People · 1905–1977
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A fisherman's son from Abonnema was diagnosed with leprosy at fourteen. Inside a leprosy colony in Abia, he wrote more than 600 hymns.
Ikoli was born in 1905 in Abonnema, a Kalabari town in the creeks of the old Niger Delta. His parents, Munabo and Odibo, named him Ikoli. The Kalabari lived by fishing and trading, and as a child he was taught both. But what he loved was music. Between 1915 and 1918 he went to several schools, including the Bishop Crowther Memorial School, and he played in the school brass bands. The flute and the side-drum were his instruments.
Then, in 1918, the first signs of illness showed. In 1919 the diagnosis came. He had leprosy.
It is hard now to feel how heavy that word was a hundred years ago. Leprosy was treated less as a disease than as a curse. People who had it were pushed out of their homes and their towns, and the boy who had been playing the flute in a school band suddenly had no school. In the early 1920s he was sent to the General Hospital in Port Harcourt, among other people who had the disease.
And here is the first surprising thing. He did not simply sit there. He went on making music. In Port Harcourt he formed a singing band with about forty other people living with leprosy. These were people the world had decided to forget, and they were singing together. Around this time, too, he took the name the world would remember him by, Harcourt Whyte.
The patients in Port Harcourt also did something else. They wanted proper care, not just a place to be put away. Their call for help was one of the things that pushed the authorities and the Methodist mission to open a settlement for people with leprosy at Uzuakoli, in Bende Division, in what is now Abia State. It opened in August 1932, and that same year Harcourt Whyte was moved there.
At Uzuakoli he met the man who would change his life. Dr T. F. Davey was an English doctor, a Methodist minister, and a musician as well. Davey saw what Harcourt Whyte could do, and he encouraged him. He took him along on survey tours of the surrounding villages, and on those trips Harcourt Whyte listened. He gathered the sounds of Igbo music, the rhythms and the ways people sang, and he carried them back with him.
Think about what that meant. Christian hymns in southeastern Nigeria were mostly European tunes with words translated into Igbo, and they often sat awkwardly in the language. Igbo is a tonal language. The rise and fall of a word's pitch can change its meaning. Sing it to the wrong tune and you can end up singing nonsense. Harcourt Whyte, steeped in Methodist hymns and Wesleyan teaching but now also full of the music of the villages, began to write church music that sounded as if it belonged there.
He was not a well man while he did this. His illness affected his hands, which made writing music down a real struggle. Still the songs kept coming. Uzuakoli itself was growing too. It became much more than a place to keep patients. From 1948 doctors there were studying how best to give the drug dapsone by mouth, and later they tested clofazimine, two medicines that changed what a leprosy diagnosis meant around the world. The patients who took part in that research, while still carrying all the stigma of the disease, are part of that medical history too.
In 1949, after thirty-four years of illness, Davey discharged Harcourt Whyte from Uzuakoli and wrote him down as clean. He was cured.
You might expect a man in that position to walk away and never look back. He did not. He gave much of the rest of his life to helping and educating other people who had the disease he had survived. And he kept writing. Over his lifetime he composed more than 600 hymns and other works in Igbo. His music spread across Igboland, sung in churches far from the colony where it was made, and he came to be called the father of Igbo church music. His best-loved hymn is "Atula Egwu", which means "Do not be afraid".
That title is worth holding on to. It came from a man whom society had every reason to fear and shut out, and he spent his life telling people not to be afraid.
He died in 1977 in a road accident. His story did not die with him. In 1985 the playwright Ola Rotimi put his life on stage in a play called Hopes of the Living Dead, using some of his hymns. And decades later, his voice turned up somewhere he could never have imagined. A recording of him performing "Otuto Nke Chukwu" was sampled by the British band Coldplay on their album Everyday Life. Somewhere a listener on another continent heard the voice of a leprosy patient from Abonnema, singing in Igbo, without knowing a thing about him. Now you do.
