Anne Spoerry

Anne Spoerry (13 May 1918 – 2 February 1999) was a French-born physician, based for most of her career in Kenya as a "flying doctor" affiliated with AMREF.

Early life and education

Anne Marie Spoerry was born in Cannes, France, the daughter of Henry Spoerry and Jeanne Schlumberger. Her brother was architect François Spoerry. As a girl she attended the Francis Holland School in London. While she was still in medical school in Paris, she joined the French resistance during World War II. She was arrested in 1943, and spent some time in the German concentration camp at Ravensbrück for her activities.[1]

After World War II, Spoerry studied tropical medicine at the University of Basle.[2]

Career

Anne Spoerry departed France for Africa in 1948, finding work as a doctor at a women's hospital in Yemen, and eventually settling in the Kenyan highlands, where she lived on a cooperative farm and practiced medicine. She also founded the first Girl Guides troop in the region.[2] At Kenyan independence, she decided to stay and purchased a small farm. In her forties, Spoerry learned to pilot a small plane so that she could practice medicine over a wider rural area, and reach island populations.[3] In 1963 she became the first female member of the AMREF "Flying Doctors," delivering babies and administering vaccines along with other medical care. In her work, she also carried mail and basic supplies to remote locations.[4][5]

Richard Leakey praised Spoerry's work, saying, "She probably saved more lives than any other individual in east Africa – if not the whole continent."[1]

Personal life

Spoerry's memoir, On m'appelle Mama Daktari, was published in French in 1994.[6]

Anne Spoerry died in 1999, age 80, after a stroke in Nairobi; she was buried on the island of Lamu.[2] A team of seaborne doctors and veterinarians in the same archipelago named their project for Spoerry.[7]

After she died, Spoerry's experiences at Ravensbrück were revealed to have been more sinister than previously understood. In the 1940s, she had confessed to collaborating with Nazi prison officials by administering fatal doses of medication to others, when she was herself an inmate.[8][9]

She once had been known as “Dr. Claude,” a notoriously brutal kapo during her time as an inmate at Ravensbrück, a women-only Nazi concentration camp. A post-World War II French court found her guilty of “anti-French and anti-patriotic behavior” in 1946. The following year she was arrested in Switzerland, having been charged with torture by the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects. Her father bailed her out of jail, but the possibility of further trials and imprisonment loomed, and with the help of her family’s connections, she fled to Africa.[10]

In 2018 author and researcher John Heminway published a biography of Spoerry, which examined in detail her wartime activities and then her work in Africa.[10]

References

  1. 1 2 John Heminway, "A Legendary Flying Doctor's Dark Secret" FT Magazine (21 May 2010).
  2. 1 2 3 Fiammetta Rocco, "Obituary: Anne Spoerry" The Independent (9 February 1999)
  3. ↑ Patrick Moser, "Anne Spoerry: Flying Legend of the Bush" UPI Archives (23 August 1987)
  4. ↑ W. F. Deedes, "Mama Daktari's High Flying Life of Adventure" The Telegraph (3 January 2001)
  5. ↑ "Anne Spoerry" in Laura Lynn Windsor, Women in Medicine: An Encyclopedia (ABC-Clio 2002): 188. ISBN 1-57607-392-0
  6. ↑ Anne Spoerry, On m'appelle Mama Daktari (J. C. Lattès 1994). ISBN 2-7096-0947-9
  7. ↑ "The Anne Spoerry Sailing Doctors of Lamu" French Embassy in Nairobi (10 May 2010)
  8. ↑ Macharia Gaitho, "Revealed: The Darker Secrets of Kenya's Legendary Flying Doctor" Daily Nation (26 May 2010)
  9. ↑ Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2015) ISBN 978-0-385-53911-1
  10. 1 2 Heminway, John (2018). In Full Flight: A Story of Africa and Atonement. New York: Knopf. ISBN 978-1-5247-3297-4.

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