In the 1970s and 1980s Paul Boateng was a prominent figure in Britain’s tumultuous era of political and racial struggle. He was wiry and animated, the firm set of his mouth and chin a hallmark of his articulate, legally trained passion for social justice, especially in the black cause.
He appeared everywhere — on television, on radio, in public debates, at the forefront of mass marches for social justice, on the platforms of the sometimes rowdy “Rock Against Racism” events that brought together a new generation of punk rock musicians dedicated to overthrowing the accepted social order, and among leveller heads working steadily to bring change to a divided, post-imperial society that was not yet ready to give up the ghost.
There were many interlinked causes in post-1960s Britain. On the grand scale, there was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a post-World War II movement with left leanings.
There was the battle against not-quite-institutionalised racism in British public life, which meant that the foremost institutions that underpinned the country’s social, political and economic existence effectively excluded the millions of its citizens who were born in the former colonies, or were descended from the waves of African, Indian and Caribbean immigrants of the 1950s. In other words: non-whites in a country that perceived itself as historically white.
On a less exalted scale, there were the campaigns to bring justice to the thousands of young black Britons arrested, often on charges trumped up by a blatantly racist police force, during riots in the black inner cities of Brixton, Southall and Walthamstow in London, Toxteth in Bristol, and the mixed slums of Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, among others.
Then there was the battle against South African apartheid — at that time not yet a fashionable cause with Nelson Mandela as its figurehead.
Boateng was a prolific public figure in all of these. He officially cut his political teeth when he joined the Labour Party as a 15-year-old in 1966. He survived the vicissitudes of a high-profile life in politics to become one of the first black MPs as part of the Labour opposition in the post-Thatcherite years of Tory rule in the late 1980s, and ended up as one of the most important figures in Tony Blair’s New Labour governments of the 1990s and onwards. In 1999 he was appointed to Her Majesty’s Privy Council (an archaic institution that allowed him to add “Right Honourable” to his name but didn’t give him much personal power as it would have done in the days of Henry VIII — “Off with his head”, and so on. Besides, Britain had abolished the death penalty by then).
He had greater power as a member of Blair’s Cabinet — Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Health Department, and later Deputy Home Secretary. From there he served as Financial Secretary to the Treasury — a position that gave him control of the purse strings of the realm, second in command only to the chancellor of the exchequer who in turn was second in command only to the prime minister.
Boateng would have seemed to have reached the pinnacle of power in a political landscape that he had done so much to transform — creating what he calls “a remarkably successful multi-racial democracy — a point arrived at not by accident, but because there have been struggles”. Who knows — he might have been set to steer a course to becoming the first black prime minister of Her Majesty’s Realm.
Instead, he chose to step down from all of that. On June 17 2005 (three days after his 54th birthday, incidentally) he presented his credentials to President Thabo Mbeki as Her Majesty’s high commissioner to South Africa. It was a carefully considered change of direction, a logical step, for him, in a professional life that had always held on to a steady vision of what needed to be done next, and dreams that could possibly be accomplished within one lifetime.
Given his remarkable personal background, it was a step that seems to have been inevitable — and the confluences of history made it possible for him to make that leap at the critical time.
The exchange of formalities between Mbeki and Boateng in Pretoria was more than a diplomatic gesture between friendly nations with an often tempestuous past. They had known each other on and off over the years in the escalating intensity of the global Anti-Apartheid Movement, and had shared moments of debate, strategising and reflection. Boateng had known Mbeki during tough and exhilarating times in London, Lusaka and Harare, when change still seemed to be a far off dream. And yet — here we all are.
Paul Yaw Boateng was born in England in 1951, of a British mother and a Ghanaian father. He is proud of both strains of his identity, which, he says, have given him the balanced view of his own country, Africa and the world that has been the grounding of his activism.
In 1954, responding to the call of Africa’s star voice of liberation, Kwame Nkrumah, the family relocated to the then Gold Coast, where his father acted as legal adviser to Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, the movement that was to steer the country to independence from colonial Britain in 1957.
They were heady times. Boateng still remembers the excitement of being a schoolchild making flags for the arrival of the Duchess of Kent, who would hand over power to the new African elite on behalf of the Queen, and the street celebrations that heralded in the glorious moment.
Nkrumah, and those who served with him, including Boateng’s father, believed that they were at the cutting edge of African liberation — West Africa, the fractious Congo and, of course, Verwoerd’s South Africa, a blot on the spreading black wave that was heaving over the continent.
As neighbours in Accra, the Boatengs had African National Congress leader Oliver Tambo and his family, the young Robert Mugabe and his Ghanaian wife Sally, and soon-to- be Malawian dictator Kamuzu Hastings Banda. Africa was on the march, and the boy Boateng was at the centre of things.
But it was not long before the euphoria died away. Corruption, mismanagement and, it must be said, a sustained campaign from afar opposed to Nkrumah’s brand of African self-confidence culminated in a military coup that saw Nkrumah and his allies isolated, jailed or driven into exile.
Boateng’s father spent the next four years in jail without trial. The young Boateng was dragged to the front of his primary school class by a teacher who told his fellow pupils that the boy’s father deserved to be hanged.
Boateng’s mother packed whatever she could into two suitcases and surreptitiously fled back to England with her two children, wondering about the possible fate her husband would have to face.
Although the family was finally reunited, Boateng spent the next years experiencing the transformation from an exalted life in Africa to life on a council estate in Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, where his mother found employment as a teacher, and dedicated herself to giving her children the best education she could.
He didn’t do too badly — captain of the debating society, head boy in a school where he was the only child of colour, and on to a successful career as a solicitor, finally called to the British Bar in 1989. And then on into the boiling politics of a Britain in ferment.
He attributes his survival of all of this to steadfast parents whose sense of morality and justice led them to teach their children to be strong and “just get on with it”. There was no space for self-pity. Just a drive to “do the right thing”.
Faith, in every sense, has been critical — and not blind faith, either. The family Sunday lunch, to hear Boateng describe the family dynamics, must be quite an event — his mother a confirmed Quaker, his father an Evangelist, his wife an Anglican and Boateng himself a committed Methodist. And yet they all find space to respect each other’s choice of how to respond to the demands of a Greater Power.
And so, whatever that Greater Power is has brought Paul Boateng to his next calling — the demands that could, just could, be served by embracing an ambassadorship to South Africa, flagship of an as yet undefined African renaissance.
As he said in our meeting, it’s not exactly a full circle (“And don’t you dare say it is! I’m not done yet!”).
What is clear is that Boateng will certainly be a hands-on high commissioner — taking nothing for granted in his mellowed out, pugnacious way, and pushing himself, and anything he comes across, to the limits.