Bandas' tryst with diplomacy

Dr Hastings Banda, a former Prime Minister and later President of Malawi (1964-1994), did not have a Sri Lankan ancestry despite his last name --BANDA. Nor has the current President of the 193-member UN General Assembly who has a variation of BANDA in his double-barreled last name: Tijjani MuhammadBande, described as a diplomat, academic and political scientist from Nigeria.

But still, the name BANDA, and variations of it, remained prominent in both UN and Sri Lankan diplomatic circles in a bygone era. Dr Palitha TB Kohona, Sri Lanka’s former Permanent Representative and Chief of the UN Treaty Section, had TIKIRI BANDA as his middle names. So did Bernard AB Goonetilleke, a former acting Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the UN who was ANTON BANDARA.

Jayantha CB Dhanapala, a former UN Under- Secretary- General for Disarmament Affairs and one-time Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to the US, was a CUDA BANDARA. And then there was the late HKJR BANDARA, a senior diplomat at the Sri Lanka Mission to the UN, and later our Ambassador in Egypt and Indonesia and High Commissioner in Australia.

And it begs the question: What prompts BANDAs and BANDARAs to go places in Sri Lankan diplomacy?

Meanwhile, Lebanon’s current Permanent Representative to the UN does not have a Sri Lankan ancestry either even though her last name sounds like a shopkeeper from a remote village in Kuliyapitiya or Pelmadulla: Dr. Amal MUDALLALI, a former Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC.

Perhaps in Arab circles, her last name is pronounced as MUDALLALI.