Raphael Armattoe

Last updated
Raphael E. G. Armattoe
Dr Raphael Armattoe.jpg
Born12 August 1913
Keta, Gold Coast
Died22 December 1953
Hamburg, Germany
NationalityGhanaian
Known forAbochi drug against parasites, 'Cure' for Swollen-Shoot

Raphael Ernest Grail Armattoe (12 August 1913 - 22 December 1953) was a Ghanaian scientist and political activist. [1] He was nominated for the 1948 Nobel Peace Prize and was a campaigner for unification of British and French Togoland. He was called by the New York Post "the 'Irishman' from West Africa", and the BBC producer Henry Swanzy referred to him as the "African Paracelsus". [2]

Contents

Biography

Early life and education

Armattoe was born at Keta in the Gold Coast (in what is now the Volta Region of Ghana). He received his early education in Lomé, Togoland before completing his primary education in Denu, Gold Coast. Between 1925 and 1928 he attended secondary school at Mfantsipim School, Cape Coast. [3]

As Togoland changed from German to British and French hands, Armattoe ended up being fluent in German, French and English; whilst also being fluent in Spanish and Portuguese. [3] He also spoke his native Ewe language. He left for Germany in 1930 for further studies, with most of his tertiary education was in Germany and France.

He apparently left Germany for France due to rising Nazism. He continued his studies in anthropology, literature and Medicine at the Sorbonne. [4]

Research, science and medicine

Armattoe moved to Edinburgh, where he qualified to practice medicine.

He then got a locum job in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and following that worked at the Civil Defence first-aid post in Brooke Park, Derry, between 1939 and 1945. After the Second World War, he opened a medical practice at his home on Northland Road in Derry. [4] He later established and became the director of the Lomeshie Research Centre, named after his mother.

In 1947, he attended the Nobel Prize laureation ceremonies with his friend Erwin Schrödinger, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, being the only African amongst the thousand intellectuals invited to attend the event in Stockholm. [3] Schrödinger later wrote the foreword for Armattoe's book The Golden Age of West African Civilization. Armattoe later successfully applied for an anthropological research grant worth £3,000 at the time from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. At the age of just 35 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1948. [5] The Abochi drug which can cure guinea-worms, toothaches, bronchitis, boils and allied diseases patent was later bought by a prominent Nigerian drug company at the time. [3]

At this stage, he started being more involved with writing and giving talks, especially relating to anthropology. He was described by some who knew him as a marvellous doctor and a good speaker. [6] Through association with international scientific societies he is regarded as one of the very few scientists at the time to understand atomic energy. [3]

Later in 1948 he returned to West Africa, where he conducted research mainly on Ewe physical anthropology but also set up a medical clinic at Kumasi in the Ashanti Region. He also turned his attention to poetry, writing and politics. His first collection of poems was Between the Forest and the Sea (1950). His next collection, Deep Down in the Black Man's Mind, was published in 1954, after his death. [4]

Politics

Armattoe and Kwame Nkrumah first met at the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester; [7] a conference attended by many future Ghanaians politicians as well as Hastings Banda, Jomo Kenyatta and W. E. B. Du Bois. [8] Though they both favoured independence for the colonies, Nkrumah was centrist while Armattoe was federalist. He joined the Ghana Congress Party rather than Nkrumah's Convention People's Party. [4]

Armattoe maintained contact with W. E. B. Du Bois who partook in his study Testament to Youth. [9] [10] [11]

He belonged to the Ewe ethnic group who he sought the unification of its people who were divided by colonial powers between British Togoland, the Gold Coast and French Togoland; he wanted its people united as one Ewe nation-state being active within the Togoland Congress, advocating for Ewe Unification. [4] [6]

In 1953, Armattoe addressed the United Nations in New York City regarding Togoland and the "Eweland Question", which Die Welt at the time regarded as one of the most important documents in African History in the 20th Century. [3] [12]

Family

His father Glikpo Armattoe was a merchant of Palime, Togoland, who traded mainly with the Germans and also studied local indigenous languages. [13] [4] Armattoe was married to Swiss-born Leony Elizabeth Schwartz, who was also known as "Marina". They had two daughters, the elder, Irusia, being born in Derry. Armattoe and his family lived at Kumasi in Ghana until his death. [14]

Death and legacy

Armattoe fell ill and died in a hospital in Hamburg. His wife reported that he said he had been poisoned by some unknown persons. He had apparently been attacked previously by supporters of Kwame Nkrumah, [4] [6] for withholding the cure to swollen shoot unless the government approached him in a respectful manner having chosen to distance himself from Nkrumah's Government. [3] [15]

Inscribed on his gravestone in Hamburg are the words "Africa's Greatest Nationalist". [3]

