During the Apartheid era in South Africa, non-white persons and citizens were not given equal opportunities in the medical professions. At Groote Schuur Hospital, Hamilton Naki was an informally taught surgeon. He started out as a gardener and cleaner. One day he was asked to help out with an experiment on a giraffe. From this modest beginning, Naki became principal lab technician and taught hundreds of surgeons, and assisted with Barnard's organ transplant program. Barnard said, "Hamilton Naki had better technical skills than I did. He was a better craftsman than me, especially when it came to stitching, and had very good hands in the theatre". A popular myth, propagated principally by a widely discredited documentary film called "Hidden Heart" and an erroneous newspaper article, maintains incorrectly that Naki was present during the Washkansky transplant.