THREE WOMEN IN MY LIFE – LONG READ- ENGLISH
- canhandula
- May 23
- 12 min read
INTRODUCTION
In my entire life I have had two major shocks that had the effect of freeing my spirit, my outlook on people and my understanding of the role of a supervisor/leader. Both shocks were positive, but they were shocks nonetheless. Violent.
The first, I already described in my earlier article: I discovered late in life that I am a mulato after all[1]. So, what was all this racist nonsense I have been carrying around all my life? It was a corrosive protection mechanism (protective and corrosive!). Did I not realize that Jesus chose to be a refugee in Africa instead of going to any other Continent? Do I not realize that in another hundred years Europe will be black? Colour as a distinctive feature will be so messed up as to become irrelevant.
My second shock is the subject of this article. Still, no man can start a serious story about women in his life without starting by the mother. Mine died four months into my life. So, I really did not see her, although she still remains my queen. She knows where she buried my umbilical cord.
The absent queen left a boy that I am today, 69 years later. To reach here, I started in the hands of women in an orphanage called Fonte Boa. I would not remember all women that took care of me, plus other two orphans (David and Helena). But I remember the name of one lady Ana Samuel. Wherever she may be, God be with her. The other was Margarida Ferrão. I never thought I would meet her, but she is alive and I met her in the 68th year of my life. She lives and I managed to receive her embrace one more time. There certainly were other women who protected and cared for me as a child, but with age, we disperse and forget.
That takes care of my childhood.
Then there is the woman in my life: my wife. But that is private, and she did not happen in my life: we chose each other. Allow me to skip that, would you?
THE OFFICE OF THE UNITED NATIONS HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR REFUGEES
To come straight to my professional experience with women I must get onto UNHCR. The women I bumped into as a teacher or as a junior diplomat remain far below those in UNHCR. Maybe I was also hard to impress.
Now, the women I met in UNHCR, those never left me unimpressed, one way or the other. Before getting there, let me generally celebrate the memory of my direct supervisors in UNHCR, chronologically. The reader may recognize some of them:
David Kapya in Tete, Mozambique.
Andrew Mayne in Danane, Cote d’Ivoire.
Anna Lyria Franch, Antoine Noel and Marjon Kamara in Luanda, Angola.
Maureen Connely in Ngara, Tanzania.
Luc Stevens and Kai Nielsen in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania.
O. Bajulaiye, Ahmed Gubartalla and George Okoth-Obbo in Lusaka, Zambia.
Mengesha Kebede in Geneva, Switzerland.
Eusebe Hounsokou in Kinshasa, DRC.
Liz Ahua in Nairobi, Kenya.
Valentin Tapsoba in Freetown, Sierra Leone and Niamey, Niger.
Liz Ahua in Geneva, Switzerland.
Liz Ahua in Ndjamena, Chad and Abuja, Nigeria.
Clementine Nkweta Salami in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. Exit public life.
These chiefs span my 33 years of career in the UN. The purpose of this long recital is to appreciate female leadership in UNHCR by extolling three supervisors that really impressed me, marked me, tolerated me, taught me, advanced me, as they believed in my capacities. They occupied 20 years (66%) of my 33 years as International Civil Servant:
ANA LYRIA FRANCH, a Spanish national I met and worked for in Angola.
MARJON KAMARA, a Liberian national I met and worked for three times: Angola, Tanzania and Switzerland.
LIZ AHUA, a Nigerian national I met and worked for four times: Kenya, Switzerland, Chad and Nigeria.
Before describing these great women, I must say that this is an article about women. Still, it negates not at all the fact that I received equally strong support, guidance, appreciation, learning and feedback from male chiefs that I do not hesitate to call leaders that I wish to briefly mention here:
Emmanuel Owusu: he told me (1991), after an unusual joint UNHCR/WFP field mission in the forests of Province of Zambezia (northern Mozambique), that a good structured and action-suggesting report is the equivalent to an invoice you raise against your monthly salary.
Andrew Mayne: he taught me (1992) Lotus 123 including many automated features. He also taught me to always travel with a book on long trips, especially where airports are concerned. You always have time and some delays can be a disguised opportunity.
Kai Nielsen: If you wish to be a good programme officer, master the software of the organization, be fast with every new system introduced.
Ahmed Gubartalla: Polish your rough angles, be a diplomat, and your intelligence will do the rest in opening doors for you.
George Okoth-Obbo: whenever you write to government, ensure to read it back to yourself as if you were the recipient. Never send letters or mails with precipitation: draft, sleep on them and get onto them again the next day. And get onto the e-learning offered by the organization.
Mengesha Kebede: Believe in yourself and offer to be the first for the difficult or complex tasks. No pain, no gain. By the way, forget your colour already. Structure your thoughts instead.
Thank you all. Now, let me return to my main three women.
