ESI NANA AMA MENSAH-BONSU

Consultant surgeon at Korle Bu who carried free operations to Ghana's northern villages

Theatre Four at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital has a small wooden stool in the corner, built for the shortest surgeon on the team. Everyone knew whose it was. Dr. Esi Mensah-Bonsu stood on it for twenty years, and nobody ever operated better.

She was born in Cape Coast in 1967, the daughter of a land surveyor and a headmistress, and grew up in a house where homework was inspected at the dining table. Like her mother she attended Wesley Girls' High School, then read Medicine at the University of Ghana Medical School, qualifying in 1992. She trained in surgery at Korle Bu, took her fellowship with the West African College of Surgeons in 2002, and added a fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh two years later.

As a consultant general surgeon at Korle Bu from 2004, she led the breast and endocrine surgery unit and trained more than forty registrars. Colleagues remember her calm in an emergency, her laughter in the corridor afterwards, and her rule that every patient's family must be told the truth in plain words. For fifteen years she travelled north every few months to Tamale and Bolgatanga, running free surgical outreach camps for patients who could not reach Accra.

She married Dr. Nii Lante Sowah, an anaesthetist, in 1995, and was a devoted mother to their daughters Naana and Adjoa. She loved kelewele, her mother's Methodist hymns, and a garden full of hibiscus. When her mother died in 2020 she delivered the eulogy herself, without a note.

Dr. Esi died in June 2025 after a courageous illness, supported to the end by her family and colleagues. She leaves her husband, daughters and two brothers.

“A surgeon's job is to be there, calm, on the worst day of someone's life.”