The three-storey Child Health Department of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Ghana’s capital Accra is a place with hushed corridors, laboured breathing and parents clutching on to hope.

But on Friday, the gloom gave way to shrieks of joy as children with drips taped to their arms sat upright for the first time in days.

Others, too weak to stand, managed faint but determined smiles. Nurses paused mid-rounds, phones raised in the cancer ward. Even exhausted mothers lit up.

The reason was nearly six feet seven inches (2.03-metre) tall, dressed in the iconic blue-and-red Superman suit and cape.

In real life Leonardo Muylaert is a lawyer specialised in civil rights who needs reading glasses to work.

Muylaert – known worldwide as the “Brazilian Superman” – was rounding up his one-week maid

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