Sir Shridath S. Ramphal - "Sonny," as he is widely known - was born on October 3, 1928, in New Amsterdam, Guyana.

In 1947 he began his legal training at King's College, London, and was called to the bar from Gray's Inn in 1951. He returned to what was then British Guiana in 1953 and served as crown counsel in the Attorney General's Office and in 1961 he became Assistant Attorney-General. In 1965, he was invited by Forbes Burnham, then prime minister of British Guiana, to return home and become the country's Attorney-General and to begin drafting Guyana's independence constitution. This was the beginning of his ten years in national politics.

In 1967, the year after Guyana's independence, Ramphal was appointed Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. In 1972 he became Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a year later he took on the Justice portfolio as well. He was instrumental in shaping Guyana's non-aligned foreign policy. He was actively involved in Caribbean politics and in the major international organizations of which Guyana is a member - the United Nations, the Commonwealth, the Group of 77, and the Non-Aligned Movement.

He also strengthened relations between the countries of the Caribbean and those of Latin America. He was a key spokesman for the developing countries of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific in the negotiations with the European Community which resulted in the Lomé Convention of 1975. At the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1975, Ramphal was unanimously appointed the Commonwealth's second Secretary-General, the first from a developing country. After the end of his third term as Secretary-General of the Commonwealth in 1990, he served as head of the World Conservation Union (formerly known as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural resources) and played an important role in the Earth Summit in 1992.

His book Our Country, the Planet (1992), published just in advance of the Summit. In all he served on five international commissions on global development and the environment. Although he received a knighthood in 1970, he preferred the simple title of "Mr." He married Lois Winifred Ramphal (née King) in 1951, a nurse whom he met while he was a student in London. They have four children, two sons and two daughters.

Sonny Ramphal, who is Guyanese, served as Commonwealth Secretary-General for an unprecedented stint of 15 years, from 1975-1990, at a time when the Commonwealth was at the forefront of international progress and the struggles against racism and poverty. It saw the independence of Zimbabwe and freedom for Nelson Mandela; ground-breaking work on international debt, and recognition of the special development needs of small states; the first response to climate change, the creation of a Commonwealth of Learning which puts distance teaching at the service of students everywhere, and a challenge to global unemployment of young people.