The Nigerian Foreign Service community recently suffered a huge loss in the untimely passing away of Ambassador Gordon Harry Bristol, Under Secretary for African Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This is a tribute to his friendship and a shared love and passion for Nigeria and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which we both joined as part of the legendary 1980 set.
A tribute to a friend lost to eternity in the prime of his life is a difficult one to compose as the storyline can only be jagged and rough consisting as it does of hugely unfinished business and of potential that will remain forever untapped. The best approach then is to speak to his qualities which included a huge and towering intellect, a penchant for hard work, an ebullient personality, a love of diplomacy and a passion for Nigeria.
Ambassador Bristol’s painful and untimely demise has left a void that cannot be filled in the life of his family. This is equally true for his friends and colleagues especially those in the Foreign Service where he spent all his working life after completing National Youth Service. He was the first friend I made in the Foreign Service that had not been my contemporary at then Unife. We were introduced by Emeka Ifezulike (Ifez) who was one of my closest friends during our Youth Corps year and with whom Gordon had gone to Unilag.
Gordon Bristol was one of the brightest members of the 1980 set and this was no mean feat in a formidable group with several first rate minds coming from across the length and breadth of Nigeria. If I recall rightly, Ifez in introducing Gordon had informed me that he won the prize as the best student in the faculty of his graduating class. Gordon’s intellect and quest for knowledge was such that right from our early encounters we were always planning to go to either Oxford or Cambridge and exchanging ideas on how best to gain admission and pay our way. He eventually went several years before I did and paid his school fees by selling off a car he had bought during our one year attachment abroad! Since he did not then have the resources nor indeed time off from work to pursue his doctorate Gordon always insisted that he would not do a PhD from a lesser institution so as not to sully his hard won MPhil (Cantab).
Given that his intellect was matched by a huge capacity for work, it was not surprising that Gordon was often called upon to support very senior officials and given special assignments. He thus worked as Assistant to several Ministers of Foreign Affairs including Professor AB Akinyemi, Major-General IOS Nwachukwu, and Chief MT Mbu. Indeed, with the advent of civilian government in 1999, we served together in the State House with Gordon as the right hand man to Amb (Dr.) PD Cole, Special Adviser to the President on International Relations and later on to Mr Stephen Oronsaye, when he was Permanent Secretary, State House. Hard work and a nimble mind ensured that Gordon quickly won the confidence of these highly regarded people but I am sure it was the additional quality of his ability to speak truth to power in the most diplomatic of ways that endeared him to them.
In addition to being personable, negotiations and communications are at the heart of diplomacy. These skills were Gordon’s forte. He spoke clearly and eloquently and negotiations
were second nature to him in multilateral forums such as the United Nations and African Union. Indeed, in his last role as Under Secretary for African Affairs, he led the Nigerian delegation to the Africa-Turkey Summit which took place in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea less than a month ago. Gordon had a fine pen and his writing while lucid, crisp and concise was also underpinned by rigour and logical flow. I can attest to Gordon’s great drafting skill because prior to our working together in the State House, Gordon and I had worked together on the Foreign Service Book Project to produce two under-appreciated tomes of work on ‘Nigeria at the United Nations’ and ‘Nigeria in the Organization of African Unity’. It was while working on this project and on a visit to Vienna that Gordon learned of the untimely loss of his dear father. He was completely distraught and heartbroken and a far cry from the confident, ebullient GHB that I had come to know.
To know Gordon Bristol was to come into contact with a completely self-assured and well composed Nigerian diplomat. He had a great sense of humour and laughed loudly and with great gusto. When he was serving in the Permanent Mission of Nigeria to the United Nations in New York, he would regale me with stories of how his name had spared him from rudeness over the telephone only for his interlocutors, sometimes landlords, to find out after seeing him in the flesh that he was a fully born and bred Bonny Man. Of course, Gordon never failed to remind anyone who was listening that Nigeria’s most famous product was ”Bonny Light.
Gordon had a very large heart and did not bear needless grudges. He quickly put misunderstandings and altercations behind him and when he was the victim of some malfeasance, he would tell the story with some amazement about human behaviour and then visibly shrug it off and move on to other things. This made him a natural born leader and he was very much in the forefront of the struggle by the 1980 and 1981 sets to fight the effort to pension them off early. Even then, when I spoke to him about the matter, he bore no grudges and was instead looking to the future with optimism.
Perhaps the greatest attribute that those who knew Gordon would attest to was his passion for Nigeria and desire to use diplomacy as a tool to promote Nigeria’s interests. This much was evident from his work including a pioneering contribution to the framing of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the yet unfulfilled desire to see the Ministry of Foreign Affairs play its proper and functional role in the area of technical cooperation. Gordon was a huge success in his diplomatic postings spanning bilateral and multilateral missions such as Vienna, New York, Stockholm, Doula and Paris, the latter two in which he served as Head of Mission in the capacity of Consul-General and Ambassador respectively.
Gordon was immensely proud and protective of his family. His equally bright, hard working and lovely wife, Ambassador Ijeoma Bristol was one of our set and it took someone of her calibre to win Gordon’s heart for keeps. I know he was immensely pleased with the academic achievements of his children, which as we always said was the one compensation we all got from the very disruptive life of serving our country abroad. One cannot begin to imagine the deep sorrow that this close knit family is feeling at this time but I would want them to know that we shared a love for Gordon whose memory will remain evergreen in our hearts and minds. His was a great mind, a happy presence and a kind heart.
Adieu, my brother, my friend. Adieu.
Ambassador (Dr) Adeyemi Dipeolu, is Director of the Capacity Development Division of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. He wrote this piece in his personal capacity.
