Brian Donaldson

Britain's coming ambassador to the Big Island will take his seat in Antananarivo next October. Currently the High Commissioner to Namibia, Brian Donaldson, who turned 56 this week, is married to a woman named Elizabeth and the father of three grown children. Since entering the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in 1965, Donaldson has held a number of diplomatic posts in Africa. Soon after his career started, he was stationed in Algiers (from 1968 to 1971), before heading to Lagos between 1975 and 1979. After returning to the FCO in London, he served as second, and later first, secretary at the British embassy in Mauritius, and that experience, from 1985 through 1989, must have already given him the occasion to become familiar with the Big Island. He then served as deputy to the head of mission in Yaounde between 1989 and 1992 and, after a stint in Dhaka from 1992 to 1996, Donaldson went to work for the FCO's personnel management department between 1996 and 1997, before serving as head of the Information Department from 1997 to 1998 until he was nominated High Commissioner to Windhoek in 1999.