Matilda J. Clerk

Matilda Johanna Clerk (2 March 1916 – 27 December 1984) was a medical pioneer and a science educator on the Gold Coast and later in Ghana as well as the second Ghanaian woman to become an orthodox medicine-trained physician. The first woman in Ghana and West Africa to attend graduate school and earn a postgraduate diploma, Clerk was also the first Ghanaian woman in any field to be awarded an academic merit scholarship for university education abroad. For a long time after independence in 1957, Clerk and Ofori-Atta were the only two women doctors in Ghana. By breaking the glass ceiling in medicine and other institutional barriers to healthcare delivery, they were an inspiration to a generation of post-colonial Ghanaian and West African female doctors at a time the field was still a male monopoly and when the vast majority of women worldwide had very limited access to biomedicine and higher education.

Early life and family

Matilda Johanna Clerk was born on 2 March 1916 in Larteh in the Akuapem Mountains, where her father, Nicholas Timothy Clerk (1862–1961) was stationed as a Basel missionary at the time. Her Basel-trained theologian father was the first Synod Clerk of the Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast from 1918 to 1932. Her mother, Anna Alice Meyer (1873–1934) was of Ga-Danish heritage.

Her paternal grandfather, Alexander Worthy Clerk (1820–1906), a Jamaican Moravian missionary, arrived in the Danish Protectorate of Christiansborg (now the suburb of Osu) in Accra in 1843, as part of the original group of 24 West Indian missionaries who worked under the auspices of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society of Basel, Switzerland. Alexander W. Clerk was a pioneer of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana and a leader in education in colonial Ghana, establishing a boarding middle school, the Salem School at Osu in 1843. Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Hesse (1831–1909) was from the Gold Coast, and was of Danish, German and Ga-Dangme ancestry. Her grandaunt was Regina Hesse (1832─1898), a pioneer educator and school principal who worked with the Basel Mission on the Gold Coast. She had six other siblings and belonged to the notable historical Clerk family of Accra, Ghana. who served as the fourth Synod Clerk of the Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast between 1950 and 1954 and Editor of the Christian Messenger newspaper from 1960 to 1963. Theodore Clerk was the first Ghanaian architect who planned and developed the port city of Tema, while her older sister, Jane E. Clerk (1904–1999), a teacher, was a pioneer education administrator in colonial Ghana.

Education and training She had her primary and middle school education at Presbyterian schools at Adawso and Aburi respectively. Thus, before the school permitted M. J. Clerk to enroll in the course in 1940, her father had to formally petition the then Governor of the Gold Coast, Arnold Wienholt Hodson for a special waiver.

Other pioneers in West Africa In 1933, Sierra Leonean political activist Edna Elliot-Horton became the second West African woman higher education graduate and the first to complete a bachelor's degree in the liberal arts. Many leading lights in the Gold Coast medical profession during that period, including her fellow pioneering colleagues, Charles Odamtten Easmon, Emmanuel Evans-Anfom and Susan Ofori-Atta, also attended Achimota School and the University of Edinburgh Medical School.

Career

Science teacher In between her teacher training/secondary education and preliminary medical course at Achimota, she was a science teacher at the Wesley Girls' High School from 1938 to 1940. In 2026, to mark its 300th anniversary, Edinburgh Medical School included Matilda Clerk among the 300 Faces of Edinburgh Medical School, recognising individuals who have shaped the School’s 300‑year history.