Dr. Leo Joseph DeSouza, orthopedic surgeon who escaped Idi Amin’s Uganda
Dr. Leo , born in Tanga, Tanganyika in 1926, was sent to Portuguese Goa for his education, later obtaining an MBBS in Bombay, India and FRCS in Edinburgh, Scotland. His family is from the village of Parra, Goa.
No Place For Me narrates the challenges of being an Indian doctor practicing in colonial East Africa in the 1950s. Social hierarchy dictated by the British left the Indian and African believing they were not quite as good as the white man. Dr. DeSouza did not even have the authority to prescribe medications for his Indian and African patients without approval of a white nurse!
Post-independence, Tanganyika was desperately short of surgeons but not being black or white, Dr. Leo’s career prospects stalled. Discouraged at the inability to obtain an appropriate surgical appointment, he accepted minor posts in Tanga, Arusha, and Lindi to support his growing family, eventually moving to Uganda and leaving behind the country he always thought of as home.
His years in Uganda provided the professional success that eluded him in Tanganyika, working with his colleagues, Denis Burkitt in Lira, Piero and Lucille Corti in Gulu and Ron Huckstep at the Polio Clinic in Mulago Hospital, Kampala. The coup and terror regime of Idi Amin in January 1971 forced Dr. Leo and family to flee to the United States, beginning his career all over again at the age of 45.
This memoir received the Outstanding Thesis in Creative Nonfiction Award in 2002 when Dr. Leo DeSouza completed his MFA in Creative Writing at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. The author passed away in 2016. His story will be published by November 2019. Inquiries can be directed to NPFM.LJD@gmail.com.
