ASANTE, K.B.
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PHOTO CAPTION: Kwaku Baprui Asante. SOURCE: EA Library.
Kwaku Baprui Asante (March 26th, 1924 – January 22nd, 2018) was a Ghanaian diplomat, writer and politician. He was the Secretary to Ghana’s First President, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and also served at the African Affairs Secretariat from 1960 to 1966 as the Principal Secretary.
Mr. Asante was born in March 1924 at Accra, Gold Coast. He attended the O’Reilly Educational Institute, Tudu, the Government Junior Boys’ School, Adabraka and the Government Senior boys’ School, Tudu from 1927-1937. He had his upper primary and secondary studies at the Achimota College from 1 938-1942, where he also taught Mathematics from 1945-1948.
He proceeded to further his education at Durham University in Britain and obtained BSc in Mathematics in 1952. In 1953, he became part of the Institute of Statisticians and later returned to Achimota College as a senior mathematics tutor, where he taught mathematics from 1953 to 1955.
Beginning his political and diplomatic career in 1957, he worked with the British High Commission as a Consul and later assisted in the establishment of the Ghana High Commission.
He was again tasked to establish a yet one more embassy in Tel-Aviv in Israel and later became the Secretary to Ghana’s first president Dr Kwame Nkrumah, where he served at the Flagstaff House as the Principal Secretary at the African Affairs Secretariat from 1960 to 1966.
He was the Head of Administration at the OAU office in Addis Ababa and thereafter became Ghana’s Ambassador to Switzerland in the United Nations Offices in Geneva and the United Nation establishment with concurrent accreditation as Ambassador to Australia in Vienna from 1967-1972.
From 1976 to 1978, Mr. Asante served as the Ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg, and the European Economic Community. He became the Chief Representative of the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and World Trade Organization (WTO).
In 1982, he became the Secretary for Trade and Tourism in the PNDC administration and later as Secretary for Education and Culture from 1986-1990 after he had retired from the Civil Service in 1978. Mr. Asante wrote a weekly column, “Voice from Afar” in the national newspaper, Daily Graphic, where a compendium of his weekly articles was printed as a book with the same title of his column in 2003.
Unfortunately, Mr. Asante died in Greater Accra at age 93 on the 22nd of January 2018 after a short illness.
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