![]() ![]() Or Tidjane Thiam, managing director of Aviva International, the world's fifth-largest insurance company, which counts Norwich Union and the RAC among its businesses. Or Claire Ighodaro, former president of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and director of the Banking Code Standards Board. And you almost certainly are aware of the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, who tops the women's list.īut you may not know of Dr Mo Ibrahim, who recently sold his mobile phone business for $3.4bn and who is about to launch the world's biggest philanthropic prize for African leaders - at $5m, it dwarfs the Nobel Peace prize or Stanley Musesengwa, chief operating officer of the sugar giant Tate & Lyle or Trevor Faure, general counsel for American conglomerate Tyco International, who has been voted one of the 20 best corporate lawyers in the world and who grew up on a Luton council estate with a single mum and ate free school dinners.Īnd then what about Michael Prest, an oil trader with offices in five countries, whose company turned over more than £1bn last year? Or Tandy Anderson, who co-founded and is chief executive of the country's number one model agency, Select. Well, you have probably heard of Damon Buffini, the king of private equity barons in the City, who has just been appointed to Gordon Brown's business advisory panel we ranked him number one on the men's list. There are no active sportswomen on the list and a just handful of entertainment figures, most of whom are behind the stage or camera. He is credited with having been one of the biggest influences in ending the civil war that engulfed Ivory Coast for years. The list contains just two active sportsmen: Lewis Hamilton (who makes it alongside his father, Anthony we've dubbed them Team Hamilton) and Didier Drogba, not because he scored 30-odd goals for Chelsea last year, but for his efforts as a peacemaker in his homeland. In the end, some of the people we unearthed were as big a revelation to us as we hope they will be to you. But we were more interested in accuracy, in so far as it is possible to be precise with something so subjective, than social engineering. Certainly when we started the project, we thought that there was a possibility that would be the case. It is probably fair to say that if most people were asked to name 100 of the most influential African Caribbean people in Britain, their list would contain more than a smattering of footballers, athletes, boxers, singers and rappers. Some six months after we began the process, we have our list.Ĭoming at a time when the necessity for role models from Britain's black communities has never generated more headlines, it looks as though our timing - purely coincidental though it was - has been spot on. We ended up with about 400 people and by applying the level-of-influence criteria, after a lot of (sometimes heated) debate, we whittled them down to 50 women and 50 men, from whom we then chose the respective top tens. To find candidates for the list, we did the old-fashioned thing and used our contacts (the three of us who were most involved in its compilation - myself, Justin Onyeka and Adenike Adenitire - have more than 40 years of experience as journalists between us, much of it dealing with people from our communities), consulted widely with experts in every profession or occupation we could think of and, of course, we supplemented that with months of research. The more anyone had of both, the more likely they were to make the final cut. In the end we settled on a relatively simple formula - first, we would measure a person's influence within their own sphere of expertise and then look at how far their influence spread into the wider world. Our first task was to set the criteria for inclusion. ![]() We were tired of seeing the usual suspects rolled out every time the role model debate hit the news, and we were bored with the idea that the only black people on the planet who were doing anything constructive all lived on the other side of the Atlantic. We were sick of people telling us that African Caribbean people weren't getting anywhere. As the author Alice Walker once put it: 'The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.' But as well as putting the feelgood factor back into the community, we also wanted to explode some myths. ![]()
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