Raphael Armattoe was born in the coastal town of Keta in Ghana on August 12 1913.
He received his early education in Togoland before completing his primary education in Denu, Ghana, before attending secondary school along the country’s Cape Coast.
As Togoland changed from German to British and French hands, Armattoe ended up being fluent in German, French and English whilst also having a strong grasp of Spanish and Portuguese.
He left for Germany in 1930 for further studies but apparently departed there for France amid the rise in Nazism. He continued his studies in anthropology, literature and medicine at the Sorbonne.
Armattoe later moved to Edinburgh where he qualified to practice medicine before accepting a locum job in Belfast.
Following that he 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. He later established and became the director of the Lomeshie Research Centre, named after his mother.
In 1947, Armattoe attended the Nobel Prize laureation ceremonies with his friend Erwin Schrödinger who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, him being the only African amongst the thousand intellectuals invited to attend the event in Stockholm
Schrödinger later wrote the foreword for Armattoe’s book The Golden Age of West African Civilization.
In 1948 he returned to West Africa, where he conducted more research. After about half a year of field research, he returned to Derry to write up his reports.
Armattoe wrote of studying the ancient herbal medicines of County Donegal and collected many African plants to study for medicinal applications. He presented his findings in 1949 and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for medicine and physiology.
Raphael Armattoe discovered the Abochi drug that saved millions of lives in Africa in the 1940s. It was very efficacious in treating water-borne diseases, ringworms and other allied diseases. The Nigerian government later bought the patent for thousands of pounds.
In 1950, the Armattoe family left Derry for Kumasi, where he set up a medical clinic, but also embarked on new adventures in poetry and politics. His two books of poetry, Between the Forest and the Sea and Deep Down in the Black Man’s Mind, are of continuing interest to students of African literature. The poems about his family and about African history are full of love and pride, but many of the poems express the author’s despair with the emergent leaders of the Gold Coast Colony.
In 1953 Dr Armattoe travelled to New York to address a United Nations committee. On his way back to Gold Coast, he visited Ireland and Germany. After falling ill en-route, he was treated in hospital in Hamburg where he died on December 21, aged only 40 years old.
A blue plaque in Raphael Armattoe’s honour was unveiled by the Ulster History Circle at 7 Northland Road, Derry, where he lived and practised as a GP from 1939 to 1945.