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AP Article Email This Article To A Friend South African Gardener-Turned-Heart Surgeon Dies At 78 By CLARE NULLIS Associated Press Writer CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) _ Hamilton Naki, a former gardener who was so skilled in complicated surgery that he helped in the world's first heart transplant _ but had to keep his work secret in apartheid South Africa _ has died. He was 78. Naki, a black man who left high school because his family couldn't afford the fees, took his first job at the age of 14, cutting grass at the University of Cape Town. The university, where he worked until his retirement in 1991, announced his May 29 death on its Web site. No cause of death was listed. In 1954 he was promoted to helping care for laboratory animals and progressed from cleaning cages to more advanced lab work after a professor at the university asked him to help anesthetize animals used to train students in surgery. ``He has skills I don't have,'' Dr. Christiaan Barnard told The Associated Press in 1993. ``If Hamilton had had the opportunity to perform, he would have probably become a brilliant surgeon.'' Barnard asked Naki to be on the backup team in what became the world's first successful heart transplant, in December 1967. It was in violation of the country's laws on racial segregation, which dictated that blacks should not be given medical training, nor have contact with white patients. Naki was especially known for teaching medical students to perform intricate liver transplants on pigs, a procedure said to be more complicated than human heart transplants. Doctors who observed Naki's work used to describe how he managed to join minute blood vessels together with amazing delicacy and accuracy, and quietly finish operations the medical students had started. Ralph Kirsch, head of the Liver Research Center, described him as ``one of those remarkable men who really come around once in a long time.'' By the time he retired in 1991, he had only made it to the level of laboratory assistant. But he had to be content with the meager pension of a gardener, since his more skilled work had never been made public. Naki once told an interviewer: ``Those days you had to accept what they said as there was no other way you could go because it was the law of the land.'' It was only after the demise of apartheid in 1994 that Naki's contributions became known. In 2002, President Thabo Mbeki gave him the country's highest order for his years of public service. Naki himself said that he hoped to set an example to young people to benefit from opportunities in the new multiracial, democratic South Africa that he was denied. ``I would like it a lot if the young generation could find inspiration in my work. Our country needs more doctors, especially from the disadvantaged community,'' he once said. ``Look at me it can happen!''

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