Books For Africa Remembers Walter Mondale
Books For Africa (BFA) mourns the passing of our dear friend and supporter, former Vice President Walter F. Mondale. For many years he served with his college classmate and friend, former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, as honorary co-chairs of BFA’s Jack Mason Law & Democracy Initiative. The late Jack Mason was a federal magistrate judge and a friend of both Mondale and Annan. Since 2008, the Law & Democracy Initiative has shipped 108 law and human rights libraries to 23 African countries. Vice President Mondale’s leadership in the project made a difference in the lives of young law students and lawyers and inspired them to help build more democratic societies across the continent.
During his years in Washington he became friends with Kofi Annan, then UN Director of Peacekeeping Operations, who, like Mondale, had attended Macalester College. When Books For Africa launched its Law & Democracy Initiative in 2008, Vice President Mondale agreed to become co-chair of the Advisory Board along with Secretary General Annan.
Vice President Mondale spoke at Thomson Reuters in November of 2010 when Books For Africa established a formal partnership with Thomson Reuters to supply legal reference law libraries for BFA to send to African law schools, bar associations and other legal organizations.
Mondale spoke at and attended several other BFA events during the past 15 years. In 2018, he was honored along with Kofi Annan at a St. Paul celebration of the 30th anniversary of Books For Africa and the 10th anniversary of its law book program.
In 2011, Mondale co-authored an OpEd with Annan on the Rule of Law in Africa, and another with Thomson Reuters Vice President Sharon Sayles Belton in 2020.
Vice President Mondale's words of encouragement will remain on our law book program webpage: "It is sad but true that many law schools in Africa have no books for classroom teaching and few books in their library. Through this innovative program, with BFA the world’s largest shipper of school books to Africa and Thomson Reuters, the world’s largest publisher of law books, the rule of law can truly be put into practice."
Vice President Mondale will be greatly missed in Minnesota and around the world. We are forever grateful for his leadership of our law book program and his support for the broader mission of Books For Africa to end the book famine in Africa. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.
View more photos of Mondale's work with Books For Africa in our photo album.
