Tribute: PROF VICTOR ANOMAH NGU: THE IROKO TREE HAS FALLEN
The translation into glory of Prof Victor Anomah Ngu FWACS on June 14, 2011 was received with numbing shock by the entire Fellows of the West African College of Surgeons (WACS). The passage of a man widely regarded as the founder of the West African College of Surgeons indeed marked the end of an era. Born in the Southern Cameroon town of Buea in 1926, Prof Ngu attended primary and part of his secondary school in Sasse, South-Western Cameroon, then a part of Nigeria. He later transferred to Government College, Ibadan where he completed his secondary school education and was subsequently admitted as one of the 12 foundation medical students of the then newly established University College, Ibadan (UCI), Nigeria in 1948.
Victor Anomah Ngu at WACS Annual Scientific Conference in Sierra Leone in 2007
He completed his undergraduate medical training at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, London where he won the Max Bonn Prize in Pathology at graduation in 1954. This prestigious prize had been won by such eminent persons as Alexander Fleming for his work on the discovery of penicillin. In 1959, Victor Anomah Ngu completed his postgraduate training and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh FRCS (Ed) as well as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England FRCS (Eng). In 1962, he completed a Masters programme in Surgery at the University of London.
Establishing the WACS
In an often told lore of the WACS much detailed in the College annals, Ngu, the new surgeon had met and discussed with Dr Charles Bowesman, an Irish colleague while they both sailed back to West Africa in 1959. They spoke on the need to create a forum for surgeons practicing in West Africa to meet periodically, exchange ideas and share experience. Thus, the tiny seed of what has grown into the entirety of the West African College of Surgeons was sown. In April 1960, Ngu, then a senior registrar at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria travelled along the West African Coast in his Volkswagen Beetle car with registration number WAJ 991 along with his fiancée, Miss Clara Ugbodaga, canvassing the idea of forming what later became the Association of Surgeons of West Africa (ASWA). They met Drs E. Evans-Anfom, William Leigh, Nicholas de Heer, Charles Easmon and Emmanuel Badoe during the trip. The proposal received quite an enthusiastic response and culminated in the inaugural meeting of Association of Surgeons of West Africa in Ibadan by December 1960 where Victor Anomah Ngu became the first Honorary Secretary of the ASWA under the distinguished chairmanship of the first President of the Association, Sir Samuel L.A. Manuwa. In 1969, ASWA, a body that had fostered great social interaction amongst surgeons in the sub-region, was transformed into a training body and achieved full collegiate status in 1973. A chapter devoted to this story in Knife in Hand - The History of the West African College of Surgeons, described it as “an idea whose time had come”. Thus, his pursuit of a dream 5 decades ago has led to a College with a membership base of over 5000 Fellows from Cape Verde to the Congo basin and whose members largely sustain the surgical manpower needs of the West African sub-region following the devastating brain drain that brought the health sector to a near collapse in the past three decades. Typical of his humble personality, Ngu eventually became the 6th President of the Association 11 years later.
Prof Ngu’s brilliant surgical career spanned the same fifty years’ exponential existence of the very College he helped establish. He joined the University College Hospital, Ibadan as a senior registrar in 1960, became a lecturer in 1962 and was Professor of Surgery, University of Ibadan, Nigeria from 1965-1971. He was recalled to his native country of Cameroon and appointed Professor and Head of Surgery at the newly established University Centre for Health Sciences, University of Yaoundé from 1971-1974. From then on, he had an enviably uninterrupted and unblemished public career helping to shape tertiary education, health care and research in Cameroon and beyond. He was the Vice-Chancellor, University of Yaoundé, 1974-1982, Director General of Scientific and Technical Research, Cameroon, 1982-1984 and Minister of Public Health, Cameroon, 1984-1988. He was the Director of Cancer Research Laboratory (CUSS) from 1984-1991 and the Pro-Chancellor, University of Buea from 1993-2004.
A consummate researcher forged in the crucible of many a great scientists, Ngu’s forte was his penchant for oncological hypotheses. A master thinker, his mind constantly churned with the whys and why nots of many natural events and he contributed substantially to medical literature on Burkitt’s lymphoma and cancer immunotherapy. He sought evolutionary reasons and set forth brilliant hypotheses on diverse medical phenomena including fever thermodynamics, chronic infections and the role of viruses in the causation of human cancers. The last two decades of his life were devoted to HIV, an endeavour he said was only a natural extension of his work on cancers induced by viruses. The relatively underdeveloped, third-world African setting was not a deterrence to Victor Anomah Ngu’s fertile imagination. He believed in his works and passionately laboured to find an immunotherapeutic approach to the scourge of HIV. Reviewing Ngu’s prodigious contributions to the fight against HIV in Africa, the April 2012 edition of Africa and Science magazine likened Ngu’s death to ‘’when a fighter leaves the battle front’’ Professor Ngu won many accolades for his landmark scientific works and unassailable service to humanity. He was President of the International Union Against Cancer, Founding member and President of the Nigerian Cancer Society, President of the Association of African Universities, member of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Group of the Tropical Disease Research of World Health Organization(WHO), member of the Advisory Committee on Medical Research of WHO, member of the Consultative Group of the UNICEF International Child Development Centre, Florence, President, Bernard Fonlon Society and many others.
