CHERYL Packwood has the sort of resum? that would be admired anywhere, but this only child of noted author and librarian Cyril Packwood and Dorothy has tested the strength of glass ceilings on two continents, and here in Bermuda.

Born in New York, she graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1979. After Yale, and Harvard Law School, where she met her Mauritanian husband, Ms Packwood spent three years with the powerhouse law firm of Shearman and Sterling in New York before embarking on a new life with her husband in the "Paris of West Africa", as Abidjan, former capital of the Ivory Coast, was known before it descended into chaos and anarchy.

Back home in Bermuda, and after less than two years in a senior legal position with the Bermuda Monetary Authority, Ms Packwood is poised, at year-end, to take over the helm of the newly-merged Cingular Wireless as general manager.

She described her experiences, including those years of great personal and professional satisfaction in West Africa, before she was forced to flee francophone C?te d'Ivoire, to reporter COLIN O'CONNOR and photographer TAMELL SIMONS.

Q: Before we track back to your experiences in the US and Africa, can you tell me what you have been doing with the BMA since last summer?

A: I am currently the Director of Legal Services, Enforcement and International Affairs. I have been with the Authority since last September, and I have been overseeing the legal area and trying to start up, or at least conceptualise, an enforcement mechanism here in Bermuda. Also, I have been co-operating with foreign regulators, handling, or perhaps juggling, the different foreign regulatory requests that we make and that are made of us. It's a question of 'policing the perimeters', dealing with companies, or more often 'bogus' companies, who claim to be doing business or that they are licensed to do business in Bermuda, when in fact they are neither one nor the other.

That has been the first task of enforcement. We advise other regulators about them, and we contact the companies and if we can, we bring them in here, and tell them to stop these practices. Sometimes we're effective, sometimes not.

Q: So, your educational and professional background is in the law?

A: I am a trained and qualified lawyer. I attended Yale University as an undergraduate, then Harvard Law School, and worked on Wall Street for three years, with Shearman & Sterling. Then I went to Africa in 1990, and basically set up my own practice within an Ivorian law firm catering to an international, anglophone client?le who wanted to do business in francophone West Africa. I took the Love Boat! (laughs). I met my husband at Harvard. He's from Mauritania, a French-trained lawyer who had been admitted to the French bar, and he worked with a large firm, and suddenly decided he wanted to be the first Mauritanian to go to Harvard Law School!

Then he took the New York Bar exams, and worked at Coudert Brothers, and that's when we got together. We were both working very long and hard days in New York, when he got an offer to join the African Development Bank which was headquartered in Abidjan.

He went in August 1989, and I first went there on vacation in that October, and we got married in March 1990 at the Marriott Castle Harbour here. I went back for a while to Shearman and Sterling, then I took off for Abidjan in 1990.

My parents flew up from Bermuda, and there was a teary good-bye when they waved me off on Air Afrique from New York via Dakar, on a one-way ticket. They were a little concerned, because it's such a long way, and I am an only child.

Q: So when you got to Abidjan, you simply started to build your own anglophone law practice?

A: Well, I worked with an Ivorian firm, N'Goan, Asman & Associ?s. There used to be an American law firm in Abidjan which had all of the American, British, Dutch and German business, all that sort of client?le, including the supranationals like the World Bank, and N'Goan Asman wanted to break into that market, and here I was, this young attorney, and they said, 'You went to Harvard, you worked at Shearman Sterling, you're admitted to the New York Bar, you can do this!'

So, I started working with them, and it was like that clich? where you hang out your shingle, and sit and stare at the phone waiting for it to ring! But there's always someone who will give you your first try, and while I stayed busy with colleagues, I probably got my own first client after about five months, then it just blossomed from there. It was a fabulous experience, doing work on transactions of a magnitude that I would never have done, even at Shearman Sterling.

Q: If you weren't before, presumably you became fluent in French quite quickly?

A: Yes, I learned French under duress! Although I still have an Ivorian accent when I speak French, it's not the classic Parisian accent. Well, when I first arrived in Abidjan, they had just had what they called at the university, literally a 'blank year', because there had been student uprisings with a student killed and the university was closed for so long, the whole year was a write-off.

It was during the time of the first President, Felix Houphouet-Boigny. I was there for the election in 1990 when he ran against Laurent Gbagbo, and won by a landslide. I met Gbagbo a few times before he became President, and he was quite a character.

Houphouet was the 'old crocodile', the respected elder, mystical; he had a presence, and if there can ever be such a thing, he was a 'good dictator'. There were problems with some ethnic groups, like the Bet?, killings back before my time there, and so there were ethnic tensions between the Baoul?, Houphouet's ethnic group, and the Bet?. But it settled down, Houphouet had an amazing ability to call people in and tell them to be good, and behave yourself, and it worked, at least for a while.

