By Faridat Salifu
The Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) , Audrey Azoulay, has expressed deep sorrow at the news of the death of Prof Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, aged 103.
Prof. M’Bow, who passed away on September 24 in Dakar, Senegal, was the sixth Director-General of UNESCO from 1974 to 1987 and the first African to lead the agency.
Audrey Azoulay described her predecessor in office as a profound humanist and all-round intellectual who was an “architect of the equality between peoples”.
Noting that Amadou Mahtar M’Bow left a lasting impression on UNESCO by forcefully defending the need for solidarity and equal dignity between peoples and cultures, Azoulay said “throughout the independence movements, he also strove to ensure that every state found its rightful place at UNESCO, giving substance and reality to the ambition of multilateralism.”
The DG said, UNESCO owe Prof M’Bow the monumental scientific work that is the General History of Africa, which gave the world, and more specifically Africans, a means of appropriating their own history and facing the future with confidence.”
The editor-in-chief of naturenews.africa, Aliu Akoshile, who also paid tributes to the late Prof. M’Bow describes his death as a colossal loss to Africa and indeed the rest of the world.
In a condolence message to Amadou Mahtar Ba, a nephew of Prof. M’Bow and executive chairman of allafrica.com, Mr. Akoshile said the deceased “was the harbinger of the phenomenal paradigm shift in the world information and communication order between the global North and South.”
He described Prof M’Bow as “an excellent international public servant and a quintessential multidisciplinary scholar who had a track record of unassailable integrity and selfless leadership.”
Mr. Akoshile noted that one of the many indelible contributions of Prof. M’Bow was in the field of mass communication when, in 1977, he empanelled the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems.
The editor-in-chief of NatureNews noted that the commission, headed by the Irish diplomat Elie Abel Seán MacBride, produced the iconic report titled _Many Voices, One World_ which advocated the shift “towards a new, more just, and more efficient world information and communication order.”
A tribute issued by UNESCO says M’Bow era was marked by long-lasting initiatives such as the International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC) created in 1981; the World Heritage Committee, set up by the 1972 World Heritage Convention and established in 1976, which played a major role in elevating UNESCO’s reputation; and two years later, the Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation.
It was also under Amadou Mahtar M’Bow’s mandate that the first biosphere reserves were designated: protected areas recognised by UNESCO as model regions that reconciled biodiversity conservation and sustainable development.
As head of the UN agency responsible for promoting education, science, culture and communication and information worldwide, Mbow elevated UNESCO’s profile during the 13 years he served as DG, beginning in 1974.
Born in Dakar in 1921, Amadou Mahtar M’Bow was the Minister for Education, Culture and Youth of Senegal, participating actively in his country’s political life, and was the Director-General of UNESCO for 13 years.
“The path that led the small farmer from the African Sahel to the head of one of the United Nations’ most prestigious organisations is representative of the emergence of a world that had long been subjugated, despised or even ignored: that of the dispossessed”, wrote the journalist and future diplomat Pierre Kalfon when Mr M’Bow was elected to the post of UNESCO DG in 1974.
The young Amadou was admitted to the French Colonial School, after first attending classes in a Koranic school, then enrolled in the ‘commerce course’ at the Dakar Chamber of Commerce before passing the competitive examination to become a clerk in the colonial administration. In 1940, he volunteered for service in France but returned to Senegal after the French defeat. Four years later, he took part in the Provence landings and participated in the liberation of France.
After studying history at the Sorbonne, young professor M’Bow returned to Senegal in 1951 and taught for two years before being tasked with creating and leading primary education in Senegal and Mauritania. After being appointed Minister for Education and Culture during the period of internal autonomy (1957-1958), he resigned from his position to join the fight for independence. Once Senegal gained independence, he became Minister of National Education (1966-1968), then of Culture and Youth (1968-1970) and a member of the National Assembly.
Appointed Assistant Director-General for Education at UNESCO in 1970, he was elected Director-General in 1974, a post he held until 1987 after being re-elected in 1980. His work at the head of UNESCO centred around two main priorities: promoting consensus as a means of collective decision-making within UNESCO and defending the independence of international civil servants.
Amadou Mahtar M’Bow expressed his “deep held belief that the world is one, and that the struggle for human rights is the same in all places”. He believed that “humanity has an obligation to live in the age of solidarity, if it does not want to experience the age of barbarism”.
Amadou Mahtar M’Bow also argued forcefully in favour of a ‘New World Order of Information and Communication’ – since at the time international news was provided exclusively by five major press agencies, all based in Europe and North America, with the resulting news flowing essentially from North tou South.
