In early December 1967, I sat in the stacks of the Harvard Law School Library studying torts notes. I had no notion that events of that morning would tie themselves together so indelibly in my memory.
My face still warm with embarrassment and anger, I absently tossed my Boston Globe on the cubicle desk, dropping my torts case book on top of it. I had just come from Charles Fried’s torts class in which he had thrown out to us a question about nuisance as an actionable event: “Besides noise pollution and the nuisances we have discussed, can any of you think of anything we may have missed?” Hands shot up around the large wainscoted bowl of a lecture hall. “How about blacks moving into a white neighborhood?” This came, in an even voice, from Mark Green, later to become a prominent New York liberal Democrat. Save for its fictive substantive content, Mr. Green’s offering went un-remarked by the hundred and fifty or so first year law students who were there that day. This included the five black students who looked at each other with registered understanding. We had been at the law school little more than three months. We were strangers to the place and had not wished to make a scene. Moreover, we were happy to be there and, maybe, even a little grateful.
Underscoring the searing shame of the moment and fixing both in memory was a large front page picture that day in the Boston Globe of a white South African surgeon named Christiaan Barnard. The broadly smiling Dr. Barnard, a privileged product of the world’s ugliest race-based dictatorship, had just become the first person in history to successfully transplant a human heart. The miraculous procedure, performed at Capetown’s Groote Schuur Hospital, made of Barnard an international celebrity and conferred upon his white supremacist government a measure of legitimacy.
Just under two weeks ago, Hamilton Naki, a member of Barnard’s transplant team, died in penniless obscurity at the age of 78. His were the hands that on December 3, 1967 at Groote Schuur Hospital removed the heart of Denise Darvall, a 25-year old white woman who had been mortally injured in an automobile accident. The heart was then placed by Barnard into Louis Washkansky, a 55-year old diabetic with incurable heart disease. Eager to hide Naki’s role, the hospital admonished him, “Look, we are allowing you to do this, but you must know that you are black and that’s the blood of a white. Nobody must know what you are doing.”
Hospital outsiders who saw Naki on the day of the surgery, or during the years before and after, were told that he was a cleaner and gardener. This is how the hospital’s employment records for 50 years described the man who led one of the two surgical teams that undertook the historic heart transplant operation.
Naki’s formal education ended when he was 14. He was denied formal training as a doctor and was barred by law from operating on whites. Growing up in Ngcingane, a small village in the Eastern Cape, he went without shoes and wrapped himself in sheepskin to ward off the winter cold. He was lashed as a “kaffir” by whites, routinely arrested under one police state regulation or another, and subjected to every imaginable humiliation meted out under the apartheid system. In retirement, he made do for his unemployed household of eleven on a gardener’s pension of $127 a month. For the entirety of his working life, he had no running water, no electricity, and no reliable transportation.
Yet, he became one of the world’s most gifted surgeons without whom the operation that made Barnard world famous might not have happened. Said Barnard, “On Saturday, I was a surgeon in South Africa, very little known. On Monday, I was world-renowned.”
While the state permitted Naki to secretly perform surgery and teach medical school professors up until his retirement in 1991, to the outside world, even to his neighbors in the ramshackle dwellings of Langa Township near Capetown, “[the state] pretended I was a cleaner.”
Just before Barnard died a few years ago, he confessed that Hamilton Naki “probably had more technical skill than I had.”
Such are the distortions and omissions of history where clarification arrives late, if at all, usually favoring the historian’s camp.
It is unlikely that Mark Green (or any of the other white students present) can recall the offensive remark he made to a 1L torts class in 1967. Obviously, I have never forgotten it. In any case, I am reasonably confident that neither of us knew at the time that Harvard Law School, viewed by whites as an enabling patrimony of sorts, had been endowed by its founder, Isaac Royall, from proceeds he derived from the sale of enslaved blacks on his Antiguan sugar plantation.
The point here is that what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget, what we choose to include and what we choose to exclude, has enormous consequence for all of those who look to history for an accurate measure of their worth.
Indeed, as we can now see, the abuse of history-telling discretion has had life and death significance for our relations as a nation with more than a few of the world’s peoples – the Vietnamese, the Somalis, and the Iraqis being the most recent unfortunate examples.
Had I known anything about the origins of the law school’s wealth, I might have been emboldened that day with the knowledge that I more nearly owned the place than they to whom I was caused to feel a small debilitating gratitude. No doubt it was for this very reason that no-one outside South Africa had ever heard of Hamilton Naki before his death two weeks ago. In that same vein, it is also a good bet that neither Barnard nor Naki nor Green nor one in a million Americans, for that matter, would ever have had cause to fathom that African doctors were performing cataract surgery at Sankore University in Timbuktu, Mali, in the 13th century.
For 246 years, American slavery not only snuffed out the lives of millions and robbed its victims of their material worth, but even more damagingly and with designed asphyxiating patience, erased from them all memory of the documentable glories of Africa’s golden antiquity.
In studious denial, America lives with the cost and shame of its own holocaust, still. Our prisons warehouse the evidence. This outcome should not, however, be surprising. For people seldom over-perform or under-perform the record of performance relentlessly presented to them as the measure of their whole full value. In other words, beyond eradication, the most horrific crime that one people can commit against another is to strip them of their story of themselves.
For all concerned, the short and long term price of ignorance can hardly be overstated.
Just ask the well-gulled, patriotic, American farm-boy soldier fighting in Iraq who has never heard of Gertrude Bell or Percy Cox or the mis-told exploits of Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, the so-called Lawrence of Arabia.
Randall Robinson,(rr@rosro.com),
is a social justice advocate and
author of several works
including The Debt - What
America Owes to Blacks