Not sure if this goes here or General or …?
Wonder how many people knew of this; glad it is being publicised. Interesting how Dr. Naki is taking it all in his stride (i.e. his "gardner " role) even though he was instrumental in the transplant. How many other unsung / hidden heroes around the globe?
"Two men transplanted the first human heart. One ended up rich and famous - the other had to pretend to be a gardener. Until now
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.” "