by Patrick Chura,
Ph.D Professor
By coincidence, I spent most of Valentine’s Day reading a book about a heart transplant. Zulu Heart, published in 1974, was the last novel completed by writer-activist Shirley Graham, the second wife of W.E.B. Du Bois. Only 160 libraries worldwide own a copy of this rare book, but Graham biographer Gerald Horne called it “the most significant work of art she produced during her long and fertile career.” Graham’s novel is relevant now.
Set in South Africa during Apartheid, the narrative focuses on Kirk Vermeer, a 36-year-old Afrikaner surgeon who goes into cardiac arrest and can only be saved by a transplant. The white doctor’s replacement heart is taken without delay or inquiry from a black man, a young laborer mutilated in an accident in the Johannesburg mines.
The transplant is successful, but it alters Vermeer’s personality. Scenes from the dead miner’s Zulu heritage filter nightly into the white man’s consciousness in the form of intense dreams. Eventually the wealthy doctor, whose life epitomizes white privilege, becomes a partisan in the struggle against South Africa’s racist government. He joins with black militant groups, uses his influence to rescue black prisoners from the Johannesburg penitentiary, and dies a martyr to the anti-Apartheid cause.
Zulu Heart won praise in the black American press. The Harlem-based Amsterdam News saw it as “a novel of conversion” that explored cross-racial cooperation and suggested that the transformation of society “must come through a literal ‘change of heart’ on the part of the privileged.” The reviewer also noted that Graham’s novel was not a mere fantasy; it was based on events in the “actual world.”
The real-life sources of Graham’s plot offer a fascinating window into the social implications of medical science. In December 1967, South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed his first heart transplant. A month later, Barnard’s second procedure was famous for another reason: It was the first interracial heart transplant, with a black donor and a white recipient.
The transference of a black heart into a white body caused quite a stir in 1968. As Maya Koretzky’s recent article in Social History of Medicine notes, black newspapers saw this transplant as uplifting proof that “we are all one people” and that technology might eventually cancel out racism. According to the Los Angeles Sentinel, discrimination was now “a political fact but a biological fraud,” and social progress was on the way.
These optimistic views faded only four months later, with the first interracial transplant on U.S. soil, the Tucker case of Richmond, Virginia. In May 1968, Bruce Tucker, a 54 year-old black laborer, was severely injured at work and rushed in a coma to the Medical College of Virginia. After minimal attempts to contact the man’s family, surgeons declared Tucker dead, removed his heart, and transferred it to the body of a white man. Two days later Tucker’s brother arrived at the hospital to learn not only that his brother was dead but that his heart had been taken in an act of brazen racial exploitation.
“Beware Heart Snatchers” read the headline of the New York Amsterdam News when the Tucker family filed a lawsuit. The article warned that African-Americans were now more valuable dead than alive. The Tucker case was ultimately dismissed by an all-white jury, but not before it became a powerful reminder that science often served rich whites at the expense of poor blacks.
Reviews of Zulu Heart in the Black press hinted at the Tucker case by observing that the accident Graham described in the Johannesburg mines was not only “quite convenient” for the white beneficiary, but that the injured black miner “was apparently helped along the way by the good doctors.”
These accounts of medical exploitation echo the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the most iconic episode of racist medical maltreatment. They might also help explain why the current rate of Covid vaccination for black Americans lags significantly behind that of whites. Like the first heart transplants, vaccines might be called a medical miracle. But disparities in delivery add up to a tragedy of unequal access, combined with historically justified mistrust.
Graham’s story of South Africa addressed America’s problems too. The novel’s ultimately hopeful message was enabled by her idealism about the human heart, which in her view was not just a machine but a unique organ, the seat of identity and passion. Her real “hero” is the Zulu heart itself. That strong heart is an engine of transformation and a symbol of aspiration. Perhaps the book is after all a fitting Valentine’s Day read.
