Se eye ndzeye pa enum yi a, na eye barima (Gather the five virtues, then you are a man). --Fante tribal proverb

I. Enyimnyam (Dignity)
"Once my father did something that quite shocked me." Kofi Annan is talking. He is nestled in the back of a royal-blue Mercedes, part of a six-car motorcade flying along the streets of Accra, Ghana. Air conditioning purrs inside the car. Outside, motorcycle outriders scream past, inches from the doors, sirens singing as they race ahead. Annan shakes his head and gives the tiniest of sighs. "I asked them to skip the outriders. I asked for a nice, low-key day out." A grin. The streets are lined with men and women who become ecstatic as the cars breeze by. Their heads flop back, their eyes sparkle and their arms shoot up into the air. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is also in town this weekend. Local gossips say he has driven across the desert in a motorcade of 420 cars--a romantic, incredible tale in this poor country. Perhaps, Annan wonders, the crowds think this motorcade is Gaddafi's? "Father," they shout as the cars pass. "Father!" They recognize Annan. A nice, low-key day out.

"I was a kid," Annan continues in his quiet voice, decorated with a lively British accent. "I witnessed a scene in my father's office once which shocked me a bit. He was looking over a set of accounts. He had a question or something, so he called one of the junior managers, and of course the fellow came rushing right in. But the fellow was smoking. And he put the cigarette--still lit--into his pants pocket because my father didn't smoke and didn't approve of people who did. And he stood there as he talked to my father, with his pocket burning, obviously in some distress. And finally he finished the business and walked out. And I was really shocked. And I said to my father quite angrily, 'Why did you do that to him? You made him put his cigarette in his pocket.' And my father looked at me and really gave me a lecture. He said, 'I did not. There was an ashtray here; he could have used that. He could have excused himself and gone and thrown it out. He could have continued smoking. He put the cigarette in his pocket. He need not have done that.' My father looked at me and said, 'Today you saw something you should never do. Don't crawl.'"

In Ghana, Annan's father is still revered. His name was Henry Reginald Annan--the first and middle names were a legacy of British colonialism, when ambitious Africans named their children as if they were bound for Oxford. Annan happens to be a sturdy Scottish name, and from time to time business associates believed that H.R. Annan was a Highlander--until they met him. In fact, Henry Reginald Annan was a noble of the Fante tribe. He was possessed of a legendary personal reserve. His son recalls seeing him steam up only once or twice--including the day of the cigarette lecture. "He was a man who was very centered, very secure," Kofi says. "His intuitive dignity was almost innate."

Annan's predecessors as U.N. Secretary-General--Kurt Waldheim, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Boutros Boutros-Ghali--were a gray parade of deliberately inoffensive floats. But Annan, in his three years on the job, has shown himself to be a brass band of hope, ideas and energy. His critics fault the slow pace of reform he has brought to the U.N. They argue that even armed with a management degree from M.I.T., he is badly overmatched by the U.N.'s thick bureaucracy. But mostly they chew away at his idealistic, moral world view. The U.N. continues to have its problems--the embarrassment of having peacekeepers taken hostage in Sierra Leone, the contempt of the U.S. Congress. But these haven't diminished the high polish he has brought to the job. Annan, 62, is a miracle of our internationalized world: born in Ghana, educated in the U.S. and Europe, a career U.N. diplomat who became Secretary-General in 1997. As Secretary-General he has begun to thrust the U.N. into new realms of global life. In internationalist circles, his vision of a moral world order is debated with ferocity.

What Annan proposes is nothing less than a world filled with dignified people. A world where Sierra Leonean rebels would have enough innate dignity to not chop off the arms of infant girls. A planet where India and Pakistan would be dignified enough not to blow up each other, where the indignities of chemical weapons would be a thing of the past, where the world's rich would be, yes, dignified enough to worry about the millions of Africans who will die of aids in the next two decades. This is the kind of world Annan imagines. It is the sort of world his very presence--serene, quiet, intent--suggests.

Next week, when 159 heads of state convene in New York City for the U.N. Millennium Summit--the largest such gathering ever (and doubtless a traffic nightmare that the city will not forget soon)--Annan will press this idea further. In the past few years, he has been refining a policy that calls on the states of the world to step in wherever and whenever human lives are being consumed in conflagrations of hate, disease or poverty. He has not always succeeded. On his watch, in places like Rwanda and Bosnia, he has seen thousands die as they awaited help. He is haunted by their faces--and determined to perfect his organization so those mistakes never occur again. >>MORE