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E-mail this Obituary Hamilton Naki Jun 9th 2005 From The Economist print edition Cape Argus-Trace Images Cape Argus-Trace Images Hamilton Naki, an unrecognised surgical pioneer, died on May 29th, aged 7 8 ON DECEMBER 3rd, 1967, the body of a young woman was brought to Hamilton Naki for dissection. She had been knocked down by a car as she went to b uy a cake on a street in Cape Town, in South Africa. Her head injuries w ere so severe that she had been pronounced brain-dead at the hospital, b ut her heart, uninjured, had gone on furiously pumping. The young woman, Denise Darvall , was white, and he was black. The rules of the hospital, and indeed the apartheid laws of the land, forbade him to enter a white operating thea tre, cut white flesh, or have dealings with white blood. For Mr Naki, ho wever, the Groote Schuur hospital had made a secret exception. This blac k man, with his steady, dexterous hands and razor-sharp mind, was simply too good at the delicate, bloody work of organ transplantation. The chi ef transplant surgeon, the young, handsome, famously temperamental Chris tiaan Barnard, had asked to have him on his team. So the hospital had ag reed, saying, as Mr Naki remembered, Look, we are allowing you to do th is, but you must know that you are black and that's the blood of the whi te.
On that December day, in one part of the operating suite, Barnard in a blaze of publicity prepared Louis Washkansky, the wo rld's first recipient of a transplanted human heart. Fifteen metres away , behind a glass panel, Mr Naki's skilled black hands plucked the white heart from the white corpse and, for hours, hosed every trace of blood f rom it, replacing it with Washkansky's. The heart, set pumping again wit h electrodes, was passed to the other side of the screen, and Mr Barnard became, overnight, the most celebrated doctor in the world. In some of the post-operation photographs Mr Naki inadvertently appeared, smiling broadly in his white coat, at Barnard's side. He was a cleaner, the hospital explained, or a gardener. Hospital records listed him that way, though his pay, a few hundred dollars a month, was actually that o f a senior lab technician. It was the most they could give, officials la ter explained, to someone who had no diploma. Mr Naki, born in the villa ge of Ngcangane in the windswept Eastern Cape, had been pulled out of sc hool at 14, when his family could no longer afford it. His life seemed l ikely to be cattle-herding, barefoot and in sheepskins, like many of his contemporaries. Instead, he hitch-hiked to Cape Town to find work, and managed to land a job tending lawns and rolling tennis courts at the Uni versity of Cape Town Medical School. A blackeven one as clever as he was, and as immaculately dressed, in a c lean shirt, tie and Homburg hat even to work in the gardenscould not ex pect to get much further. But a lucky break came when, in 1954, the head of the animal research lab at the Medical School asked him for help. Ro bert Goetz needed a strong young man to hold down a giraffe while he dis sected its neck to see why giraffes did not faint when they drank. Mr Na ki coped admirably, and was taken on: at first to clean cages, then to h old and anaesthetise the animals, then to operate on them. Stealing with his eyes The lab was busy, with constant transplant operations on pigs and dogs to train doctors, eventually, for work on humans. But he beca me an expert at liver transplants, far trickier than heart transplants, and was soon teaching others. Over 40 years he instructed several thousa nd trainee surgeons, several of whom moved on to become heads of departm ents. Barnard admittedthough not until 2001, just before he diedthat M r Naki was probably technically better than he was, and certainly defter at stitching up afterwards. Unsung, though not unappreciated, Mr Naki continued to work at the Medica l School until 1991. When he retired, he drew a gardener's pension: 760 rand, or about $275, a month. He exploited his medical contacts to raise funds for a rural school and a mobile clinic in the Eastern Cape, but n ever thought of money for himself. As a result, he could pay for only on e of his five children to stay to the end of high school. Recognition, w ith the National Order of Mapungubwe and an honorary degree in medicine from the University of Cape Town, came only a few years before his death , and long after South Africa's return to black rule. Bitterness was not in his nature, and he had had years o f training to accept his life as apartheid had made it. On that December day in 1967, for example, as Barnard played host to the world's adoring press, Mr Naki, as usual, caught the bus home. Strikes, riots and road blocks often delayed it in those days. When it came, it carried himin h is carefully pressed suit, with his well-shined shoesto his one-room sh ack in the township of Langa. Because he was sending most of his pay to his wife and family, left behind in Transkei, he could not afford electr icity or running water. and t here, the next day, he could read in banner headlines of what he had don e, secretly, with his black hands, with a white heart.
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