He won the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award in Clinical Cancer Chemotherapy in 1972. He gave the 5th Sir Samuel Manuwa Memorial Lecture titled “A Surgeon Takes Another Look At Malignant Tumour Disease” at the West African College of Surgeons annual scientific conference in Monrovia, Liberia in 1988. He was a recipient of the Dr. Samuel Lawrence Adesuyi Award and the Medal awarded by the West African Health Community in 1989 and that of the African International “Recherche et Innovation” Trophee in 2002. For the fight against HIV/AIDS and his work on VANHIVAX, Prof Ngu won “The Rev. Leon H. Sullivan Achievement Award” of the O. I. C. International in 2003. He was decorated with many national honours in his native country of Cameroon. In 2007, Professor Victor Anomah Ngu was awarded the Honorary Fellowship of the South African College of Surgeons, the first black man to be conferred with this honour.
In 2000, the West African College of Surgeons established a scientific lecture in honour of Prof Ngu for his outstanding contributions to the founding and development of the West African College of Surgeons. That is the Professor Victor Anomah Ngu Lecture, awarded by the WACS to younger Fellows of the College to showcase their seminal research works. It is keenly competed for biennially and its recipients are accorded high regards in College protocols. Professor Olajide Olaolu Ajayi (Past President, WACS) gave the first Professor Victor Anomah Ngu Lecture honoris causa at the Annual Scientific Conference of WACS in Nouakchott, Mauritania in 2001. Other subsequent Victor Anomah Ngu Lecturers were Professors Rudolph Darko, Olufemi Babalola, Adedoyin Adesanya and Olubunmi Olapade-Olaopa.
Victor Anomah Ngu at the WACS Annual Scientific Conference in Cotonou in 2005.
How shall Prof Anomah Ngu be remembered? He was humble beyond humility. Yet, an aura of humane gentleness haloed his persona. He was unpretentious, always bemused by anyone making a fuss about his great presence. He deeply cared for his family. He accepted us warmly into his home and called us his children. He was a hypothetist, who dreamt beyond the pervading mediocrity of our continent and proved you could achieve your dreams in Africa without soiling your hands and your name.
The WIPO Magazine wrote of him two years ago, commenting that at 78 years, Professor Ngu retained both his joy in discovery and his commitment to science in the service of mankind. When asked why he chose the rarified field of surgical hypotheses, Professor Victor Anomah Ngu quipped “Ideas are the bases for discoveries. Most of the time, people try to solve problems without clearly defining or knowing what the real problem is. If you can’t define a problem, you can’t discover”. Musing about his life-long love of scientific discourses, Victor Anomah Ngu(VAN) had the following to say only a year ago “In a sense I’ve lived well. I’m 79 years old and I think it’s because I’ve been doing something scientific that has kept me going so long. I wake up at two in the morning and I get an idea and I can’t go to sleep. Isn’t that wonderful?” Vintage VAN.
Victor Anomah Ngu was a compassionate person. Cho Ransome, one of his assistants at his Clinique d’Espoir (Clinic of Hope) in Yaounde, Cameroon recalled a story of his childhood told by Victor Anomah Ngu himself: He once carried a sick classmate of his on his back and walked barefoot from Sasse to the nearest hospital several miles away down in Victoria and, according to him, Victor Anomah Ngu only realized his classmate had died when he got to the Hospital! On the door of his clinic where he cared for HIV patients, VAN hung a plaque "Be Patient, God Is Not Finished Yet With Me ". He savoured every moment spent in the company of others and until infirmities of old age set in, he revelled in the yearly fellowship with his peers at College conferences. Although Clara, his wife of many years died several years ago, VAN retained a deep loved for his three children who also lavished unreserved love on him.
The College received an avalanche of tributes when the news of the demise of this great man broke. Professor Sats Pillay of South Africa described Victor Anomah Ngu as a “pioneering giant and peer to the surgical fraternity”. The epithets from the Fellows of the West African College of Surgeons were florid: “A Lion Goes to Sleep”; “The Iroko tree is fallen”; “The great fish swam away into the deep”. If Victor Anomah Ngu could read these lines, he would wave them off as effusive and rather grandiloquent for his plain humble self. But then, if he didn’t say that, he won’t be VAN!
The West African College of Surgeons family shall miss you, sweet good old man. You were a father to many. You were a true father to me.
Professor Christopher O. Bode
Professor of Surgery & Immediate Past Secretary-General, WACS.