Under Garba’s leadership the UN had adopted by consensus a declaration on South Africa at the 16th special session of the Assembly in December 1989, a session devoted to the eradication of apartheid The declaration had outlined a process for change. This document, Mandela believed, would go down in history as one of the most important in the struggle of the international community against apartheid; the statement was proof of the unity of the world community on the South African question It was the culmination of Garba’s anti-apartheid work. He had led his own country’s long and determined fight against the regime in Pretoria.Joseph Nankeen Garba was born in 1943, at Langtang, on the Jos Plateau in central Nigeria. After military training in Nigeria and Britain, with time at the Staff College, Camberley, he became, at 19, the youngest officer in the Nigerian army. He rose to command the ?te Brigade of Guards in Lagos and was in charge of the personal security of General Yakubu Gowon, the head of the military government.He is mostly remembered in Nigeria for his role in July 1975 in the bloodless military coup during which Gowon, who at the time was in Uganda at a meeting of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was deposed It was Garba’s voice that announced the coup on the radio. He served there until 1989 and was chairman of the Special Committee Against Apartheid.In 1987, he published an account of his early years, Diplomatic Soldiering, which provided previously unknown details of the 1975 coup. After his work at the UN he returned to Nigeria and became a political analyst.Linda Melvern.

Stella Richman, television producer: born London 9 November 1922; married first Alec Clunes (marriage dissolved), secondly 1953 Victor Brusa (died 1965; one son, one daughter), thirdly 1966 Alec Hyams (marriage dissolved 1976); died London 24 May 2002. Stella Richman was an actress, a restaurant- and club-owner, and a television executive of rare vision, enthusiasm and – rarest of all – modesty. She was also a devoted and loving mother of her daughter, Cookie, and son, Paul, by Victor Brusa, with whom, until his accidental death in 1965, she ran the White Elephant Club, in Curzon Street, London It became the favourite showbiz rendezvous of the Sixties. She also ran the White Elephant on the River, in Pimlico, where the Sunday brunches, often family affairs, were notorious for their inexhaustible generosity. Light-hearted, she was never frivolous: her attention to detail was implacably sharp. I met her first in the early Sixties when she had just been made “story editor” at Associated Television (ATV). She was small, black-haired, vivacious, unpretentious and constantly enthusiastic.

She told me recently that she could not believe her luck in actually meeting writers (in those days, a shyer species). We, in our turn, could scarcely believe how accessible she was and how willing to take a risk with new talent.I had published only two novels, and had no mentionable credits in the movies or in television, but she immediately commissioned me to do a script from a Truman Capote story (“Answered Prayers”) and, when that “worked a treat”, I seemed to become Stella’s favourite young writer So, of course, did any number of her stable. She always had the attractive woman’s ability to make you feel that she was particularly interested in you.Her position may, at first, have been modest but, early in 1960, she was in effectively sole control of what were still called “plays” for Lew Grade’s highly successful company. Those were the days when an independent television franchise was said, by Roy Thomson, to amount to “a licence to print money”.Grade had the wit, and nerve, to give Richman a licence to generate a new species of television drama. The exercise of her freedom was limited by the solitary stipulation that it not have a disastrous effect on the ratings.

Richman proved, by her demanding eclecticism, that quality was not the enemy of popularity. Since there could (and can) be no rules for what the public liked, she assumed that, if she gave them the best work she could find, they would like that. She was always intelligent, never intellectual; and her instinct and others’ appetites coincided as much in her television work as in her restaurants.Having been an actress, Richman appreciated scripts in a way of which today’s executives are seldom capable. She could listen to dialogue as she read it, and visualise the piece on the screen.