The death of Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U. N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has shocked Macalester College, where Annan is remembered as “the clearest and most famous embodiment of our…
As the world mourns the passing of Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U. N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, the pain of his passing is felt intensely here at home where Annan got his start as a young student at Macalester College.
“We are both shocked and deeply saddened. He seemed like one of those people that would go on forever,” said Brian Rosenberg, president of Macalester College in St. Paul, where Annan graduated in 1961.
Rosenberg first met Annan in 2004 and got to know the loyal alumnus and former Macalester trustee well as Annan returned several times over the years to speak at the college.
“He was the clearest and most famous embodiment of our mission,” he said. “We feel like we’ve lost a little part of ourselves.”
Annan attended Macalester from 1959 to 1961, eventually earning a degree in economics and setting a school track record in the 60-yard dash.
“He was an outstanding orator,” Roger Mosvick, Annan’s former communications professor told the Pioneer Press in 1998. “He was a very bright guy who had this ability to adapt to virtually any situation.”
This adeptness in speech contests, of which Annan won several, would serve him well as he went on to join the United Nations’ World Health Organization in 1962 and later become the top diplomat for the United Nations — a post where he had to react to crisis situations, wars and controversy.
Born to a family of chiefs of the Fante tribe in Ghana, his father was a businessman and provincial governor and his mother was a homemaker. While studying at Ghana’s University of Science and Technology, Annan was offered a scholarship from the Ford Foundation’s Foreign Students Leadership Project. It was this opportunity that brought him to St. Paul. In 1959, he left Ghana to study economics at Macalester. This was his first trip out of Africa and into another culture.
Annan never forgot the warm welcome he received in the cold state of Minnesota.
In a speech in 1994, he described his feelings for Macalester when he said, “We were not merely greeted with tolerance, we were welcomed with warmth.”
Annan returned to the college several times over the years to give commencement speeches and, most recently in May to be honored by the college when it renamed its Institute for Global Citizenship to the Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship.
“He was obviously an enormous source of pride for us,” Rosenberg said. “I’m really glad he was able to be here and celebrate that with us.”
Fellow student Jack Mason, who became a U. S. magistrate judge and passed away in 2002, was on the speech team with Annan in 1961.
He told the Pioneer Press in 1998 how the team would pile into a car and go all over the state for contests, but that the traveling and lack of sleep never seemed to bother Annan.
“Kofi would get out of the car…and he’d be so eloquent and give these speeches that were really something,” Mason said.
That would be another quality Annan would retain throughout his career has he jetted all over the world to give speeches representing the United Nations.
David Lanegran, former professor of geography at Macalester, and a member of the graduating class of 1963, said there was one thing Annan was not good at — American football.
“He could not catch the football to save his soul,” Lanegran told the Pioneer Press in 1998. “I think he had one of the shorter football careers at Macalester.”
In 1984, Annan married Nane Lagergren, a Swedish-born attorney and abstract painter who is the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in Hungary who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis. Together they had three children.
Besides Annan’s abilities and accomplishments, what folks from Macalester remember most about him was his humility.
Rosenberg said the humble foreign student from Africa who grew up to become one of the most powerful men in the world, never changed in character.
“The most impressive thing about Kofi Annan was that he was even more impressive in private than he was in public,” Rosenberg said. “He never acted like he was more important than you.”
When Annan and his wife visited in May, Rosenberg was reminded again of his friend’s humility when Annan asked for a member of the custodial staff who cleaned the guest house to come see him so he could thank him.
“He took a picture with him,” Rosenberg said. “It really kind of captured the kind of person that he was.” Related Articles
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As the college processes the passing of its most famous son, Rosenberg has found himself thinking back over their many conversations through the years and still being inspired by Annan.
“His faith in the future gives me faith in the future,” Rosenberg said. “He and I taped one interview that we have not yet released. One of the last things he talked about was that change is hard and change takes time. It takes persistence. Sometimes that’s difficult for all of us to remember. I would want to thank him for reminding me of that. If anyone had the right to be frustrated, it would be him. But he never gave up. He just kept working.”
