Guy’s Hospital: Mural honouring African health workers unveiled

“It’s an honour and a privilege to be featured in a piece this big.”

Metian Parsanka’s gaze is fixed on a giant image of herself on the side of the Nuffield Suite at Guy’s Hospital in Southwark, south London.

The mural, which features her and five other African women who have worked in healthcare in the UK, has a background motif of medicinal plants from the continent.

“It communicates the multicultural workforce that makes up the NHS,” Ms Parsanka says.

She is a specialist occupational therapist in the accident and emergency department at St Thomas’ Hospital, part of the same trust as Guy’s.

Ms Parsanka, who was born in a small village in Kenya, came to the UK when she was 14 and is the only person featured in the mural still working at the trust.

She says she likes her image, adding: “It’s much bigger than I thought it would be.

“I am surprised, privileged and happy to be able to represent my culture and profession amongst such accomplished women.”

The artist behind the project, Dr Michele Curtis, says she does not think people realise how brave women are to leave their home country, not knowing how they are going to be received, and “yet still achieve so much”.

Dr Curtis told BBC London that the mural, which is her third, was the product of a research initiative by the Young Historian’s Project which included young people of African and Caribbean descent.

She says she hopes she has captured the bravery in the women’s faces and their eyes, “so that people feel connected to them”.

The other women featured on the mural are:

• Kofoworola Abeni “Ivy” Pratt – she was born in 1910 in Lagos, Nigeria. She trained as a nurse at the Nightingale School at St Thomas’ Hospital from 1946 to 1950. She has been dubbed “the Florence Nightingale of Nigeria” due to her influence shaping nursing there.
• Matilda Clerk – she was born in 1916 in Larteh, Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). She was the first Ghanaian woman in any field to be granted a scholarship abroad to study medicine, at Edinburgh University, which she attended from 1944 to 1949. She became the first Ghanaian woman to earn a postgraduate diploma.
• Dzagbele Matilda Asante – she was born in Ghana in 1927 and worked as a teacher before migrating to the UK. In 1947, she arrived in Dover and began training as a nurse at Barnet Hospital, Central Middlesex Hospital in Harlesden, and later studied health visiting at Battersea Polytechnic.
• Blanche La Guma (née Herman) – she was born in 1927 in Athlone, South Africa, and trained as a nurse and midwife in the 1950s. She was an activist against the Apartheid regime. While in London, she completed a refresher course in midwifery in the 1960s and conducted house calls.
• Dr Irene Elizabeth Beatrice Ighodaro (née Wellesley-Cole) – she was born in 1916 in Freetown, Sierra Leone. She studied medicine at the University of Durham from 1938 to 1944, becoming the first West African-born female doctor in Britain.