Pauline M. Clerk

Pauline Miranda Clerk was born on 25 May 1935 in Accra to Richard Alfred Clerk, a colonial civil servant who worked on the Gold Coast and in Nigeria. Her siblings were Robert, Richard and Caroline. She was a member of the historically important Clerk family of Ghana.[5] She was the great-granddaughter of Alexander Worthy Clerk, a Jamaican Moravian missionary who arrived in the Danish Protectorate of Christiansborg, now the suburb of Osu, in Accra in the Gold Coast in 1843, as part of the original group of 24 West Indian missionaries who worked under the auspices of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society of Basel, Switzerland.[5][6] A.W. Clerk was a pioneer of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana and a leader in education in colonial Ghana, co-founding a boarding middle school in Osu, the Salem School in 1843.[7] Her paternal great-grandmother, Pauline Hesse (1831–1909) was from the Gold Coast, and had Danish, German and Ga-Dangme ancestry.[8] His great-grandaunt was Regina Hesse (1832 ─ 1898), a pioneer educator and school principal who worked with the Basel Mission on the Gold Coast.[8]

Notable among her relations was her granduncle, Nicholas Timothy Clerk (1862 -1961), a theologian and missionary who was elected the first Synod Clerk of the Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast from 1918 to 1932.[5] N. T. Clerk was a founding father of the all boys’ boarding high school, the Presbyterian Boys’ Secondary School established in 1938.[9] Her uncle, Carl Henry Clerk (1895 -1982) was an editor, agricultural educator, school administrator, Presbyterian minister and journalist who was elected the fourth Synod Clerk of the Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast from 1950 to 1954 as well as the Editor of the Christian Messenger, the news bulletin of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana from 1960 to 1963.[10] An uncle, Theodore S. Clerk (1909 -1965) was the first Ghanaian architect of the Gold Coast who planned and developed the port city of Tema[11][12] P. M. Clerk's aunts were Jane E. Clerk (1904–1999), a Gold Coast pioneering woman education administrator and Matilda J. Clerk (1916 -1984), the second Ghanaian woman to become a physician.[13] Her cousins were the academics Nicholas, George and Alexander Clerk.[14][15][16][17][18]

Pauline Clerk was educated at the Osu Presbyterian Girls’ School and Achimota School, both in Accra. She joined the Gold Coast Civil Service in the 1950s and became a foreign service official – a career diplomat attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.[2][3][4] Between 1962 and 1965, she was Ghana's diplomatic representative in Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin).[2][3][4] Pauline Clerk was the diplomatic secretary for Information and Culture at the Ghanaian embassy in Paris.[19] A French and German speaker, she also served as the Ghanaian diplomatic representative in Togo and the former East Germany.[2][3][4] In the 1980s, she was appointed an advisor at the Office of the PNDC.[2][3][4] Upon the return to civilian rule in the early 1990s, she became a senior advisor at the Ghanaian presidency under the leadership of Jerry John Rawlings.[2][3][4]