He represented C?te d'Ivoire in the French National Assembly when the country was a French colony, and he had been President for over 30 years, until he died in 1993. He was considered the 'father of the country' because he had brought the country to Independence in 1960.

Q: I have heard that Abidjan was the 'jewel' of West Africa. How much financial and cultural influence did the French have there after Independence?

A: There were so many different names ? 'the pearl of Africa', 'the Paris of West Africa', and they were all true! Some of the best French food I ever had was in Abidjan. All of the finest wines, and in the '80s, they used to say they were bathing in champagne because the economy was so strong.

They didn't discover and start to exploit some oil finds until the late '90s but back then Ivory Coast was the number one cocoa producer in the world, and at that time, I think, the number two producer of coffee.

Houphouet got credit for that, for getting the investment in and opening the economy up to international trade, because other West African countries could have done the same, the soils were not so different, but they didn't.

Houphouet built roads, he built hospitals and schools and universities. He wanted his people to be educated, and they were. Ivory Coast had some of the best schools and universities in the region and the children who went there are working all over Africa and in France. Children came from all over West Africa to go to school there. You can't say the same thing today, because the schools have deteriorated since Houphouet died.

When I arrived there, 90 per cent of the people had electricity, and potable water. He didn't keep all of the money!

Q: When did you conclude it was too dangerous to stay there, and did you come back to Bermuda straight away?

A: I lived through several coups d'?tat, or attempts, and I brought the children to Bermuda in September 2002 when a coup split the country apart.

By that time, I was general manager of a GSM cell phone company, and we had been having major fights with the government over corrupt judicial decisions, retroactive licences, renegotiations of our inter-connect agreement, and I was the leader of the fight. I put together a coalition of all of the GSM operators to fight the government over these matters.

The secret police had arrested my chairman in the middle of the night, shot his dog, and probably would have killed him except that other people were there. I was in Bermuda when I heard about it.

The secret service held him at their station for two months without any arraignment or charges, without him seeing his wife or family or a lawyer. They let him see a doctor for five minutes to check his blood pressure. He was released a week or two before the coup on September 19.

That Monday evening, nine 'red berets' jumped the wall at our network operations centre and fired on it with semi-automatic rifles and machine guns. I took that as a personal threat! My chairman had been detained, and I had been fighting the government for a couple of years, and I took that as a message that it was time to leave.

I went to the centre when I heard about the attack, and I couldn't believe the damage, but there was a curfew, and I couldn't stay there or ask anyone else to stay there. They could have been shot.

I got on the first plane I could get on, the following night. That night, the British Embassy and the US Embassy called me, because I was registered with both of them, and they told me that they were telling all of their citizens who could leave to get out.

That day, a friend with three young children had her home completely ransacked by soldiers who looted the whole neighbourhood, and she was completely traumatised and was gone the next day. I lived near the Interior Minister and heard a lot of bullets firing in his area, and learned later that he had been killed.

Q: It seems to be getting worse. How much do you follow it, or can you follow it, and do you still have friends there?

A: I talk to friends there about once a week. They can't call here for some reason, but I can get them from here. A lot of friends have left, but a lot of Ivorian friends are there. I must say that I saw the problems coming. That's a problem throughout Africa. My husband is from Mauritania, by the river that's the border with Senegal, but his family lands were across the river in Senegal. He doesn't speak Wolof, the main language of Mauritania, and he is not Wolof but Peule. When the war broke out in 1988 between Mauritania and Senegal, they had no access to their family property.

It's a problem everywhere; Ivory Coast is a country of about 70 different ethnicities and languages, with Dioula the traditional market language, and French the official language.

Q: Ivory Coast had one of the best economies in Africa. What are the prospects now?

A: I don't have a very positive view, unfortunately. To come back from what has happened will take a lot of work and struggle. You only have to look at the other countries in Africa that have gone through strife and civil war to see how long it takes ? you look at Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Congo.

All of these countries have not come back. It was ten years in Liberia between the first coup and full-scale war breaking out. Even to get back from where they are today will be long and hard. You have to build back trust in the international community, bring back the foreign investment.

I talk to my friends there, and all of the law firms in the country have closed; there's simply no business, and people are starting to starve.

But Ivory Coast is beautiful, and it will come back. It's such a rich country, and some of my Ivorian colleagues are in France, but they will go back. They love their country, and they are proud to be Ivorian, but it depends on how much international confidence has been destroyed.

Q: Let me ask if it was your experience with Telcom in Abidjan that led to your new career with Cingular Wireless?

