Berthan Macaulay Jnr, Barrister who became the conscience of Sierra Leone’s legal profession and the quiet guardian of its rule of law, has died aged 73. He the pre-eminent private practitioner at the Sierra Leone Bar for more than half a century, a lawyer’s lawyer, as his peers without exception called him.
Berthan combined intellectual rigour with a personal integrity so consistent and undemonstrative that it became, for a generation of younger barristers, both a standard and a reproach. He was rarely the most loudly celebrated figure in any room he entered. He was invariably the most respected.
He was born into one of the most distinguished legal families in Sierra Leone’s post-independence history. His father, Berthan Macaulay Snr Q.C., was the first indigenous Attorney-General of Sierra Leone, appointed in 1963 by Sir Milton Margai shortly after independence from Britain.
His mother, the late Agnes Awunor Renner, served as Acting Chief Justice of Sierra Leone. The weight of such inheritance might have flattened a lesser character. Berthan Jnr chose instead to be defined entirely on his own terms, carving a reputation that owed nothing to ancestry and everything to personal discipline.
He read Law at King’s College London, graduating with LLB Honours in 1974, and was called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn the following year, an inn his father had also attended.
He was admitted to the High Court of Sierra Leone in 1977 and, later, to the Supreme Court of the Gambia. His practice would span more than five decades, conducted almost entirely from Freetown, where he became senior partner of Basma & Macaulay, a firm that the international legal directories, Chambers Global and IFLR1000 among them, consistently ranked as one of the leading practices in the country.
He was rated Highly Regarded by IFLR1000 across banking, energy, infrastructure, mergers and acquisitions, and project finance: a breadth that spoke to a mind comfortable at the intersection of commercial ambition and constitutional principle.
Source: The Sierra Leone Telegraph.
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