As I entered the office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees, I found it to be a hive of really busy women. I first met High Commissioner Sadako who came to a small border village in Tete called Mutarara, where I and a Nigerian United Nations Volunteer (Ebe Okwuchukwu) slept on a tree, tied to the tree by some ropes we found on the UNHCR field box. We had tried the small tent in the Geneva box, but local hyenas came sniffing our feet. I digress. Sadako came and went, I never understood the importance of her visit until after she left. But she was for me the preview of the women I would meet. My perception of importance until then was masculine.
Then I went to Danane, where I met three Liberian women refugees who would make careers in UNHCR, becoming even Representatives: an officer who knows what it feels to be a refugee, for having been one: Olivia Shannon, Sharon Cooper and Annette Nyekan. Strong, motherly women.
Then I was sent to Angola as Programme Officer. Anna Lyria Franch was our Representative. The first time I worked with and for a white woman who thought nothing of her whiteness.
She introduced me properly to UNHCR: “procedures and protocols my young man! You are no longer a teacher, you are an international civil servant. Do you understand? Let me give you some document you already received but perhaps you never read”. She gave me the booklet “Standards of Conduct of the International Civil Service”, and pushed me to read it all. I read it all on my road trip between Luanda and Mbanza Congo, via Huige and Negage, an epic trip between MPLA and UNITA territories. In the company of a colleague Field Officer Beatrice Ngendandumwe.
Anna lessons for me:
Dress smarter than that, you are no longer a small town teacher or a junior diplomat. She gave me in 1992 a green striped tie, which until now I have somewhere in my closet. Now that in retirement I really do not wear ties.
Read and learn always.
Have the courage to talk to MPLA the same way as you talk to UNITA. We are not asking you to be neutral but impartial. (you learn to pay attention to the important sophisticated differences).
One morning, she gave me seven Toyota hardtops to deliver to Mbanza Congo to facilitate repatriation from Zaire (RDC). During 2 days the vehicles were flown from Luanda. The day I finished delivering them, a UNITA officer came to me and told me that they noticed new vehicles, they were coming for them in the afternoon, the time for me to inform my bosses in Luanda. All objections raised, I asked when we could have them back. “at the end of the war” he said politely.
Of course I called Luanda all alarmed. Ms Anna Lyria told me not to be a hero with armed men, to calmly deliver the vehicles. She would be reporting to the authorities in Luanda, so they do not think that a Mozambican was supporting UNITA. I did not understand at the time that she was protecting me against a powerful government that could accuse me of having gone to deliver logistics to UNITA.
During that repatriation, apart from small unfortunate incidents of a country at war, I saw beautiful places that far outshine Swiss resorts in Europe. I never saw Eden, but these could be in the same class: places on the Uige-Negage-Mbanza-Congo-Soyo-Nzeto long axis. The border with DRC and the border with Zambia, I forget the names.
It was a short encounter, not more than a year and half but Anna Lyria impressed me and her disorderly hair is still in my memory.
Marjon Kamara Representative met me in Angola, and I left to Ngara, Tanzania to work for the Rwandan and Burundian refugees. After two years, I came to Dar-es-Salaam as Programme Officer where I met for the second time Marjon Kamara, Representative
With Marjon, you learn to prepare your arguments.
With Marjon, you learn to ask a question and prepare a tentative answer to your own question.
With Marjon you learn to offer ideas and already have a draft on paper.
With Marjon you learn to anticipate what comes around the corner.
With Marjon you learn not to hesitate in whatever you do.
I am not sure I know how to summarize that bunch of lessons. She makes you learn to be ahead of the game. So, I decided to be in the office 90 minutes before everyone arrived for work. That allowed me to fully experiment, research and master programme skills through self-learning, self-experimentation, tinkering with systems the organization put at my disposal. This was key to my career progression. The ninety minutes were worth the entire day’s work. As Deputy Representative or as Representative eighteen years later, no staff could misinform me, because I could extract any report or produce analytical tables from the organization’s systems myself. With the Lotus 123 skills Andrew Mayne taught me…
At the beginning of 1996, Sergio Vieira, then Assistant high Commissioner, came to Ngara to tell us that within twelve months, all Rwandan refugees should have returned to their country. Then I moved to Dar-es-Salaam as the Progamme Officer. Immediately we started negotiating repatriation resources with the government. The two governments then decided to tell UNHCR that repatriation would instead take six months.
We were just concluding the discussions and we had released the first of two tranches of money, one week later the repatriation had ended, even before there was any material time to spend. That was a military repatriation and clearly most of the money was never used as intended. The second installment was never paid, and we actually were seeking the return of most of the first tranche. Pure mess. The expected financial report came five months later with expenditures we could not accept. No expenditure should have been engaged on a repatriation that had all but ended by the time we stood up from the negotiation table.
Then the government Inspector General insisted that the moneys had been spent properly! I never accepted the expenditures, and the matter was never resolved, since it involved a certification from an Inspector General. Still, you “kind of” cannot get around a declaration of an inspector general.
