Ghanaian Examining Race In 1965 Reith Lectures

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30880, 13 October 1965, Page 7

Ghanaian Examining Race In 1965 Reith Lectures

The 1965 8.8. C. Reith Lectures will be given by a Ghanaian—the first African to be heard in the series, says a 8.8. C. newsletter. Mr Robert K. A. Gardiner, executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, will examine the subject of the meeting of various races in different parts of the world. His title is “A World of Peoples.” In London recently he described race relations as a fundamental aspect of human relations ‘‘a problem all of us live with nowadays.” The Reith Lectures (named after the 8.8.C.’s first director-general, Lord Reith) have become an important annual broadcasting event

since the first series was delivered by Bertrand Russell in 1948. Each year the aim has been to choose a subject in the forefront of the public mind and a lecturer qualified by wide experience and special study to present a comprehensive survey and stimulate further thought. The six lectures will be broadcast in the 8.8. C. domestic and world services beginning in November, and will be widely used in translation in other of the 8.8. C. external services. Mr Gardiner was born in Kumasi in 1914. He is a graduate of Cambridge and London Universities, did post-graduate work in social anthropology at Nuffield College, Oxford, and from

1943 to 1946 lectured in economics at Fourah Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone. In 1946 he joined the secretariat of the United Nations as area specialist on research and analysis information from trust territories; from 1949 to 1953 was director of extra-mural studies at University College, Ibadan, Nigeria, and then spent six years in the administrative service of Ghana, becoming Head of the Ghanaian Civil Service. In 1959 Mr Gardiner was appointed deputy executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. In 1960 and again in 1961 he visited the Congo for the United Nations, and in the latter year brought about the recall of the Congolese Parliament and the reconstitution of the government under the Prime Minister, Mr Adoula. In July, 1961, he was appointed Director of the Division of Public Administration in the Bureau of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations in New York. In 1962 he became officer-in-charge of the United Nations operation in the Congo, and became executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa.