 1987).
Ramphal continued to articulate the multilateralism that Brundtland preached through institutions such as the Commission on Global Governance, of which he was joint chairman (1992-2000). Knighted in 70s, at various times he was chancellor of the universities of Guyana, Warwick and the West Indies.
His genial, outgoing personality was allied to great intellectual capacity, and a genuine global vision. A memoir, Glimpses of a Global Life, came in 2014, and outstanding among his other books are a collection of speeches, One World to Share (1979); the selected reflections of Inseparable Humanity (1988); and a later collection of speeches, An End to Otherness (1990).
In 1951 he married Lois King, whom he had met in London when he was a student and she was a nurse. She died in 2019, and he is survived by their two sons and two daughters.
• Shridath Surendranath Ramphal, diplomat and lawyer, born 3 October 1928; died 30 August 2024
• This obituary has been updated since Kaye Whiteman’s death in 2014
