Lost history · 1932 to present
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Their leprosy was treated years ago. Some have certificates to prove it. But when one of them sat down at a funeral, everyone else got up. Inside the old settlements at Oji River, Uzuakoli, Okija and Abakaliki.
Leprosy is an old disease, and it is curable. It is caused by a germ from the same family as tuberculosis, and it mostly attacks the skin, the eyes, the nose and the nerves. It is not passed down in families. But for as long as people have known it, they have also feared it, and the fear has often done more harm than the germ.
In 2024 a reporter for The Sun, Aloysius Attah, spent four weeks in the four leprosy settlements of the South East: Oji River in Enugu State, Uzuakoli in Abia, Okija in Anambra, and the unit at Mile Four Hospital in Abakaliki, Ebonyi. Imo is the only state in the zone without one. Researchers he quoted said that before independence, settlements like these were built to protect public health and give care to the sick. There are about 64 across Nigeria, though some no longer work.
At Oji River, a lonely footpath leads to the ward and the homes. What greets a visitor is dust on the furniture, old cars rotting where they were left back in the days of the regional governments, and roofs that leak. On the Sunday Attah arrived, residents with walking sticks and crutches had gathered to decide how to share money a well-wisher had given for their children's school fees. On a wall hung a large dummy cheque for N200,000, a birthday gift in 2021 from the former governor, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi. It was, as far as he could see, the only state help in about ten years.
One of the oldest residents, Chinyere Ugwuoke, now in her late seventies, sat outside a house left from colonial times. She walks on artificial legs because the disease took her limbs. She was living in Aba when she first noticed blisters on her body, and she came to Oji River in 1972. She married another resident there. He has died, and they had four children. She sells small things, but her capital is gone, and she said the government seemed to have grown tired of them. The church helps, she said, and charity. Nothing else.
Many of the people in these settlements are no longer sick. That is the hardest part of the story. A local health officer at Oji River, Emmanuel Omeke, said about 82 people there had been cured but still carried the scars and twisted limbs the disease had left. Their own families would not take them back.
Romanus Eze, from Nkerefi in Enugu State, has lived at Oji River since 1983. He stopped taking medicine more than twenty years ago. He told Attah about a friend from the settlement who went to a funeral and sat under a canopy. Everyone around him got up and left, and he sat there alone. To avoid such shame, Eze said, he had decided to live and die in the settlement. People run from you, he said, though leprosy does not spread that way. Who will bring me back into society?
Benjamin Udeze, who chairs the residents' association, came in 2012. Before the disease, he farmed and hoped to go further in school. His hands were disfigured because nobody worked out what was wrong in time. Life in a colony, he said in Pidgin, is not moi moi, meaning it is no easy treat. The residents had decided to be a family to one another, so that even if society rejected them, they would not reject themselves. Houses were falling in, he said, and they had no proper road even to go and beg in town.
There is still care, of a kind. An Anglican priest, Rev. Donatus Ezigbo, runs the centre. On a Wednesday, after prayers, residents sat with plastic bowls of water and soaked their feet, part of a self-care project for their wounds. The welfare officer, Obiageli Igbokwe, said about 34 people had received bowls, sponges, soap and petroleum jelly from a charity. New cases still come. Omeke had just confirmed one in an 18-year-old girl from Nimo in Anambra.
The oldest of the four is Uzuakoli, near Ozuitem in Bende Local Government Area of Abia. It was set up in 1932 and is run by the Methodist Church. The composer Ikoli Harcourt Whyte, who was found to have leprosy in 1919, came to live there and stayed over 45 years, long after he was cured. He wrote more than 200 songs, died in a road accident in 1977, and lies buried in front of the Chapel of Glory, which still stands.
Near the hospital at the entrance, things look new. At the far end, where the residents live, the reporter found thick bush and broken toilets, and silence until he clapped and people came out. The director, Rev. Joshua Okpara, said about 50 people lived there, many of them rejected by their families. Some farm even without fingers.
At Okija, a narrow bush path leads off the Onitsha-Owerri road. Gregory Okwuosa has lived there almost 30 years. He was cured and given a discharge certificate, but his people still turned him away because of his scars. He went blind ten years ago from glaucoma. His wife, Onyebuchi, married him against her family's wishes, and she now hires herself out to farm for others in Ogbaru to feed the household.
At Abakaliki, the residents were singing hymns together on the hospital balcony when the reporter arrived. A short walk away, the old and weak lived on their own. The unit is run mostly by the Catholic diocese and missionary sisters, and its head said even the main drug was out of stock.
None of the four states, the reporter found, had set aside any money for leprosy in their 2024 budgets. Anambra's health commissioner disagreed, saying leprosy was covered under a wider line for neglected tropical diseases. The residents, for their part, were still waiting.
