AKINLOLU FAWEHINMI HISTORICAL CORNER: DR. AUGUSTUS ABAYOMI-COLE. NIGERIA BORN DOCTOR WHO CURED EUROPEANS OF MALARIA

This is the story of the herbalist who helped British colonialists survive Malaria in the early 1900s.

Born in Abeokuta to Sierra Leonean missionaries in 1848. He was 4 when his parents returned to Sierra Leone. In Freetown he was put under the tutelage of the great A.B.C. Sibthorpe at Hastings, a suburb of Freetown. He received a Bachelors degree in Medicine from the Fourah Bay College.

After graduating from Fourah Bay College, he taught at the Evangelical United Brethren Church School, he was in his mid-twenties when he left his home country of Sierra Leone and moved to the United States where he was ordained a Minister in the American Wesleyan Methodist church. He later qualified as a medical doctor and became a Fellow of the Society of Apothecaries (F.S.A.) of the United States. Shortly thereafter, he became an affiliate of the National Association of Medical Herbalists in the United Kingdom.

Combining his scientific training with a wealth of knowledge on the healing properties of traditional herbs, roots and leaves, his fame soon spread to all parts of West Africa. His cures were a mixture of the orthodox and the traditional. He cured rheumatic pains, skin diseases such as “alay”, nervous and eye diseases, etc. During the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic, he invented a mixture of “tea-bush”, “camphor”, lime and spirit which saved many lives at a time when the influenza death toll was so high globally just like the 2020 pandemic.

He was appointed by the Colonial Government to help find a cure for Malaria when it became a drastic taker of lives, mainly amongst the Europeans living in West Africa. His preparation of herbs which consist mainly of ‘broomstone leaves’ and ‘agiri’ proved to be effective until his patients returned within a week to complain of the same symptoms. With his research he was able to prove that the cause of malaria was as a result of mosquitoes breeding in stagnant pools of water around houses. His name is Dr. AUGUSTUS ABAYOMI-COLE and he died in 1942 at the age of 93.

Dr Akinlolu Fawehinmi lives in Lagos Nigeria