A: Yes, my time with CORA, the GSM operator I managed in Abidjan, was exciting and challenging. By the way, the name wasn't an acronym; a Cora is a traditional African guitar. When I first arrived in Abidjan, the difficulties in telecommunication were extraordinary.

In some places in Africa, it takes seven to ten years to get a fixed land line, and in the Ivory Coast, the average wait was over a year. Africa has the lowest 'tele-density' in the world, but we could put a cell phone into someone's hand in 15 minutes! You can just imagine the powerful economic effect that had, even the women in the marketplace who could now organise foreign markets for their produce, or cloth or crafts.

It was phenomenal. From 1996, when cell phones were introduced in Abidjan to when I left in 2003, it went from a market of some 1,000 subscribers to over one million. I was proud to be a part of that development. I was managing director, and I had wonderful people working with me, and everyone was Ivorian. It was great to be able to hire capable Ivorians and not to have to bring in expats.

Q: A perfect segue from Ivorianising, if that's the word, to Bermudianising the top position at Cingular Wireless. How will it be to deal with such a saturated market? Does Bermuda not have the most cell phones per capita in the world?

A: Of course, in Africa, you didn't have to be particularly brilliant to make millions, because it was such a green market. Bermuda is a very sophisticated market, and demands sophisticated products and pricing. I think that I have a lot to learn, but then I hope I have a lot to offer! I have three boys, aged 13, nine and seven. My husband is still with the African Development Bank, which evacuated from Abidjan to Tunis in February of 2003, due to the chaos. My oldest son is in boarding school in France, because there is obviously no French school here, and when we first came back, we didn't know how long we would be here, we thought perhaps six months, so we kept him in school in France.

My other two children are at East End Primary, which I love, and I am very pleased with the public school system in Bermuda, at least at the primary level. They are doing a very good job with my children.

I don't have a lot of free time, but we go to the beach in summer; we are regulars at Tobacco Bay at weekends, and I spend a lot of time in St. George's, where I live, and where my family has always lived.

Q: Can you tell me something about your family history?

A: Of course. We have been by the Wellington Oval for generations. My great-grandfather was David James Packwood, and he bought that property from the Spurling family.

Jim Packwood worked as a butcher for Mr. Spurling; the story I heard is that he ran away from home and lived with the Spurlings at their then family home at Wellington, became their butcher, and later had his own horse-and-buggy business, taking people from St. George's to Hamilton and back in stately fashion.

In fact, I believe that all of his horses were buried on our property. He married Orelia, and their first property at Wellington was called Orelia Cottage. He loved her so much he named the cottage after her!

Orelia and Jim had one child, Cyril Alexander Packwood, who worked on the base as a mechanical engineer. He played cricket for St. George's during the golden years of Cup Match, and in fact, my great-grandfather played in the very first Cup Match, and played for 14 years.

It was only when my son had to do a paper on Bermuda's sporting heroes, that I read about David James Packwood having played in the first Cup Match, and the book gave him credit for the initial idea of having an annual match between Somerset and St. George's. I was astounded, and my son wrote it up, and read it at school, and I was so proud of him.

Cyril Packwood married Gladys Outerbridge, so I am related to half of Bermuda through the Outerbridges at Bailey's Bay. They also had one child, my father Cyril Outerbridge Packwood, Jr., who wrote . My father married Dorothy Cunningham, and I am their only child. Three generations of single children!

My father went to school in the US when he was 15, and he had planned to be a dentist. But when he was at Fisk University, he met one of the famous poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Arna Bontemps, who was chief librarian there.

So my father fell in love with history and library science, and he decided he wanted to be a librarian. It was very difficult for a black Bermudian male to come back and be hired as librarian in these segregated days, and he had to apply for the position he eventually got over and over again, and eventually came back as Chief Librarian in the '80s.

Before that, he had been Head Librarian at Countee Cullen Library in Harlem, and Head Librarian at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, which was part of the City University of New York. He published in 1976.

You know, in 'small world' terms, my best friend at Yale was Wendy Williams, who turned out to be the granddaughter of my father's mentor Arna Bontemps! And her mother, who never remembers anyone, remembered my father from Fisk!

Q: Is it good to be back, or is your heart still partly in Africa? Where do you feel you belong?

A: Well, I haven't lived in the US for 15 years, and most of my professional career was spent in Africa. Do I feel African? No, not really. I felt very much the foreigner, the expat there, but I did come to love and respect a group of people in the Ivory Coast, and I miss them very much.

I do feel very much like a nomad, having lived all over the world. Does that make me less American? No. Does that make me less Bermudian? No.

It's great to be back in Bermuda, but of course, part of my heart is in Africa and will remain there, with my friends and the people I love there.

Just as part of my heart is in New York where I have friends and family, and here in Bermuda, which is the home that my father helped me grow to love and respect.