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Annalena wanted the fewest possible barriers between herself and those she worked among
Maggie Black
24 October 2003 (OneWorld)
In inhospitable and obscure reaches of the world, rare individuals still pursue a vocation among the poorest of the poor. Annalena Tonelli, who was murdered one Sunday in early October in the remote Horn of Africa, was the rarest of her kind.
Her work belongs to a vanishing era of heroic missionary endeavor – except that she was entirely on her own. She spent 30 years tending TB patients and social rejects among the nomadic Somalis, first in Kenya and later in Somalia itself. In all parts of that troubled land, her reputation was unparalleled.
Annalena, a 60-year-old Italian, could have garnered the celebrity of a Mother Teresa for Africa if she had tried. Instead she chose invisibility and an almost surreal humility: she wanted the fewest possible barriers between herself and those she lived and worked among.
She chose to be “without a name, without the security of a religious order, without membership of any organization”.
She avoided all status and recognition, accepting a prestigious award from the Pope for her services as a “voluntary worker” only under heavy pressure from friends. A devout Christian among a wholly Muslim population, the only faith she ever proselytized was the doctrine of love.
Although the ideal of service to the poorest overseas is somewhat passé, Annalena was the opposite of old-fashioned. She had a genius for organization, and became a leading expert in the treatment of TB even though her qualifications in health – she was a lawyer and a teacher – never extended beyond diplomas.
Center of excellence
Her pioneering treatment of outpatient TB was taken up by the World Health Organization, which conferred on her 250-bed TB hospital in Borama, Somaliland, special status as a TB center of excellence. The hospital also provided the hub for a range of health and social outreach programmes supported by UNICEF, UNHCR and Caritas International among others.
Annalena worked closely with everyone and had excellent relations with many local mosque leaders, whose public support she obtained for health messages at Friday prayers.
Two years ago Annalena began to work against what is known in Somaliland as “female cutting” or “circumcision”.
Surgical excision of external genitalia and the almost complete closure of the aperture is inflicted on all young girls as an extreme form of protection against male sexual predators before marriage. The practice was mistakenly believed by Somalis to be sanctioned by the Koran.
Annalena respected the extreme sensitivity to outsider interference in a custom endorsed by centuries of tradition. In Borama, the team of three she established – a sheikh, a midwife, and a social worker – have persuaded almost all the local circumcisers to abandon their “weapons” and take up other professions instead.
Her efforts were less appreciated by local hardliners.
Most recently, she had begun to provide HIV/AIDS care and prevention.
Because she loved and welcomed all such patients, and her staff did likewise, her efforts attracted grateful admiration from the Somaliland authorities. But they were less appreciated by local hardliners imbued with old attitudes towards the sick.
Life-threatening illness in the desert was a serious threat to group survival; in the old days victims were isolated and even discarded. Attitudes die-hard.
Within this frame of reference Annalena’s hospital and programmes were incomprehensible sources of dangerous contagion, and provoked deep hostility.
Did grievance lead to murder?
Despite her attempts to be as close as humanly possible to the least advantaged, she was still a foreigner, or gal, in a world where kin and clan are paramount. In one incident, her house was stoned and her life threatened because an HIV-positive mother and child from another district had been sent by ambulance to her hospital.
Now, it would appear, some similar grievance against her nurture of the stigmatized sick has led to her murder.
In many African countries today, internecine ethnic and religious wars have led to unprecedented levels of risk for courageous humanitarians. Last year in Merca, in southern Somalia, a Swiss – Verena Karrer – was shot dead in the compound where she ran a hospital and school. The reasons were as impenetrable as in Annalena’s case.
In Merca, Verena’s Somali colleagues try to carry on her work. What will happen to Annalena’s programmes? No matter how devoted her Somali staff and network – devastated as they will be by her loss – Annalena is irreplaceable.
In June, visiting Borama under UNICEF’s auspices, I met Annalena Tonelli. Very rarely in a lifetime is one privileged to come across someone whose humanity and commitment are so transcendent, so stratospherically beyond the miserly measure most of us enjoy.
Although she was in her own mind the simplest possible person – “I am nobody” is what she said – Annalena was extraordinary.
In our fame-obsessed world, the death of this “nobody” should not go unmarked.
Maggie Black is a UNICEF consultant and a UK-based writer.
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