"Africa’s emergence into the modern world will present and give to today’s world something new and original" |
“I don’t think it matters where you live,” Michael had said,“ it’s how you live that matters. It’s our job to live as a bridge in Africa – a living bridge between two worlds, two races and even two times in history.”
The words of AMREF Founder Michael Wood had special significance to the life of his wife, Lady Susan Wood.
She was born in a mud hut in the Belgian Congo to missionary parents. A year after her birth, her parents, who had been in Africa for three or four years, decided to go home on leave, making an arduous foot safari across Central Africa to the Nile to board the steamer to Alexandria and from there another ship to England.
Susan’s parents returned to the Congo, leaving their children to be raised at boarding schools in England, but Africa was to remain with her for the rest of her life.
The Second World War was to have a profound impact on Susan’s life, claiming the lives of her father and brother. By this time, she was in Oxford training to be a nurse, which is where she met Michael Wood. He, too, had lost a brother in the Navy and was training to be a doctor at the Middlesex Hospital.
They were married in 1943, and were determined to live abroad, for Michael had chronic asthma exacerbated by the damp weather in England, and it was to Africa that Michael and Susan turned at the end of the war. On arrival in 1947, Susan felt that she had come home.
The Woods and their children lived in Nairobi, where Michael ran a busy surgical practice.
One day Michael said to Susan, “If we want to know Africa and get to know the Africans, we have to go farming because farming is the way of life of the country.” They quickly sold their house and bought a hundred-acre farm in the highlands of Limuru.
As Kenya’s independence struggle began, the Woods believed that not only was change inevitable, it was desirable. Susan said “We were living in a community that was still exclusive and driven by the colour bar, and somehow this did not fit with our view of the post-war world”.
At around this time, Susan and Michael flew their own plane across Africa to visit the famed mission doctor Albert Schweitzer in his leper colony and hospital situated in Lamberene in the Congo. He inspired them to help Africa by using ‘the tools of their time’.
Michael bought a new farm on the slopes of Kilimanjaro in newly independent Tanzania, where he was to be reunited with fellow AMREF founder Sir Archibald McIndoe, with whom he had trained in England.
During the early days of AMREF, Susan took on the administration of the farm, and opened a small clinic every morning for mothers and babies and farm workers with minor ailments. "I had a very full and happy life on the farm and I did not regret making the enormous change in my life."
After 15 years on the farm, the land was claimed by the Tanzanian Government, and the Woods returned to Nairobi.
Susan began a small business, creating beadwork and pottery. This has now grown into a mini industry- Kazuri, meaning small and beautiful - and employs 200 people.
In 1985, Michael retired and was awarded a Knighthood by the Queen. He later started an organisation called FARM Africa, which was to encourage and support small farmers. He died in May, 1987. Susan said at the time “He was a man who had lived the dreams of his youth and I am sure that he died in that happy knowledge.”
Susan lived in Kenya until her death on May 16, 2006. She was 88. All but one of her children, also live in Africa, and are involved in different ways, in building the continent.
Looking back at her life, she says “In my old age, this is a source of wonder and thankfulness. Africa does cast a spell on those who live and serve her. Children born or brought up here are said always to return. In the long view, Africa’s emergence into the modern world will present and give to today’s world something new and original, a spiritual reawakening when the old world is tired and has used up its spiritual inspiration. To have been part of this is an immense fulfillment.
Our family of over five generations will soon be forgotten, but what we have done, will, in the strange history of time, be there ever afterwards.
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