In 1960 a photograph seemed to show Jaja Wachuku, Nigeria’s first ambassador to the UN, asleep in a UN meeting.
There was more to it.
After a racist comment, Wachuku is said to have asked for a chance to object. When that was refused, he pretended to sleep on purpose as a protest, declining to take part in the session.
Years later, as Nigeria’s foreign minister, he stepped into the Rivonia Trial and pressed British and American officials to lean on apartheid South Africa not to give Nelson Mandela and his co-accused the death sentence.
Mandela and the others were in the end given life imprisonment rather than death.
He was the man who looked as if he was “sleeping” at the UN but was making a point against discrimination.