“Stole with his eyes….”
Occasionally humanity is graced with certain special souls, Hamilton Naki was one of those very special souls. I was so moved by the deeds of such a humble yet great man that I have retained his obituary for reading when things get tough or inspiration is needed. When reading about his life in the Economist one is puzzled why his passing didn’t make front page news in more newspapers. Perhaps because Mr Naki is a hero from another time, a time most people would prefer to forget.
For those who may not want to spend the time to read about Mr Naki let me briefly summarize who he was and what he did. Mr Naki was born a poor black man in the little town of Ngcangane in apartheid South Africa. He left school at 14 when his family could no longer afford it. Through a series of jobs he found himself tending to the gardens of the Cape Town Medical School. One day the head of an animal research lab asked him to hold down a giraffe while it was being dissected. Mr Naki complied and was later asked to do more and more to help the lab with constant transplant operations on pigs and dogs. All these operations helped train you surgeons in the budding young field of transplant surgery. Throughout Mr Naki “stole with his eyes” and learned the techniques with no formal training. He became so good he was an expert in the extremely complex liver transplant operations which are more difficult than heart transplants. Eventually he was teaching liver transplantation techniques to young surgeons, albeit “un-officially”.
On December 3rd, 1967 Christiaan Barnard had Hamilton Naki remove the heart of a white woman for the first human heart transplant. Dr. Barnard could have chosen anyone, he requested Hamilton Naki. Christiaan Barnard would later (in 2001 before his death) admit that Mr Naki was probably more technically adept than him. Naki appears in some photos of the surgical team after the historic operation, although his presence is explained away as a gardener or technician who snuck in. If the world only knew his true contribution.