Hamilton Naki

Hamilton Naki (26 June 1926 – 29 May 2005) was a black laboratory assistant to white cardiac surgeon Christiaan Barnard in South Africa. He was recognised for his surgical skills and for his being able to teach medical students and physicians such skills despite not having received a formal medical education, and took a leading role in organ transplant research on animals.

A controversy arose after his death in that at least five periodicals and the Associated Press retracted statements in their obituaries of Naki that claimed that he participated in the world's first human-to-human heart transplantation in 1967; the incident has been cited as an example of inadequate fact checking by the newsmedia and delayed corrections of the errors.

Naki was born to a poor family in Ngcingane, a village in the Transkei region of the Eastern Cape of South Africa. He received six years of education up to the age of 14, after which he moved to Cape Town. Beginning about 1940, he commuted from Langa, Cape Town to the University of Cape Town to work as a gardener, specifically rolling grass tennis courts.

In 1954 Robert Goetz of the University's surgical faculty asked Naki to assist him with laboratory animals. Naki's responsibilities progressed from cleaning cages to performing anaesthesia. Most of Naki's work under Goetz involved anaesthetising dogs, but Naki also assisted in operating on a giraffe "to dissect the jugular venous valves to determine why giraffes do not faint when bending to drink."

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