Ylva, thanks for this forward.  The truth shall always triumph no matter how
long stifled.  There seems to be a lot of Nakis in this world.  I watched a
documentary last year of an African-American Surgeon, who like Naki was not
allowed to operate but would be in the operating room directing the
operations (how to cut, where to cut/stitch, etc.).  Incidentally, he was
also listed as a Janitor, did not have a formal education, and would be
asked to moonlight as a servant when his white partner has important guests
to entertain.  This way he is around the events at the partner's house
without being there.  I could not remember his name or which state this
occurred, but something is telling me it was at a teaching hospital around
Philadelphia or some where out east.

It takes a very very strong individual to go through what these men and
others went through and still live to talk about it.  Man, 50 years is a
long time to suffer and I believe the ANC government of Thabu Mbeki need to
do more than just award medals to this hero.  I think it is a travesty that
he is still listed as a gardener with a 70 pound monthly pension.  Amazing.

Chi Jaama

Joe Sambou


>From: Ylva Hernlund <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Hamilton Naki: 1st Heart Transplant (another piece of history)
>          (fwd)
>Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2004 12:11:25 -0800
>
>Hamilton Naki  1st Heart Transplant
>
>
>Two men transplanted the first human heart. One ended up rich and famous -
>the other had to pretend to be a gardener until now.
>
>Rory Carroll on the remarkable story of Hamilton Naki
>
>Friday April 25, 2003
>The Guardian
>
>It is one of the iconic images of the 20th century and the handsome surgeon
>had every reason to flash his toothy smile. On December 3 1967, Christiaan
>Barnard performed the first human-to-human heart transplant and by the
>following
>day Cape Town was thronged with the world's press who had arrived to
>chronicle
>his breakthrough in medical science. It was a decade given breaking new
>ground: the race was on to put a man on the moon and to pioneer the
>transplant
>technique that would save, or at least extend, countless thousands of
>lives. With
>as photogenic a celebrity as Barnard the journalists and photographers who
>crammed into Groote Schuur hospital had little reason to notice a figure in
>a
>white coat lurking on the fringes. Had they asked, they would have been
>told that
>Hamilton Naki was a cleaner and gardener who washed floors and swept
>leaves.
>What else, after all, would a black man be doing in a research institute in
>apartheid South Africa?
>
>Nobody thought to even ask the question and it is only now, almost four
>decades later, that the truth has emerged. Hamilton Naki was not a
>gardener. The
>employment records, which described him thus for 50 years, were a lie, a
>fiction
>to fit the edicts of a racist state. Naki was a surgeon - a pioneering
>surgeon considered by colleagues to be the most technically gifted of the
>hospital's
>medical team. Without him the transplant might never have happened.
>
>Yet this was someone with no formal education beyond the age of 14, someone
>who was regularly harassed and arrested by police officers who regarded him
>as
>a "kaffir", a sub-human. His was one of those stories that exposed white
>superiority as a myth so the state hushed it up. In Stalin's Russia an
>existence
>might be erased altogether but in South Africa, to be classified as a
>manual
>labourer was enough to make you invisible, a non-person.
>
>Barred from training as a doctor, from the whites-only operating theatre
>and
>from slicing white flesh, Naki was an aberration. "Nobody was to say what I
>was doing. A black person was not supposed to be doing such things. That
>was the
>law of the land," he says now.
>
>Stroll among the shacks of Langa township outside Cape Town and you will
>spot
>him: a 78-year-old man struggling to survive on a gardener's pension, his
>past as unknown to neighbours as to the outside world. That is likely to
>change.
>Fame is knocking on the door of the house he shares with his 10 children
>and
>grandchildren. The film company Ad Astera is making a television
>documentary,
>Hands of a Forgotten Hero, to be followed, funding permitting, by a feature
>film.
>
>It was the late Barnard himself who tipped off his friend, the film
>producer
>Dirk de Villiers, about his collaboration with Naki. "A lot of stories have
>been told about Chris, but this is one that hasn't been told," says De
>Villiers.
>
>Naki was born in 1926 in Ngcingane, a small village in the Eastern Cape. As
>a
>child he wore sheepskins when it was cold and always went without shoes
>but,
>unusually for a black boy at that time, made it past primary school before
>hitchhiking to Cape Town at the age of 14 to seek work. The University of
>Cape
>Town hired him as a gardener and for the next decade he maintained the
>tennis
>lawns.
>
>Punctual, diligent and dapper in a shirt, tie and hat, Naki was chosen by
>the
