MANY who work for the African Medical Research Foundation (Amref) draw their inspiration from the life of Dr Anne Spoerry, who qualified as a doctor in Paris after the German occupation of 1940, learned to fly at 45, and spent the rest of her working life giving medical service to the people of East Africa.
| Flying doctor: Dr Anne Spoerry at the controls of her Piper Cherokee plane |
Until nearly 80 years of age, she piloted her Piper Cherokee Lance PA-32, a fast and powerful machine, to the remotest corners of Kenya and beyond, defying all hazards. The Africans who came to love her called her Mama Daktari, the title she chose for her short autobiography. Before she ended her professional life, she had clocked up 8,000 hours' flying time "but when all is said and done", as she put it modestly, "that only amounts to a total of 333 days".
As a young woman in Paris during the war, she ran a safe house for the Special Operations Executive, who were making parachute landings in France. Eventually she was arrested and incarcerated in Ravensbruck. Her family's seaside home in Provence was razed to the ground by the Germans.
Recovering from these experiences, she took her medical finals in Paris, spent a year in Basle acquiring a diploma in tropical medicine and began her career in Africa and a life of constant adventure. In August 1982, for example, she learned on the Amref network of the coup d'etat in Nairobi. A state of emergency was declared, no vehicles were allowed on the road and all civilian aircraft were grounded.
Then she heard on the same network an SOS from a hospital near Lake Victoria. Two girls had had their faces badly bitten by a mad dog. "I was the only doctor available and by sheer good luck I had a supply of anti-rabies vaccine in my paraffin-powered fridge."
With a young French doctor, who was staying with her, Spoerry defied the ban, flew at a great height to avoid being identified and delivered the vaccine for the hospital into the hands of an old man on a bicycle. Throughout the flight there was complete radio silence. Hers was the only aircraft aloft in the whole country. Her flying instructor had warned her that "there are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots". But Anne Spoerry defied such axioms.
A doctor who had flown with her frequently told me that after a long hard day, she was apt to nod off while at the controls of her aircraft. "Are you awake, Anne?" he would call nervously. Providence kept an eye on her. She carried always a big Swiss Army knife, round which many legends attached. She used it for cutting pills, dismantling radios and for eating her meals but never, she insisted, for medical purposes.
There were four people who made Amref what it is today. Sir Michael Wood had come to Kenya in 1947 with a wife and two young children, with the idea of farming. Moved by the appalling injuries Africans suffered from domestic fires, he returned to England to learn plastic surgery under Sir Archibald McKindoe, a New Zealander, who also had a farm in Africa.
A third founder, Tom Rees, came from a Mormon family in Salt Lake City. Sent to Nairobi on a medical mission, he too was appalled by the injuries he saw. In 1963 Anne Spoerry joined them. "I must admit," she wrote later, "I love the hours I spend in the shade of my aircraft, or under a shady tree, behind a little table covered with medicines of all kinds.
"The crowds surge around the table calling out the Swahili name they have given me - Mama Daktari, Madam Doctor. Sometimes they add N'dege, which means both bird and plane."
Such people give the lie to those who declare that we took more out of Africa than we put into it.