There was more to come. I was on mission in the field, watching the MV Bukoba disaster on Lake Victoria near Mwanza town one early morning, when a call came from the Representative, seeking to talk to me. “Jose, did you give an interview to a newspaper saying that the government has misused money intended for repatriation? Have you read the newspaper?”
“No”, I said; “and in any case, we do not conduct bilateral relations with the government through the press, do we?”.
“Thank you, that is all I need to know”.
On return, I learned that she had written to government fully protecting me against government misdirected anger. A Representative who has your back 100%, whom I would by chance meet one third time in Geneva. That was all the more important because I was (am) married in that country. One would not want a PNG for five years with a Tanzanian family!
Then I went from Tanzania onto Zambia and then to Geneva. My immediate supervisor in Geneva was Mengesha Kebede, whom I had first met in Malawi, border with Mozambique, when I was a young Officer and he was monitoring the assistance programme for Mozambican refugees.
It would take a long recital to mention what I learned from Mr Mengesha in the famous Programme Coordination and Operational Support Section. It is enough to mention the Standards and Indicators project and that he sent us his team to promote them in the field: I visited Pakistan, Guinea, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda, to push for standards and Indicators in programming practice. Thanks to him, I and a few other colleagues (memory to Bornwell Kantande) became the programme experts of reference.
Through Mengesha I came again under the supervision of Marjon Kamara, under whose directorate we fell. She exercised maximum subsidiarity, allowing some of us to shine through. I then understood the philosophy these two supervisors shared (Marjon and Mengesha): you do not need to extinguish one candle to allow the other one to shine. In fact, both shine much more than 1+1=2. With the proper leadership, they shine 1+1=11, the multiplier being a positive attitude.
While I was Deputizing in Kinshasa, I applied and was appointed Representative to Liberia. Then Marjon and George Okotth-Obbo called me to suggest that I forego the position, to continue another 3 years as Deputy, this time in Kenya. The person I was replacing was ill. The organization would recognize my sacrifice in due time, they said.
This was a sacrifice I accepted immediately and easily. Didn’t she protect me when I most needed it in Tanzania?
In Kenya I met another lady Representative, Liz Ahua, who allowed me all the space to manage operations, to take initiatives and introduce innovations. In the process of innovations one makes mistakes. But one would never innovate if one was too scared of mistakes. She accepted those mistakes and allowed me to correct myself, and to continue innovating.
That was a period when the organization was introducing the FOCUS software as a programming tool. I drove the process, experimented it fully and provided feedback to the headquarters gurus.
I met Liz again in Geneva on my second assignment there, and I became her Operations Manager for West Africa. She was very demanding and relentless on operations reviews, on providing timely feedback to the field operations (3 days to respond, was her standard).
That was also my second encounter with George Okoth-Obbo, now supervisor of my supervisor. George I must mention, because no one can leave unimpressed after meeting him. What of working for him? He drills your intelligence. The next time you see him coming, you want to avoid him, only to realize that he is one of the very rare persons with whom you probably learn the most, and he has that intention on you. George would make me write six drafts of a letter before he approved it out.
It is not at all easy to find this alignment of supervisors from whom you learn to be rigorous, professional, detailed, direct, convincing, thorough, logical: Marjon and Mengesha. George Okoth-Obbo and Liz Ahua. Real professional heavy weights.
I learned from Liz
Carry a smile from time to time.
As Deputy Representative, you have the resources at your command and no one will teach you that you have enough room and authority to innovate on solutions.
When you are up there, still remember your humble origins. Let power not determine your personality.
You should be able to say that in your career you have also helped at least two colleagues make their own career.
One day you should be able to put in writing your professional experiences and your stories. You seem to have quite a lot to recount of your life.
Liz would supervise me one more time in her capacity as Regional Director for West Africa in Dakar, when I was Representative in Chad and in Nigeria, a total of eleven years (Kenya 3, Geneva 2, Chad 3 and Nigeria 3). With her support, I opened an office on the shores of Lake Chad on the Chad side, Bagasola (the first and only time I would open an office) and I managed to organize in Abuja, Nigeria, the second Regional Protection Dialogue on the Lake Chad Situation (Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria, Chad). If you can pull that kind of conference, you can be a Foreign minister back home.
We all opted instead to retire and nurse our active lifestyle diseases: diabetes, cholesterol and other usual suspects called co-morbidities in this golden age, I have come to learn.
I profoundly bow to these supervisors. I profoundly acknowledge these women in my public successful life. Now I am cooling my feet proudly along the mighty Zambezi River, thanks to Anna Lyria, Marjon Kamara and Liz Ahua.
Plus of course the men. I know there is no man without a woman. Could I still be allowed to ask: is there a woman without a man? We, the men, do not impregnate, but perhaps we walk around with one rib less than we were initially intended to carry. Wherever that rib may have been taken to.
Cheers
Jose
Tete, May 2025
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