Heart Transplants, Legislating Death, and Disruptive Anti-Apartheid Advocacy

Abstract

In December 1967, South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard astonished the world by becoming the first to successfully transplant a human heart. In the months that followed, a French Anti-Apartheid Committee proposed an international law to prohibit the harvest of prisoners' organs as French activists combined human rights and legal strategies to question the legality and ethics of Barnard's success. From a South Africa eager to present itself as modern and technologically advanced came an attempt to legislate use of organs from “living donors” in unspecified “authorized institutions.” In physicians' professional discussion of donor selection at an international heart transplantation symposium that Barnard convened in Cape Town, capital punishment figured as a proxy for race. Moving between South Africa, France and the United States, this article examines anti-apartheid activism, legislative innovation, and heart surgeons' attempts to normalize cerebral death and increase donors that followed the medical breakthrough in Cape Town, South Africa. It contributes to human rights history by showing how the French Anti-Apartheid Committee drew on transnational advocacy networks and legal strategies that predated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, emphasizing collective over individual rights, deploying strategies of rupture, and actively pursuing a racially conscious, anticolonial solidarity.