The mystery of Hamilton Naki

 Michael – Thursday

Hamilton Naki was an extraordinary man with an extraordinary story. Many black people in the Apartheid era in South Africa have extraordinary stories, but most of them get little attention. In Naki’s case, however, the story took on a life of its own. I’ve read a number of articles about him and versions of his story appeared in a variety of different media, including the prestigious New York Times and The Economist after his death. There were many reports at that time, some followed by retractions, and people are still chewing over the story today. There are recent posts about him on Facebook.

According to South African History Online, “Hamilton Naki was born in the small village of Ngcangane in the Eastern Cape in 1930. His family was poor and after completing primary school he left for Cape Town to look for employment.” (Here is a first mystery. Many reports describe him as “illiterate”, although the state of “Bantu education” in those days meant that completing primary school might not imply literacy as we would understand it.) 

He obtained a job as a gardener at the University of Cape Town (UCT) where his duties apparently involved mowing the grass of the tennis court near the medical school. From there he became involved with the laboratory animals, and when his spark was recognised, he was trained as a laboratory technician.

UCT was a centre of transplant research at that time, and a variety of organ transplants were carried out on animals in order to trial drugs and hone technique. Naki skill became well known and he carried out a variety of these operations as his knowledge and understanding grew. As South African History Online puts it: “Naki was one of four highly talented technicians in the research laboratory at the medical school, during the time that Dr Chris Barnard performed the first heart transplant on a human subject on the 03 December 1967.”

This is where the controversy starts. “Four decades after the first heart transplant took place at the Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town, stories began to surface about the role that Naki played in the procedure. Chris Barnard apparently hinted at Naki's involvement shortly before his death in 2001, and Naki himself claimed, at one stage, to have been involved more directly in the ground breaking procedure.” It is true that Dr Barnard once said that if Naki had “had the opportunity”, he would have made a better surgeon than he was himself. From there the story grew. When he died in 2005, the New York Times reported:

“Hamilton Naki, a laborer who became a self-taught surgeon of such skill that Dr. Christiaan N. Barnard chose him to assist in the world's first human heart transplant in 1967, but whose contribution was kept secret for three decades because he was a black man in apartheid-era South Africa, died on May 29 at his home in Langa, near Cape Town.”

The argument is that since he was black it was illegal for him to operate on white patients.

So was Hamilton Naki a brilliant surgeon who was part of the first human heart transplant team, or was he a brilliant technician who assisted with the basic research? UCT recognized his contribution by awarding him an honorary degree of Master of Science in Medicine. A local hospital group in South Africa established a Hamilton Naki Clinical Scholarship. Cape Town has renamed a square after him. Would all this have happened if he were not part of the heart transplant team itself? It seems to me that even asking that question belittles the incredible achievement of a man who started with a rudimentary primary school education and ended up not only contributing to transplant research but also demonstrating surgical procedures and dissections to medical students at the university.

To me, while it is conceivable that Dr Barnard would ignore the Apartheid laws with the University’s connivance, I find it impossible to imagine that they would have allowed a person without formal qualifications to operate on a human patient.

We can celebrate what Hamilton Naki achieved and regret the opportunities he was denied. That is enough reason to honour him.

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Whither South African Universities

Michael - Thursday

Protest at the University of Cape Town

The last months have seen a concerted push by students around the country in the Fees Must Fall campaign. Initiated at the end of last year in response to the large fee increases proposed by the universities, it was successful in getting the government to agree to fund part of the increase and the universities to eat the shortfall. Somewhere along the line, the demand changed from no increases, to reducing fees, and finally to free tertiary education.

Protest at the University of the Witwaterstand

I’ve been a staff member in one form or another at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg for 44 years, so I have a lot of myself invested in the institution and its future is of real concern to me. It has transformed dramatically over those years from a largely segregated institution where 90% of the students and almost all the staff were white, to a university three times the size with a multiracial and multinational staff body and a student body whose racial makeup pretty well reflects that of the surrounding Gauteng province that it serves. It also hosts many international students, mainly from Africa. It does stronger research and has better students and courses than it did in the eighties.

The current scenes of police all over the campus supporting private security personnel and massive student protests remind some people of the demonstrations against the apartheid government in the eighties. But the comparison is wrong for a variety of reasons of which the most important is that then the university and the students were on the same side. Although the university has tried to align itself with the students by declaring that it’s in favor of “free, quality, decolonialized higher education”, the students are too savvy to fall for that. If that’s so, they say, then join our protest. Close your doors until the government agrees to exactly that. Our university has refused to do so—90% of staff and 75% of students want to finish the academic year and write the final exams.

