Kofi Annan

Kofi Atta Annan was born on April 8, 1938, in Kumasi, then part of the British colony of the Gold Coast and today Ghana's second largest city ^[1]. He and his twin sister Efua Atta arrived into a prominent Fante family: both of his grandfathers and an uncle held chieftaincy titles, and his father, Henry Reginald Annan, worked as an export manager for a Lever Brothers subsidiary and later served as a provincial governor ^[2]. The name Kofi marks a boy born on Friday in the Akan naming tradition.

Annan attended Mfantsipim, the Methodist boarding school in Cape Coast founded in 1876, where he later said he learned that suffering anywhere concerns people everywhere ^[2]. He finished school in 1957, the same year Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African colony to win independence, a coincidence he often cited as formative. Watching Kwame Nkrumah's new nation take shape convinced the young Annan that great change was possible, even against long odds.

He began studying economics at the Kumasi College of Science and Technology, now the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. A Ford Foundation grant then carried him to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he completed a bachelor's degree in economics in 1961 ^[1]. Graduate work followed at the Institut de hautes études internationales in Geneva, and in 1972 he earned a Master of Science in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Sloan Fellow ^[3].

Annan joined the United Nations in 1962 as a budget officer with the World Health Organization in Geneva, an entry-level post that began an association lasting more than four decades ^[1]. His early career moved through UN offices in Addis Ababa, Cairo, and New York, with assignments at the Economic Commission for Africa and the UN Emergency Force in Ismailia. Between 1974 and 1976 he briefly left the organization to serve as managing director of the Ghana Tourist Development Company ^[3].

Back inside the UN, he climbed steadily through administrative posts covering personnel, budget, and refugee affairs. In 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar sent Annan to negotiate the release of Western hostages and the repatriation of thousands of stranded international staff, one of his first high-profile diplomatic tests ^[2].

In March 1993 Boutros Boutros-Ghali appointed him Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, placing him in charge of missions during the most turbulent period in their history ^[1]. The department he ran oversaw operations in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. The failures of that era marked him deeply. UN peacekeepers under his department's purview were present but unable to stop the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica occurred in a UN-declared safe area. Annan later accepted a share of institutional responsibility for both catastrophes, and independent inquiries he commissioned as Secretary-General criticized the UN's conduct, including decisions taken while he led peacekeeping ^[4]. In late 1995 and 1996 he also served as special envoy to the former Yugoslavia, helping manage the transition from UN forces to the NATO-led implementation force after the Dayton accords ^[3].

When the United States blocked a second term for Boutros-Ghali, the Security Council turned to Annan, and on January 1, 1997, he became the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations: the first from sub-Saharan Africa and the first promoted from within the organization's own ranks ^[1]. He arrived with a mandate to reform a body widely criticized as bloated and adrift, and within months he presented a restructuring package that consolidated departments and created the post of Deputy Secretary-General ^[3].

His first term produced results that few had predicted. In 1998 he traveled to Baghdad and negotiated directly with Saddam Hussein to restore access for UN weapons inspectors, briefly defusing a crisis that had brought the United States close to military action ^[2]. In 2000 he issued the report that framed the Millennium Summit, where world leaders adopted the Millennium Development Goals, a set of measurable targets on poverty, health, and education with a 2015 deadline ^[5]. He also pressed wealthy governments and pharmaceutical companies on HIV and AIDS, and his 2001 call for a global fund helped lead to the creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria ^[5].

In 2001 the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize jointly to Annan and the United Nations, citing their work for a better organized and more peaceful world, and the Security Council appointed him to a second term six months early ^[6]. The second term proved harder. He opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, telling the BBC in September 2004 that in his view the war was illegal under the UN Charter, a statement that strained relations with Washington ^[4]. The Oil-for-Food scandal then engulfed the organization: the Volcker inquiry found extensive corruption in the Iraq program and criticized the Secretary-General's management oversight, though it did not find that Annan had improperly influenced a contract awarded to a company that employed his son Kojo ^[4]. Through it all he championed the doctrine that sovereignty cannot shield governments that slaughter their own people, and the 2005 World Summit endorsed the principle known as the responsibility to protect ^[5].

Annan married Titi Alakija, a Nigerian, in 1965, and the couple had a daughter, Ama, and a son, Kojo, before separating in the late 1970s and later divorcing ^[2]. In 1984 he married Nane Lagergren, a Swedish lawyer and artist then working at the UN, whose uncle was Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Second World War. Nane's daughter Nina from a previous marriage completed the family ^[3].

Colleagues consistently described Annan as soft-spoken, unhurried, and difficult to rattle, a negotiator who preferred quiet persuasion to public confrontation. He spoke English, French, and several African languages, and kept ties to Ghana throughout his life, returning often and receiving a hero's welcome after the Nobel award ^[2]. Away from work he enjoyed jazz, and friends noted his fondness for the music of his student years in Minnesota.

Annan left office on December 31, 2006, succeeded by Ban Ki-moon, and moved back to Geneva. In 2007 he founded the Kofi Annan Foundation, dedicated to peace, democracy, and fair elections, and joined The Elders, the group of former leaders convened by Nelson Mandela; he chaired it from 2013 until his death ^[7]. He also chaired the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, pushing for improved seeds and markets for smallholder farmers ^[3].

His diplomatic skills remained in demand. After Kenya's disputed December 2007 election set off ethnic violence that killed more than 1,000 people, Annan led the African Union mediation that produced a power-sharing agreement between Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga in February 2008, an intervention widely credited with pulling the country back from civil war ^[7]. In February 2012 the UN and the Arab League named him joint special envoy for the Syrian conflict. He produced a six-point peace plan, but with the battlefield hardening and the Security Council divided, he resigned that August, openly frustrated by what he called finger-pointing among the major powers ^[4].

His final major assignment came in 2016, when Myanmar's government asked him to chair an advisory commission on Rakhine State. The commission's report, delivered in August 2017, recommended citizenship reform and development for the Rohingya minority; a massive military crackdown began within days of its release ^[7]. Annan died in Bern, Switzerland, on August 18, 2018, after a short illness, at the age of 80. Ghana declared a week of national mourning, and he was buried in Accra after a state funeral attended by leaders from across the world ^[8].

Assessments of Annan's decade at the UN's helm usually balance two ledgers. On one side sit the Millennium Development Goals, the Global Fund, the responsibility to protect, and a revival of the organization's moral voice after the drift of the 1990s ^[5]. On the other sit Rwanda, Srebrenica, the Oil-for-Food scandal, and the limits of a Secretary-General's real power when the Security Council's permanent members disagree ^[4]. Anyone asking who was Kofi Annan encounters both records, and Annan himself acknowledged the failures more candidly than most officials of his rank.

Among Kofi Annan facts often repeated at his death: he was the first Black African to hold the post, the first to rise from the UN's own staff, and, in the words of the Nobel Committee and many obituarists, the diplomat who had done more than perhaps anyone to give the organization renewed credibility at the turn of the century ^[6]. Successors continue to work within structures he shaped, from the Human Rights Council and the Peacebuilding Commission proposed in his 2005 reform agenda to the development-goal framework that evolved into the Sustainable Development Goals ^[5].

Any Kofi Annan biography ultimately returns to the schoolboy from Kumasi who watched his country claim independence and concluded that institutions, patiently built and honestly led, could bend history. The foundation bearing his name still works on elections and youth leadership, and the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra trains peacekeepers from across Africa, carrying his name into the field where his hardest lessons were learned ^[7].