Manel Abeysekera

Irangani Manel Abeysekera was born on 14 August 1933, the daughter of civil servant and later senator E. W. Kannangara and Mrs Kannangara. She later described herself as born into a "wonderful family" and named her father as her hero, even wishing as a child that she had been a boy so she could copy his Ceylon Civil Service career. She had siblings Lakshman and Swarna. A self-described home bird tied to her mother's apron strings, she was educated in Colombo before higher study abroad.

She attended Methodist College, Colombo, which she called the "number one girls' college," and secured the all-island second place in her Senior School Certificate. Reluctance to board at Peradeniya delayed university plans until her brother, then at Oxford, urged her to apply there. She read modern history at Somerville College, Oxford, graduating in 1957, and later became an Honorary Fellow of the college. After joining the Overseas Service she studied modern languages as a postgraduate at New Hall, Cambridge, and completed Commonwealth Foreign Service training in London. Methodist College's motto, "We Scatter Light," was often cited as a lasting influence.

Selected in 1958 as the first woman recruit to the Ceylon Overseas Service (later Sri Lanka Foreign Service), she trained in Colombo departments and in Britain, then served as a probationer in Rome and as Third Secretary in London. In 1970 she became chargé d'affaires in Bangkok, the first woman in that role for Ceylon. From 1974 she was Chief of Protocol, organizing the 1976 Non-Aligned Summit and writing the ministry's protocol manual. She was Ambassador to Thailand from 1980, including leadership during the 1982 Alitalia hijacking crisis in Bangkok, then Ambassador to Germany (1988-1992) with accreditation to Austria and Switzerland. She held director-general posts in press and political affairs before retiring in 1993, then consulted on training and gender.

In Bangkok she met Hector Abeysekera, a United Nations diplomat. They married in 1973, when she was forty; she later called meeting and marrying him the most wonderful thing that happened to her there. Funeral notices after her death described her as beloved wife of the late Hector Abeysekera, loving sister of Lakshman and Swarna, and much loved aunt of Priyanthi and Lakshmi. She wrote warmly about friends, relatives, and even a German Shepherd companion named Fuzzy during her Bonn years. She was a practicing Christian; her funeral was held in the Christian section of Borella Kanatte Cemetery.

Abeysekera credited a happy temperament, her parents' legacy, and Christian faith for sustaining a 35-year career. She believed dilemmas strengthen character and that "plain sailing without problems never strengthens you." She argued that diplomats must advise politicians candidly even when advice is unwelcome, and she pushed for women's empowerment after seeing secondary status accorded to women at early UN conferences. She wanted protocol to assert a small nation's dignity, not empty ceremony, and she institutionalized that view in a written protocol manual.

She opened the Sri Lanka Foreign Service to women and became a benchmark for protocol excellence after the 1976 Non-Aligned Summit. Tributes after her death called her the Iron Lady of Sri Lankan diplomacy and credited her with training standards that outlived her active service. Many later women ambassadors followed the path she cleared. Her memoir Madame-Sir remains a primary first-person record of mid-century Ceylon and Sri Lankan diplomacy, crisis negotiation, and the gendered dilemmas of pioneering women officers.

Somerville College, Oxford, named her an Honorary Fellow. Contemporaries and later diplomats routinely cited her as Sri Lanka's first woman career diplomat and first woman Chief of Protocol. Cuba invited her to advise on preparations for the 1979 Non-Aligned Summit after her Colombo performance. After her death in 2026, Colombo Telegraph and other outlets marked her as a national diplomatic pioneer.

Her principal published work is Madame-Sir: Career and Dilemmas of the First Woman Diplomat in the Sri Lanka Foreign Service (Stamford Lake, 2010), launched at the Colombo Public Library. Sunday Times Plus carried extended interviews and reviews around the launch. After her death, The Sunday Times, Lanka News Web, Colombo Telegraph, and other Sri Lankan outlets published obituaries and tributes summarizing her career and the Madame-Sir nickname.

In her memoir and in John Gooneratne's launch address, she described post-1977 political witch-hunting in the Foreign Ministry, including being told she was on a UNP "hit list" of supposed Bandaranaike supporters, and confronting a minister who investigated protocol courtesies shown to former prime minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike. She insisted on being questioned directly rather than investigated behind her back. These episodes illustrate politicization of a career service rather than personal scandal.

Manel Abeysekera died on 10 September 2026 at the age of 93. The Sunday Times reported that her funeral was held at Borella Kanatte Cemetery in Colombo. A funeral notice published with tributes named her as Irangani Manel Abeysekera, listed family members, and said she passed away peacefully, with viewing at A. F. Raymond's and burial in the general Christian section of Borella Kanatte. The specific medical cause of death was not made public in major obituaries.