Publish date: 18 October 2021
Professor Dame Elizabeth Anionwu (cousin of Elaine Unegbu) is Emeritus Professor of Nursing at the University of West London and a Patron of the Sickle Cell Society. Born in the UK with Irish/Nigerian heritage, Elizabeth spent her early years in a Catholic children’s home and was inspired to be a nurse because of the exemplary care she received from one of the nuns who treated her severe eczema.
After nurse training she became a health visitor and worked as a Community Nurse Tutor in Brent Health District, London. During this time she became aware of sickle cell disease, an inherited anaemia that has a high incidence in the African and Caribbean populations, and this led to the first Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia Information, Screening and Counselling Centre being set up in Brent in 1979.
In 1998, she established the Mary Seacole Centre. It was, she says, a way to challenge the “predominantly white, Eurocentric focus of nursing recruitment, education and research”. The centre offered a framework for student nurses to learn about conditions such as sickle cell and ran campaigns to increase the number of nurses from minority ethnic backgrounds.
Although Anionwu retired in 2007, she did not stop campaigning. Her focus shifted to spreading awareness of Seacole – the Victorian nurse of Jamaican and Scottish parentage who has inspired Anionwu since she read her autobiography in the mid-80s – and she became vice-chair of the Mary Seacole Memorial Statue Appeal. But Seacole was little known at the time, even among nurses, and the group’s efforts often looked doomed to fail, not least due to an opposition campaign led by the Florence Nightingale Society. It took 12 years, but they managed to raise more than £500,000. A statue of Seacole was unveiled in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital in June 2016.
