SierraEye: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 12 March 2026:
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.
He was a central figure in some of Sierra Leone’s most consequential legal battles. He argued landmark constitutional proceedings before the Supreme Court, contributed to the drafting of the Companies Act 2009 and the Bankruptcy Act, served as Chairman of the General Legal Council, sat on the Rules of Court Committee, and championed the Sierra Leone Law Review, serving as a Managing Editor and writing for its maiden edition.
When the Bar Association sought counsel to challenge an executive appointment to the office of Attorney-General made without parliamentary approval, Macaulay argued the case. He lost on the merits. He regarded the hearing itself as a victory. “To be heard mattered,” he was heard to say. “Process mattered. Principle mattered.” Those six words amount to a professional philosophy.
He was known, by the small number of intimates who earned the privilege, as “BMJ” or, to a still smaller circle, “Section 2,” a nickname bestowed by his late partner Shakib Basma in ironic tribute to his unyielding adherence to the text of the law.
He was meticulous in dress, his bow-tie and barrister’s bands in court, his immaculately tailored African wear without, and meticulous in practice. He insisted on yellow legal pads and disciplined file notes.
He was said to have been the first to arrive at chambers and the last to leave, and colleagues who visited him in hospital in his final weeks found him with jazz playing softly and his laptop open, discussing recent jurisprudence from other jurisdictions as if the meeting were a tutorial.
That word, tutorial, captures something important about his character. He gave generously of his knowledge to junior colleagues, often without their asking, always without expectation of thanks.
He referred clients, shared authorities in court to help opponents, and sent dark neckties, by clerk, to a younger barrister whose courtroom dress had fallen short of the standard.
He could be formidable, even intimidating; colleagues recall being on their best behaviour in his presence, not from fear but from a wish to be thought worthy. Yet he was also, to those he trusted, disarmingly funny, quick-witted, fond of anecdote, and possessed of a wicked sense of humour that surfaced without warning in the middle of the most solemn proceedings.
At a colleague’s wedding where the bride’s vote of thanks ran considerably long, he leaned over and murmured: “You’d better buy your friend ear muffs.”
He is survived by his sisters Bertina, Bernadine, and Berette Macaulay, and by a large extended family of the law, the juniors he trained, the colleagues he steadied, the institution he served.
He was preceded in death by his beloved wife Tacey, whose absence he bore with characteristic privacy; and by sisters – Avril and Berencia.
His good friend Conrad Carlton-Carew recalled visiting him at Choithram Memorial Hospital shortly before he was evacuated to Senegal for further treatment. “Mac on the run,” he greeted him. Berthan Macaulay looked up and replied: “Mac run no more.”
Berthan Macaulay Jnr, Barrister, was born on 17th April 1953. He died in Dakar on 24th February 2026, aged 72.
Editor’s note
Published courtesy of SierraEye
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