Small groups of students (and others) break up classes, damage property, set fires and throw stones. I have to say that I’m disgusted by much of the violent protest. Sometimes it consists of bullying—often targeting on female staff and students. Fire extinguishers have been used to break up classes. A cleaner subsequently died from the fumes. Firecrackers of the most explosive type are hurled into classes. A student of one of my colleagues was burned in three places on her leg. Buses and cars have been vandalized and destroyed. This week a fire was started on a bus transporting 15 students. Thankfully, it was spotted, the bus stopped, and the students evacuated; they could all have died. That isn’t robust protest, it’s nothing short of terrorism.

And what is the government doing while all this is going on? The president too has urged the students that he hears them, that he’s on their side, that their aim of free higher education is just and reasonable and one the government supports. So there's no need for violence, no need for protest aimed at wrecking the academic year. Another stakeholder trying to get on the right side of the students by supporting what he has no intention of delivering. (He has other things on his mind.)

Protest at Parliament

How “just and reasonable” are the student’s demands? Free higher education is almost certainly unaffordable in South Africa which is beset by needs from poverty, healthcare, primary education, through to crushing unemployment, to say nothing of the president’s new mansion. But fees have increased rapidly ahead of inflation, and bursaries are inadequate for the total of fees, living, and other costs. Furthermore, sometimes students are denied bursaries on the grounds that their family income is too high. Yet that calculation takes into account the income of siblings who may have their own financial stresses and have no obligation and no intention of supporting a brother or sister at university. The administration of the national loan scheme is hopeless, with students sometimes being excluded because their loan payments are delayed. Banks also loan students money but they want it back! (People in the US are well aware of how that may play out.) The students don’t need platitudes, the system is broken and they need it fixed.

Also there is another aspect. When asked at his recent book launch to comment on the student unrest, Athol Williams, a self-made man by any standard, said that it reflected a deep disillusion of South Africa's youth who feel failed by the new South Africa. That goes way beyond the issue of fees. 

It’s the universities that will be the meat in this sandwich, being squeezed between student demands and government priorities and ineptitude. Research will decline, good staff will go elsewhere. Well-healed students will take themselves off to private universities as they have with private secondary schools already. Take the ‘h’ out of the first word of this blog's title.

Still, violent student protests have occurred throughout the world. Sometimes things are achieved, sometimes not. Yet the universities have survived. I hope.

Student Protests

Michael - Thursday

Wits students protesting the fee hikes this week

This week has seen an eruption of student unrest in South Africa that has led to student injuries, tear gassings and arrests.  Roads were blocked and cars overturned.  Staff have been threatened.  Students have clashed with police leading to tear gassings, student injuries, and arrests.

Blocking roads

This was quite normal in the late eighties and early nineties when the student protests were directed at the apartheid government and usually had the implicit support of academics.  Often they led to violent responses by the police.  At least at Wits University no one was shot, although many students were injured in various ways.

Protest at Wits

With the change of government, there was a period of calm.  But structural problems remain and they are no longer just black and white.  Now the issue is more focused on the haves and the have-nots.  The struggle now is more a class struggle and it is no longer directed at the government; now it is directed at the universities themselves.  Wits University has been closed for the whole of this week.

The first rumblings of what the students described as a plan to decolonize the universities arose over monuments that seemed unconnected with South Africa’s apartheid past.  They are, but they are not unconnected with South Africa’s colonial past that was just as unsavory.  The United Party governments that preceded the hated National Party government were pretty well as racist as their successors, they just didn’t institutionalize it in the same way.  Young people in South Africa are now looking at both the present and the past.  They point to the disproportionate number of white academics and the universities’ elitist approach.  They are highly dissatisfied with the performance of the current government in terms of jobs, service delivery, restitution of land, and uplifting the poor.  They are not wrong.  These are hard problems and take time, but seeing government ministers and many others – black and white – enjoying super-luxurious living doesn’t sit well.  

Demand to move the Rhodes statue

Looking back to colonial times they demanded to know why a statue of Cecil John Rhodes graced the University of Cape Town.  Yes, he gave the university land and money, but, they ask, who did he steal those from in the first place?  That’s a fair question.

Not only students had turds for Rhodes!

And fall it did...

After much soul searching and gnashing of teeth, the statue has been moved elsewhere.  Many English speaking South Africans are scandalized.  Many white Afrikaans speaking South Africans are no doubt delighted at the demise of the British imperialist, while they shake their heads at the antics of the students that included flinging dog turds at the statue. 

The flashpoint this week was the decision by universities around the country to increase tuition fees next year by over 11%.  Inflation is supposed to be around half that, but that doesn’t really describe the increase in university expenses in a meaningful way.  Many research costs are based in foreign currency (equipment, books, conferences) and the rand has weakened 20% over the year.

