Quest for African Einstein:
Reply to Dr. Mailafia and Prof. Stephen Hawking (3)

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Because of the Whites' racial segregation that was meted on him, he nearly killed a friend in an argument by stabbing him in the stomach, but lucky Carson escaped murder because the boy was wearing a heavy belt. It is this same scenario that often makes me feel disgruntled whenever I thought of another African Medical Genius who was reduced to nothing other than a pensioner that went through life; sometimes posing as a cleaner and sometimes as a gardener. Very few people would recognize his name were it to be thrown as an answer in a jeopardy face-off. He never had the benefit of formal education beyond the basic primary stages. Yet this untutored, obscure, shy, modest and retired man should have been lionized, celebrated and rewarded for his ingenuity in one of the most spectacular feats of modern medicine and scientific achievements.
In 1967, Dr. Christian Bernerd was feted with a gazillion accolades globally for the feat of pulling off the first human heart transplant in the world-an honour that was supposed to go to someone who should have shared the major limelight, but did not as a result of the racial segregation meted on him in one of the most apartheid countries in Africa.
This man full of promise was once invited by South African Dr. Bernerd to join his surgical team that was to operate on the body of a young woman who was brought unconscious to the hospital. She had been hit by a car on her way to buy a cake in one of the streets of Cape Town, Southern Africa. Her case was very serious and was therefore thought dead, but her heart was still thumping.
However, the rules of the hospital did not allow any “black” person to participate in the treatment of any white person as entrenched in the apartheid laws. In view of this therefore, Bernerd's invitation of a “black” man into his team was heavily criticized, and so there was a sharp reaction on the black man's entry into Denise Darvall's rescue operation. But as destiny had it, the man was eventually let into the operation theatre after being warned not to reveal to anybody that he has been allowed access into the “whites' operating theatre”. The hospital management made their position known to the surgical team that “we are allowing this black man to join this operation, but he must know that he is black and that is the blood of the white. Nobody must know what he is doing”.
Ironically, the black man that was initially denied entry gave all of them the greatest shocker they had never expected during the operation, because he was too good to be labeled as “black”, which is always reduced to nothing by the Whites so-called. In fact, the British conservative weekly, the Economist once carried the news in one of its reports that “this black man, with his steady dexterous hands and razor-sharp mind, was simply too good at the delicate, bloody work of organ transplantation”. Therefore, the “black” man with the help of Bernerd, prepared the woman and made her became the world's first recipient of a transplanted human heart. Indeed, the skilled “black” hands plucked the “White” heart from the White corps, and for hours, hosed every trace of blood from it, replacing it with the donor's own. The heart was then set pumping again with electrodes.
But instead of this “black” genius to be honoured, Dr. Bernerd, became over night, the most celebrated doctor that performed the first heart transplant in the world!
Born in the village of Ngacangane in the windswept Eastern Cape, had been pulled out of school at 14, when his family could no longer afford it. His life seemed likely to be cattle-herding, barefoot and in sheep's skin, like many of his contemporaries. Indeed, his childhood upbringing was just similar with the way I was brought up between the age of 10 and 13. Then, going out for early cattle-rearing with brother Ibrahim was the perfect thing I loved doing so much. When Dad decided to leave me with Grandpa in a nearby village close to my hometown, I was busy hanging around with my Bull that I named Kuri. I used to rear Kuri from morning till dawn; surviving on raw grinded millet mixed with fresh milk cow just the way our honourable Cardiac Surgeon was brought up in Ngacangane.
Instead of this genius to give up job and concentrate on cattle-herding, he hitch-hiked to Cape Town to find work and managed to land a job tending lawns and rolling tennis courts at the University of Cape Town Medical School.
Unsung, though not forgotten, Hamilton Naki never learned the techniques of performing operations formally; as he puts it “I stole with my eyes”. But he also became an expert at liver transplant, which is by far trickier than heart transplantation. Hamilton instructed several thousand trainee surgeons whom mostly are now heads of several Surgery Departments.
Sadly, as a Gardener, he drew pension of 760 rand about $275, a month. He could only pay for one of his five children to study up to high school, and recognition with the Order of Majungubwe and an honorary degree in medicine from the University of Cape Town, came only a few years before his death, and long after South Africa's return to “black rule”.
What is left for Africans is to rise and meet the challenge of this colour segregation that is always symbolized and associated with bad omen. It is a well known fact that if you wronged a White man, for instance, he/she might wish to list you into his/her “Black book or record”. Likewise, if you are in a military setting or any armed forces outfit, especially in Nigeria, once you are a hardened criminal, you hardly escape going into the “Black Maria” (now Black Jeep). Also it is common particularly in Nigeria that anytime there is light off in the night, you hear people shouting from all angles “blackout”!
We shall therefore try as much as possible to seek redress globally by accepting to be called simply Africans but not “Blacks”. The so-called Black Americans in the United States have already started doing the battle for us. They are no longer allowing themselves to be addressed or called as Blacks but African Americans instead.
I therefore look forward confidently to the day when all mankind will work for a living with no thought to his separateness as Negro, Jew, Italian, Black, White or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into the full realization of the Africa's dream- a dream yet unfulfilled. Africa must learn from the American dream that recently brought about the African-American Presidency as in the case of determined Barack Hussein Obama. For the first time in world history an African American born to a Kenyan father is now the leading icon of God's own country.
The challenge before the African continent as highlighted by Martin Luther King Jr. in one of his addresses to the U.S citizens is therefore to fulfill a dream that will give us equal opportunity of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a continent where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to few; a dream of a continent where men will not argue that the colour of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a continent where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of services for the rest of humanity; the dream of a continent where every man will respect the dignity and worth of human personality.
 

Nura, a Quantity Surveyor, is Secretary General, African Climate Change Research Centre (ACCREC). Contact Nura at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it