2 Responses to “Farewell Angela, from Norman”

• Renuka on December 5th, 2012 at 4:17 pm

  Angela was truly a remarkable lady. Thank you for sharing this online. I wish I could have been there at the service. I met her a few times. You’re surely lucky to have had the privilege of being her friend.

• Mervyn Claxton 10 Decemberer 2012 20120 on December 10th, 2012 at 8:16 am

  I first met Angela in 1972, in Port of Spain, a few months before I left the country to take up my diplomatic post in Lagos. The next time we met was in 1985 when I returned to the region as the Unesco Representative to the Caribbean. Angela was Director of Functional Cooperation at the Caricom Secretariat at the time, and I had the privilege to collaborate closely with her on a number of regional activities during the following four years. I was very impressed by Angela’s deep commitment to the region, her immense abilities, her broadness of mind, and the indefatigable energy she invested in her work and in everything she did. But, most of all, I was tremendously impressed by what Angela’s department head at CARIRI dismissively accused her of (according to Winthrop Wiltshire) – that she was not prepared to work “within the confines of the playing field.” The region would be a much place if there were many more Caricom nationals who, like Angela, were unprepared to work “within the confines of the playing field.” But I admit that that may be a minority opinion.

  Unfortunately for Angela, and the region as a whole, she had to function within a traditional civil service type structure – one that preferred excessive caution and business as usual, and took a dim view of initiative and imagination. It was no doubt the type of structure that the region’s politicians preferred, given the fact that they had conceived and approved it. Angela did not put blinkers on her thinking. She did not possess a civil service type mentality, which I found most refreshing, especially since I came up against that type of mentality in my day to day relations with Caricom national administrations and certain regional entities.

  A few months after I took up my Unesco post in the region, I had to confront a frustrating institutional bottleneck. The previous year, Unesco had given the CDCC office in Port of Spain a contract to implement a project of importance to the region, which the CDCC had sat upon for a whole year without taking any action on it. I gave the CDCC a deadline of two months to take action, at the end of which I discovered, to my consternation, that the CDCC had done nothing at all. I was faced with the situation that if no action was taken to implement the project within a month, I would have to return the funds, which had been allocated to its implementation, to Unesco’s General Budget in order to comply with the statutory regulations.

  Frustrated with the CDCC’s puzzling inaction, I decided to cancel the contract with that organization and give it to the Caricom Secretariat, but only if I was assured that Angela would be put in charge of its implementation. She was the only Caricom functionary in whom I had complete confidence. If I did not obtain that assurance, I would give the contract to a regional or international NGO. When I put the proposal to Angela, she agreed immediately, assuring me that she would be given the responsibility for its implementation.

  But that was not the end of my problems. I had not reckoned with the infinite capacity of civil service type mentalities to put a spanner in the works. Angela’s boss, the Deputy Secretary-General (whom I knew very well) gave his oral approval to the contract but Angela could not get him to actually sign the contract. Whenever she broached the subject with him (which she did every day), reminding him how very urgent it was, the Deputy Secretary-General would take the contract from a desk drawer, put it on top of his desk, and promise to sign it the same day – a gesture he repeated every day, without fail.

  Angela and I were in daily telephone contact on the issue. With the deadline fast approaching, I proposed to Angela that I telephone the Dep. Sec. Gen on the matter, which she persuaded me not to do because he might think that she had put me up to it and she would suffer the consequences. With only a few days to go before the funds were lost to the region, Angela finally managed to persuade the Dep. Sec. Gen. to sign the contract. Needless to say, under Angela’s supervision, the contract was implemented in a manner that attracted praise from Unesco headquarters.

  That was the type of environment in which Angela had to work. Angela, being who she was, never complained, never criticized others, nor did she ever express any frustration at the many impediments she faced in merely doing her job. Angela was a secular saint. She left the Caricom secretariat to take up her post in Geneva, as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, around the same time that I returned to Unesco headquarters. When I learnt of her appointment, the first thought that came to my mind was that Angela would at last have the opportunity and the freedom to create her own environment and to develop the full range of her abilities, which she did and for which she justifiably won international recognition.

  The measure of Angela’s greatness is that, despite her very frustrating experiences at CARIRI and the Caricom Secretariat, she returned to the Caribbean to devote all her energies into making the Caricom region a better place. Soon after I began collaborating with Angela, twenty-five years ago, I came to consider her a role model for the Caribbean. The greatest tribute that Caricom citizens can pay to Angela is to consider her an example of what a dedicated and socially committed Caricom citizen could achieve for the common good, and to allow her example inspire their own actions.