At a rushed meeting at the end of last week it was decided by the universities in consultation with the minister that the fee increases will be capped at 6%.  As far as I can discover, no one has explained how the extra 5% is going to be made up.  (I did receive a memo today indicating that tea and coffee would no longer be supplied in the common room; that should go quite a way to help!)

The students were not impressed.  Their response was that they could not afford any increase, in fact they demanded that tertiary education should be free. The demonstrations moved to parliament house where the finance minister was giving a downbeat assessment of the economy and the budget for next year.  Twenty-three students were arrested.

Protest in Cape Town

The students believe that their predecessors brought down the apartheid government by these tactics.  The ANC government and the universities better not treat this lightly.

The night I danced with Bobby Kennedy

When I was a student in the 1960s at the University of the Witwatersrand (known as Wits) in Johannesburg, I became involved with the anti-apartheid movement.  For all my life from when I entered high school, I could never quite understand two aspects of South African life.  The first was how people could justify treating people of different colours so differently from themselves.  Apartheid applied mainly to Blacks, but also to an ever-increasing extent, to South Africans who had Indian, Chinese, or Malayan heritage, as well as to people who were of mixed blood (called Coloureds, in South Africa).

The second puzzlement was how the Whites could expect the current situation to remain in place.  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that suppressing 75% of the population and restricting the rights of another 10-15% was not a viable long-term strategy.  Yet most Whites either believed that it was or found it inconvenient or uncomfortable to wonder about it.

My family, in a conservative sort of way, was always against the Nationalist government, and for the most part, against apartheid too.  My mother was a member of one anti-apartheid group – the Torch Commando – and worked for the Progressive Party in our constituency, helping to send Helen Suzman to parliament many times.  My aunt, Jean Sinclair, founded a woman’s group – the Black Sash – that proved to be a thorn in the government’s side both or its consistent opposition to any law that discriminated and its steadfast provision of advice and support to those hurt by apartheid.

But it was the education system that really first caught my attention.  It made no sense to me that any government could, as a matter of policy, deny access to decent education to anyone, let alone the majority of the country.  So when I went to university, I joined the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) and started to become involved in an effort to change things. 

Apartheid supporters - probably Special Branch police. Left sign reads "Send NUSAS leader and hangers-on to jail". The other reads "Keep your land clean, South Africa, from NUSAS and Communists".

In between playing cricket, rugby, and field hockey, I protested, marched, and wrote.  I edited the newspaper of the Johannesburg College of Education, called Campus, where I tried to draw the attention of future white teachers to what was happening in the education system in the country.  But, in reality, I probably had little impact on anyone.

However, there was one benefit to being editor.  I received invitations to events and, as I was also one of the photographers, I had the ability to wander around.  

It was one such invitation that led me to dance with a star.

Invitation signed by Bobby and Ethel Kennedy

In 1966, the president of NUSAS, Ian Robertson, invited Bobby Kennedy to visit South Africa to energize the opposition to apartheid.  I suspect it was to everyone’s surprise that he accepted.  I also suspect that the government was pressured by the USA to allow him to come.

Kennedy made five major speeches in his brief visit to South Africa.  The first, at the Day of Affirmation at the University of Cape Town on June 6, 1966, is regarded as one of the best speeches he ever made.  I attended his last speech on June 8, 1966, at Wits University.  It was the most political speech of his visit, probably because it was his last.  My invitation put me in the front row.  Although I do not have the article I wrote, I do still have some photographs I took.  The prints are worn and I can’t currently find my negatives to reprint them.

After the speech, there was a party at the home of Clive and Irene Menell.  Both were very active in the fight against apartheid.  Clive was a founder of the Urban Foundation in 1977, an organization created to improve the lot of black South Africans in Soweto and other urban areas.  

Despite government restrictions that made multiracial gatherings very difficult (for example, it was illegal to serve alcohol at multiracial gatherings), the after-party was mixed.  The atmosphere was electric – the enthusiasm that Kennedy’s presence and speeches had unleashed was incredible.  So what did we do?  We couldn’t drink, so we danced – not couples, but groups, lines, circles.  And Bobby and Ethel Kennedy danced with us.  And it was absolutely amazing.  For a moment we were free.

At the after-party

1966 is a long time ago.  But I remember Kennedy’s speech at Wits, and I remember vividly the emotions that flowed during the after-party dancing.  I’ll remember them for the rest of my life.

You can read or listen to Kennedy’s South African speeches at http://rfksafilm.org/html/speeches/speechrfk.php.

Stan - Thursday