A blue plaque in his honour was unveiled by the Ulster History Circle at 7 Northland Road, Derry, where Armattoe lived from 1939 to 1945 and carried on his practice as a GP. [16] [17]

Essays and publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ghana</span> Country in West Africa

Ghana, officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and Togo in the east. Ghana covers an area of 239,567 km2 (92,497 sq mi), spanning diverse biomes that range from coastal savannas to tropical rainforests. With over 32 million inhabitants, Ghana is the second-most populous country in West Africa. The capital and largest city is Accra; other cities are Kumasi, Tamale, and Sekondi-Takoradi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kwame Nkrumah</span> Leader of Ghana from 1957 to 1966

Francis Kwame Nkrumah was a Ghanaian politician, political theorist, and revolutionary. He was the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana, having led the Gold Coast to independence from Britain in 1957. An influential advocate of Pan-Africanism, Nkrumah was a founding member of the Organization of African Unity and winner of the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union in 1962.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Flag of Ghana</span> National flag

The national flag of Ghana consists of a horizontal triband of red, yellow, and green. It was designed in replacement of the British Gold Coast's Blue Ensign.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sylvanus Olympio</span> President of Togo from 1960 to 1963

Sylvanus Épiphanio Olympio was a Togolese politician who served as prime minister, and then president, of Togo from 1958 until his assassination in 1963. He came from the important Olympio family, which included his uncle Octaviano Olympio, one of the richest people in Togo in the early 1900s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Komla Agbeli Gbedemah</span> Ghanaian politician (1913–1988)

Komla Agbeli Gbedemah was a Ghanaian politician and Minister for Finance in Ghana's Nkrumah government between 1954 and 1961. Known popularly as "Afro Gbede", he was an indigene of Anyako in the Volta Region of Ghana.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ewe people</span> West African ethnic group

The Ewe people are a Gbe-speaking ethnic group. The largest population of Ewe people is in Ghana, and the second largest population is in Togo. They speak the Ewe language which belongs to the Gbe family of languages. They are related to other speakers of Gbe languages such as the Fon, Gen, Phla Phera, Gun, Maxi, and the Aja people of Togo, Benin and southwestern Nigeria.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kojo Botsio</span> Ghanaian politician

Kojo Botsio was a Ghanaian diplomat and politician. He studied in Britain, where he became the treasurer of the West African National Secretariat and an acting warden for the West African Students' Union. He served as his country's first Minister of Education and Social Welfare from 1951, as Minister for Foreign Affairs twice in the government of Kwame Nkrumah, and was a leading figure in the ruling Convention People's Party (CPP).

Joseph Emmanuel Appiah, MP was a Ghanaian lawyer, politician and statesman.

Articles related to Ghana include:

John Willie Kofi Harlley was a Ghanaian police officer who was Vice Chairman of the National Liberation Council and the first Inspector General of Police in Ghana from 1966 to 1969. He was a member of the three-man presidential commission which carried out presidential functions during the 1969 democratic transition in Ghana and in the first year of the Second Republic.

The Anlo Youth Organisation was a political party that existed in the Gold Coast and later Ghana. It campaigned for the Ewe people under British rule to stay within Ghana after independence. It ended by merging with other parties to form a united opposition to the Convention People's Party.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ghana–Togo relations</span> Bilateral relations between the two West African countries

The strains in Ghana–Togo relations stretch back to pre-independence days.

Kwame Sanaa-Poku Jantuah, originally known as John Ernest Kwame Antoa Onyina Jantuah, was a Ghanaian politician, lawyer and diplomat. He was the last survivor from the first all-African cabinet set up by Kwame Nkrumah in the Gold Coast prior to independence.

The Accra Evening News was a daily newspaper established in the Gold Coast in 1948 by Kwame Nkrumah. The paper's appearance marked the foundation of the press in the country as a powerful means to mobilize people, and was followed by publication of the Morning Telegraph of Sekondi appeared in January 1949, and then the Daily Mail of Cape Coast.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nkrumaism</span> African socialist political ideology

Nkrumaism is an African socialist political ideology based on the thinking and writing of Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah, a pan-Africanist and socialist, served as Prime Minister of the Gold Coast from 1952 until 1960 and subsequently as President of Ghana before being deposed by the National Liberation Council in 1966.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">African Americans in Ghana</span> Demographic resident in Ghana

The history of African Americans in Ghana goes back to individuals such as American civil rights activist and writer W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), who settled in Ghana in the last years of his life and is buried in the capital, Accra. Since then, other African Americans who are descended from slaves imported from areas within the present-day jurisdiction of Ghana and neighboring states have applied for permanent resident status in Ghana. As of 2015, the number of African-American residents has been estimated at around 3,000 people, a large portion of whom live in Accra.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ewe Unification Movement</span>

The Ewe Unification Movement was a series of west African ethno-nationalist efforts which sought the unification of the Ewe peoples spread across what are now modern Ghana and Togo. It emerged as a direct political goal around 1945 under the colonial mandate of French Togoland, however the ideal of unifying the group has been an identifiable sentiment present amongst the ethnicity's leadership and wider population ever since their initial colonial partitions by the British and German Empires from 1874 to 1884. While there have been many efforts to bring about unification, none have ultimately been successful due to both the platform itself often being a secondary concern for political leadership, or inter/intrastate conflicts overshadowing them.

