Five Africans who have risen to become some of the most powerful people in European governments

Paul Boateng

Boateng was born in the UK to a Ghanaian father and a Scotswoman. But when he was four, he was taken to Ghana to be raised as his father was a minister in the government of Kwame Nkrumah.

At 15, he, his mother and sister, fled back to the UK after his father was arrested in the wake of Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966.

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In the British public since the 80s, Boateng has become an MP, the first mixed-race cabinet minister in the UK and now a member of the House of Lords.