Richard Edis, who died at the age of 59 following a long and painful terminal illness, was that rare breed of diplomatic bird which was never completely at home in an aviary designed by the Foreign Office.

His personal skills, knowledge of security techniques, considerable charm, and often fearless nature helped bring peace to war-torn Mozambique and ended a conflict between the quasi-Marxist government in Maputo and a South African-backed rebel movement called Renamo. It was a conflict, which over a 20-year period cost hundreds of thousands of lives and turned a once promising former Portuguese colony into the world's poorest country.

In 1992, after years of studying Portugal's possessions in Africa and Lisbon's way of withdrawing from them following a fateful Lisbon coup in April 1974, Richard Edis was appointed British ambassador to Mozambique.

A fragile peace agreement had been brokered between the threatened government and Renamo and Edis persuaded a colleague to join the embassy staff and fly him to the mountain retreat of rebel leader Afonso Dhaklama.

Sadly, we will have to wait a long time to discover what the canny British diplomat offered the Pretoria-financed rebel to stay in the peace process.

Whatever it was, it worked and Dhaklama - a hard man to trust, a dangerous one to confront - came to like the British diplomat and eventually value his advice. When Renamo won only small support from those able to vote in the country's first democratic election, Dhaklama came within an inch of taking his large and well-equipped army back into the bush.

Fellow diplomats and media admirers assert that it was the untiring efforts of an already visibly ill Richard Edis which saved the day.

Richard John Smale Edis was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and St Catharine's College, Cambridge. He entered the diplomatic service in 1966 and his first posting was a junior one at the High Commission in Nairobi.

A mixture of hands-on diplomat and academic, Edis followed his time in Nairobi with a three year stint at the United Nations in New York and between 1984-1988 was deputy leader of the UK delegation to the conference on disarmament in Geneva.

It was during that time that South Africa stunned the world by signing the Nkomati accord with Mozambique's Samora Machel (later killed in a plane crash), which promised ''peace in our time'' in Southern Africa. In return for a promise it would withdraw support from the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa told the Mozambique government it would drop further military support for Renamo.

It was a fragile peace which did not last.

After his triumph in Mozambique, this amusing and highly intelligent man was appointed ambassador to Tunis and last year he was appointed British ambassador to Algiers. So he stayed on the continent he so much loved and which, in turn, tended to respect him as a man of honour and vision and - no-one who knew him would ever question this - great personal courage.

Richard Edis CMG. British diplomat, born September 1, 1943, died on April 10, 2002.

Trevor Grundy