Daniel Ahmling Chapman Nyaho was a Ghanaian statesman, diplomat and academic. He was the first African appointee at the United Nations. He served as the Secretary to the cabinet in the first Convention People's Party government which shared the colony's administration with the colonial government. He also served as Ghana's ambassador to the United States of America and Ghana's permanent representative to the United Nations. In 1958, he became the first Ghanaian headmaster of Achimota College.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Political history of Ghana</span>

The Political history of Ghana recounts the history of varying political systems that existed in Ghana during pre-colonial times, the colonial era and after independence. Pre-colonial Ghana was made up of several states and ethnic groups whose political system was categorized by 3 main administrative models; Centralized, Non-centralized and Theocratic states. In the colonial era, the British Empire employed different forms of government among its four territorial possessions in the Gold Coast. Indirect rule was implemented in the late 19th century after its success in Northern Nigeria. From the 1940s, native Ghanaians yearned for more autonomy. This resulted in the several constitutional reforms as well as the creation of the office of the Prime Minister in 1952.

Kodzo Afelete Ayeke was a Ghanaian politician, teacher, journalist, lawyer, and author. He was a member of parliament for Ho West, getting twice elected into parliament in 1954 and 1956 as a Togoland Congress member before joining the United Party on the ban of the Togoland Congress in 1958. As a journalist, he founded the Togoland Vanguard the first ever newspaper in the then Trans-Volta Togoland. An ethnic Ewe, he published two novels in the Ewe language, Asitsu Atoawo and Hlobiabia.

References

  1. ↑ Amenumey, D. E. K. (2002). "1". Outstanding Ewes of the 20th Century. Profiles of Fifteen Firsts. Vol. 1. Accra: Woeli Publishing Services. pp. 1–12. ISBN   9964-978-83-9.
  2. ↑ Philippa Robinson, "Dr. Raphael Ernest Grail Armattoe (1913 – 1953): Physician and writer", Dictionary of Ulster Biography.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Ephson, Isaac S. (1969). Gallery of Gold Coast Celebrities, 1632-1958. Ilen Publications.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Philippa Robinson. "R. E. G. Armattoe: the 'Irishman' from West Africa". History Publications Ltd. Archived from the original on 20 March 2012. Retrieved 25 August 2010.
  5. ↑ "Armattoe, R. E. G.", in Makers of Modern Africa, London: Africa Journal Ltd, 1981, p. 61.
  6. 1 2 3 Fraser, Robert (4 September 1986). West African Poetry: A Critical History. Cambridge University Press. p. 364. ISBN   978-0-521-31223-3 . Retrieved 25 August 2010.
  7. ↑ Nkrumah, Kwame (1957). The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. Nelson. ISBN   978-0-7178-0293-7.
  8. ↑ Adi, Hakim; Sherwood, Marika (1995). The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited. New Beacon Books. ISBN   978-1-873201-12-1.
  9. ↑ "Letter from R. E. G. Armattoe to W. E. B. Du Bois, November 16, 1950". credo.library.umass.edu. Retrieved 16 May 2023.
  10. ↑ "Lomeshie Research Centre Testament to Youth questionnaire, ca. July 1947". credo.library.umass.edu. Retrieved 16 May 2023.
  11. ↑ "Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Lomeshie Research Centre, September 24, 1947". credo.library.umass.edu. Retrieved 16 May 2023.
  12. ↑ "Armattoe, Raphael", in Keith A. P. Sandiford, A Black Studies Primer: Heroes and Heroines of the African Diaspora, Hansib Publications, 2008, p. 46.
  13. ↑ Ephson, Isaac S. (1969). Gallery of Gold Coast Celebrities, 1632-1958. Ilen Publications.
  14. ↑ "Irusia Armattoe". Ray White. Archived from the original on 15 July 2011. Retrieved 25 August 2010.
  15. ↑ Austin, Dennis (1964). Politics in Ghana, 1946-1960. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-285046-1.
  16. ↑ "Blue plaque for physician, anthropologist and writer from West Africa", Ulster History Circle, 20 September 2012.
  17. ↑ "Blue plaque for Dr Raphael Ernest Grail Armattoe", Ulster History Circle, 2 October 2012.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.