Photo of Dr. Nalianya, Kenya, 2026

When the Republic of Kenya gained independence in 1963 the literacy rate was less than 50%. Today it is over 80% and rising. At independence there were very few hospitals. Today there are over two hundred spread across the land.

Today there are thousands of Kenyan doctors trained at home and abroad and whom, through a combination of private and public health care, do their best to live up to their Hippocratic oath, “First, do no harm.”

And so, it is indeed curious, in the extreme, that given the hundreds of millions of dollars given to Kenyan institutions of health and education, especially by European and other foreign donors, not one European or American donor or institution, has contributed in any meaningful way to the teaching of the Holocaust and medical ethics from an African perspective.

That is changing now, and not because of international development assistance. It is a Kenyan initiative pioneered by one woman.

Dr. Emma Nalianya is a well trained, articulate, cheerful, and outgoing Kenyan physician. She has been involved in the work of the Lancet Commission on Medicine, Nazism and the Holocaust since she was a medical student.

Today she teaches and coordinates a voluntary online course on Medicine during the Holocaust and its Contemporary Relevance for African health professionals and students.

She has supervised more than six thousand successful graduates of this program from the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, and the numbers of applicants is rising.

Although I am not a formal student of this program Dr. Nalianya graciously sent me a copy of her own lecture and which is part of a wider series and which I summarize here. I have added a few details taken from the original Lancet report for readers not familiar with the topic.

According to Doctor Nalianya the Holocaust was a near successful effort to kill off the Jews of Europe (and the near east, which was part of Rommel’s North Africa campaign) according to a warped concept of racial hygiene, when Nazi and German scientists claimed Jews were like a disease and if allowed to live and reproduce, they would ‘infect and debilitate’ the body politic of the German people and nation.

The root causes of the Holocaust were a lethal combination of anti Semitism that goes back to the Middle Ages, eugenics, and extreme German nationalism.

It was a dynamic process that grew with the rise of the Nazi party and their eventual takeover of the German state during the 1930s.

Given the Nazi belief in a racial hierarchy with Aryan Germans at the top and Jews at the bottom, they created a bureaucratic state where supposed racial ancestry determined your opportunities for advancement or even survival within the state.

By the mid 1930s Jews were given ID cards that showed that their ancestry barred........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)