Yvonne Mbozi remembered

Feb 05, 2012 News

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by David Granger

Yvonne St. Clair Mbozi, née Granger, former Chief of Protocol of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, died on 22nd January 2012, aged 79 years.
The eight decades from 1932 to 2012 that measured the life of my sister Yvonne Mbozi were an era of unimaginable change for humanity. Yvonne believed, however, that some values were immutable and inviolable. To her dying day, she clung to the orthodoxies she had learnt in childhood and remained a staunch Anglican.

Born in British Guiana where occupational horizons, even for educated, ambitious women in the 1940s and 1950s were limited to the services – teaching, nursing and the clerical Civil Service – in which the government proscribed marriage for women, Yvonne could have followed the customary course. She did not.
Determined not to be pigeon-holed, she escaped from the sterility of colonial convention and set out on an exciting, life-changing expedition. She became an eye witness to the post-independence tumult in the Congo and settled briefly in neighbouring Zambia, in the heart of Africa, in the 1960s. She returned in the 1970s to a nation that was much different to the colony she had left.
Yvonne started her working life in the British Guiana Civil Service – in the decade from July 1951 to August 1961 – spending some time in the Ministry of Labour, Health and Housing. She then went to the United States and worked – from August 1961 to June 1962 – as Confidential Secretary to the Permanent Representative of Sierra Leone to the United Nations in New York.
This was the start of her nomadic interlude – from June 1962 to August 1969 – when she held appointments as a bilingual Secretary-Administrative Assistant at the United Nations Operation in Congo at the time of the catastrophic post-colonial meltdown. Then it was off to serve with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Lusaka, Zambia.  She left the UN to work – from October 1970 to July 1971 – as Confidential Reports Officer at Barclay’s Bank, Zambia and – from August 1971 to August 1976 – as Committees Secretary and Acting Corporation Secretary at Zambia Airways, Lusaka.
Protocal revamp
Yvonne re-migrated to Guyana after her husband’s death and re-joined the Public Service, working – from September 1976 to June 1978 – as a Field and Office Administrator and Head of the Processing Department at the Ministry of National Development. She transferred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where she was appointed Foreign Service Officer in July 1978. She was assigned to the Protocol and Consular Affairs Department as Acting Chief of Protocol where she was promoted to the position of Principal Foreign Service Officer and confirmed as Chief of Protocol in January 1981. Here she was in her element.
Her colleagues acknowledge that she helped to transform the Protocol and Consular Affairs Department from a ‘sleepy backroom’ to a frontline post. She was to compile, later, the Protocol and Consular Manual for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She was posted to serve as Consul General in New York – from February 1985 to July 1987 – and, on her return, was appointed Head of the Administration Department until her retirement from the Foreign Service in June 1990.
Retirement gave her an opportunity to explore new fields of endeavour and to exploit the advantage of her corporate experience, her exposure to international affairs and her flair for organisation. These talents equipped her to conduct training seminars and workshops in business communication, conference organisation, etiquette and protocol for the Foreign Service Institute, Guyana Management Institute and other organisations. She also taught English at the Georgetown American School and was manager of the FRANDEC Travel Agency.
Socially engaged
Yvonne, throughout her life, remained socially engaged. Never a firebrand or a flag-waving feminist, she had an enduring interest in the development of women and youth and the prevention of domestic violence. She served as president of the Young Women’s Christian Association; executive member of the Conference on the Affairs and Status of Women in Guyana; member of the Women’s Revolutionary Socialist Movement and coordinator of the Crisis and Counselling Service of the Help and Shelter organisation.
She served, on the cultural side, as president of Alliance Française, chairman of the Woodside Choirs International, member of the Theatre Guild and the Christ Church Choir and as a representative of the Anglican Diocesan Council of Guyana. She loved art, drama, literature and, particularly, choral religious music.
Yvonne St. Clair Mbozi was born in Georgetown on 13th November 1932, the eldest of eight children of Chetwynd and Verleigh Granger. She was baptised into the Anglican communion but named St. Clair after the celebrated 13th century Catholic founder of a monastic order for women. She was a bright student and attended several primary and secondary schools, including Wray’s and St Joseph High School, where she wrote her Senior Cambridge exams and the University of Guyana where she studied International Relations and Public Administration.
She met and married Eliphaz Brinsley Trevor Mbozi, a Permanent Secretary in the Government of Zambia, in January 1966. Her first child, Samantha, was born in 1968 and her second, Christopher, in 1970. She was pregnant with her third child, Jeremy, when her husband died in a motor accident in 1971. Widowed for over half of her life, Yvonne’s stamina was sapped by the subsequent deaths of her two sons.
Yvonne had to be hospitalised and died on 22nd January 2012. She is survived by her daughter and four grandchildren.

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