Lord Paul Boateng
Left GIS: 1963
Country of Origin: Ghana
Currently Based: United Kingdom
Profile
The Rt Hon the Lord Boateng PC CVO is a Ghanaian-British politician, former civil rights lawyer, and Methodist lay preacher. Educated in both Ghana and the UK—including at Ghana International School, Accra Academy, and the University of Bristol—he qualified as both a solicitor and barrister. He served as MP for Brent South from 1987 to 2005, holding multiple ministerial roles, and in 2002, when appointed as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, became the first person of African descent and the first member of any ethnic minority to serve in the British Cabinet. He was UK High Commissioner to South Africa from 2005 to 2009 and was elevated to the Peerage in 2010 as Baron Boateng of Akyem and Wembley. He formerly served on the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee and currently serves on the International Agreements Committee of the House of Lords and the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy.
Lord Boateng is also Chair Emeritus of the Archbishops Commission for Racial Justice, Chair of the global development organisation Water and Sanitation for Urban Populations (WASUP), and Co-Chair of the Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission. Lord Boateng sits on several commercial and philanthropic boards in the UK, Africa, and Switzerland, and is Chancellor of the University of Greenwich.
Testimonial
For me, GIS represents the best of what Ghana has to offer, with its focus on educational excellence in the service not just of self but of an inclusive, global community. I was one of the school’s first pupils in the school’s oldest building, in Cantonments.
Mrs. Martin was our formidable Headmistress, with Mrs. Irene Inwood as her deputy. My mother, Peggy, taught Art and English. Mrs. Ghartey, Mrs. Bertha Conton, and Mrs. Prakash came to be amongst my favourite teachers. Ghana International School had a truly international staff. The teachers at GIS were pioneers, full of the can-do spirit. Their task was to fashion a brave new world of mutual respect for different tongues, races and creeds, free from the divisions of the past, and we were its young, proud beneficiaries.
Many years later, as a Minister of Parliament, I met up again with Mrs. Prakash, who was still teaching but had relocated as part of the East African/Asian exodus to my new Constituency at the time, of Brent South in North West London in 1987. Back in the 1950s, as I repeated my ten times tables in class, we had no sense of what fate had in store for us both.
From Mrs. Prakash, I gained my understanding of numbers—a quality that came in handy when, as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in the UK, I was responsible for the control of public spending in the country. While working in that role in the early 2000s, I visited Sierra Leone, where I happened to meet up with Aunty Bertha Conton. She had run the School Book Club and Reading Circle at GIS and gone on to establish her own school in Freetown, which she presided over well into her nineties.
My earliest memories are of catching the school bus near my family’s residence in Asylum Down with my friend David Lewis, while holding on to my lunch box. I must have been about five years old. We took that same bus on 6th March, 1957, to our allotted spot opposite the 37 Military Hospital where we waved the flags of red gold and green we had made in class. We watched as Dr. Nkrumah drove by with Princess Marina, the Duchess of Kent. Fifty years later, I took her son to see my grandparents’ cocoa farm in Old Tafo.
My GIS education helped ensure that I won a Cocoa Marketing Board Scholarship when I left, having taken My Common Entrance exams in 1963. I left GIS with a love of football, inspired by CK Gyamfi of the Black Stars, who was also our PE Teacher. I was also influenced by Kofi Antubam, the renowned artist, who tutored us in Art, and cultivated a love for drama thanks to my mum, whose school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is remembered to this day.
GIS was the realisation of Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey’s dictum, “Only the best is good enough for Africa”. The continent itself remains a work in progress. The dream has yet to be realised, but GIS gave us, as youngsters, the best of starts. May it long continue to do so.