>foreman in 1954 when a doctor in the underfunded medical faculty, Robert
>Goetz, said he needed help with the laboratory animals.
>
>Still trim and fit, Naki becomes animated at the memory: "Ooh, yes. At that
>time there was no one else you see, no one else willing to do that sort of
>work." Another explanation for this career leap could be that the Jewish
>doctor
>who had fled Nazi Germany may have empathised with outcasts.
>
>From cleaning cages Naki progressed to weighing, shaving and injecting the
>animals, mostly dogs, rabbits and pigs, and from anaesthetics to machines
>which
>pumped air into lungs, allowing Goetz to operate on organs for the benefit
>of
>watching medical students. "It was difficult work but I wanted to learn,"
>says
>Naki. By the early 1960s, he was slicing, stitching and using drips. "We
>learned a lot from the dogs. We put two livers in one, two hearts in
>another;
>then, when we got a donated organ, we would throw away the two we put in
>and put
>in the proper one."
>
>He also helped to operate on a giraffe, dissecting the jugular venous
>valves
>to find out why creatures with such long necks do not faint when bending to
>drink. As Naki notched up surgical hours, colleagues admired his steady
>hand.
>"You must not cut the vessels and must hold the forceps correctly and know
>where
>to stitch," he says.
>
>Rosemary Hickman was one of many surgeons who trained at Cape Town and
>learned from Naki. "Despite his limited conventional education, he had an
>amazing
>ability to learn anatomical names and recognise anomalies. Hamilton arrived
>at
>work at 6am come rain, shine, or strike and no matter how far he had to
>travel
>he almost never missed a day." This was no mean feat for a man with no
>running
>water, no electricity, no car and often no bus because of strikes.
>
>Despite the discrimination Naki faced in the outside world every day, he
>was
>the obvious assistant to choose when Barnard, an ambitious cardiac surgeon,
>returned from the US to introduce new open-heart surgery techniques to
>South
>Africa. "He probably had more technical skill than I had," the Afrikaner
>said of
>Naki decades later.
>
>By 1967, kidneys and livers had been transplanted but not yet the organ in
>which love and compassion were said to reside. Amid mounting suspense,
>surgical
>teams around the world vied to be first to transplant a human heart.
>
>Cape Town's Groote Schuur hospital had a volunteer recipient. Louis
>Washkansky was a 55-year-old diabetic with incurable heart disease. For a
>dying man it
>was an easy decision, noted Barnard. "If a lion chases you to the bank of a
>river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water convinced you
>have a
>chance to swim to the other side. But you would never accept such odds if
>there were no lion."
>
>The donor was Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old who stopped to buy a cake, was
>hit by a car and was pronounced brain dead by the doctors. With the
>permission
>of her father, 60 seconds after the respirator was turned off, a team led
>by
>Naki went to work, a 48-hour marathon. "Your hands get tired. We were
>exhausted.
>You must wash out the blood from the heart and put in the recipient's
>blood."
>
>When electrodes were applied it resumed beating and a second team led by
>Barnard placed the organ inside Washkansky. The heart beat strongly and,
>even
>though he died of pneumonia 18 days later, the operation was hailed as a
>success.
>"On Saturday, I was a surgeon in South Africa, very little known. On
>Monday, I
>was world-renowned," Barnard recalled.
>
>Not so his black colleague. "I was called one of the backroom boys. They
>put
>the white people out front. If people published pictures of me they would
>have
>gone to jail." Is it a bitter memory? Not at all, says Naki. "It was the
>way
>things were. They pretended I was a cleaner."
>
>Religious, Naki trusted in God and accepted his status. He was friendly
>with
>Barnard who invited him round to his house for drinks. In the documentary,
>Naki embarrasses the film crew by addressing them as "Baas", an
>apartheid-era
>deferential term.
>
>Maintaining the fiction that he was a menial worker, the state allowed him
>to
>operate and give lectures to medical professors until his retirement in
>1991.
>His £70 monthly pension is the main source of income for the 11-strong,
>unemployed household but Naki says money does not matter, though he
>confesses a
>desire for cable television.
>
>He is puzzled and pleased by the belated recognition. Last December the
>government included him in national honours and he lined up with former
>South
>African presidents Nelson Mandela and FW De Klerk - "the big giants of the
>world" -
>to collect his medal.
>
>The hands of the forgotten hero clap together at the prospect of a biopic.
>"Oooooh, it's exciting, isn't it?" One thing does rankle; by the time the
>apartheid regime fell, he was too old to study for a degree and officially
>he
>remains a retired gardener. "Dr Naki - yes, that would have been nice."
>
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