The Gods Must Be Crazy but the Producers Know Exactly What They Are Doing

_ _ _____ _ _ o _ The Gods Must Be Crazy But the producers know exactly what they are doing BY RICHARD B. LEE The film opens with a highly Both viewers and reviewers are Richard Lee is a Toronto-based anthro romanticized ethnography of the taken in by the charm and inno pologist who has worked with the San primitive Bushmen in their remote cence of the Gods ... especially the for over twenty years. home in "Botswana", (Actually sympathetic portrayal of the non Welcome to Apartheid funland, the film was shot in Namibia). whites. The clever sight gags evoke where white and black mingle eas The voice-over extols the virtues laughter that ignores political ide ily, where the savages are noble of their simple life. Into this ologies. But there is more to this and civilization is in question, and idyllic scene comes a Coke bot film than meets the eye. ... a great where the humour is nonstop. tle thrown from a passing plane. deal more. Discord erupts among the happy First, there is the incredibly These are the images packaged folk as they strive to possess the patronizing attitude towards the in Jamie Uys' hit film, The Gods bottle. Clearly heaven has made Bushmen, or San as I prefer to Must Be Crazy now playing to ca a mistake (hence the film's title) pacity audiences around the world. call them. The Bushman as Noble Savage is a peculiar piece of white South Africa's previous suc South African racial mythology. In cesses in international film distri the popular press the Bushman are bution have served their racism a favorite weekend magazine topic. well. The Wild Geese (1974) Their remarkable skills as trackers, glorified the atrocities of white their oneness with the wild, and mercenaries in the 1960's Congo their cooperative and sharing way crisis. Here a handful of ma of life are lauded, in contrast to the cho whites routinely vanquished anxieties of urban life, and in un countless, faceless blacks. In the 1964 production of Zulu the same stated but pointed contrast to the grasping, ungrateful and danger premise was transposed to the 19th century as a handful of British sol ous black majority the whites reg diers triumphed over wave after ularly come in contact with. The wave of Zulu impis at the battle San represent the land as it once of Rorke's Drift. (In the priceless was and the good native as he once Monty Python spoof of this film was. The message is clear. Left to one of the white soldiers pauses their own devices the unspoilt na in mid-battle casually to light his tives are good. Only when they pipe with the flames from his sev are exposed to civilization do they ered and burning leg). In these then become bad, ie. communist. and N!au, the Bushman hero re films the message was simple and solves to remove the offending item These sympathetic attitudes of brutal: 10,000 or more of the by carrying it to the ends of the contemporary whites contrast with darker races are really no match earth. On his journey he encoun those of the past. In the 18th for a few good (white) men. ters a white game biologist (the and 19th centuries the Afrikaners Given this track record, the klutz) and his coloured side-kick, a of the frontier invaded the lands of viewer is quite unprepared and ini beautiful white school-teacher and the San and hunted them for sport tially disarmed by The Gods Must a band of Keystone Cops Marx and bounty. The Cape Archives be Crazy. The white male lead is ist revoutionaries on the run from document a century of system played as a klutz, and the "hero" a botched coup in an unspecified atic extermination. The San were is a naked brown man. Civiliza African country to the north (An hounded to virtual extinction by the whites within South Africa by tion is viewed with skepticism and gola?). In the end the Bushman the virtues of the natural world are foils the baddies, the biologist wins 1880. extolled. And the film is funny the school teacher and the Bush Compelled by complex motives and not preachy. Hey, maybe these man disposes of the bottle, and of romanticism, the conservation South Africans are not such a bad returns to his people. Happiness ethic, and liberal guilt, 20th Cen lot after all! reigns once again in Apartheid/and. tury white south Africans have Southern Africa REPORT june 1985 19 o _ rehabilitated the San and given on Namibia elsewhere in this is or had relatives on South African them a place as the virtual mas sue). The modern !Kung in or army bases. cots of the Apartheid world-view. der to appear in the film had to A much better film is N'ai: The The books of Lauren Van der Post hide their denims, transistor radios Story of a !King Woman made by and the film of Jamie Uys both and canned beer, and reach into John Marshall (1980). It docu spring from this vision. Beyond ments the mission station, welfare, this vague liberalism, in Uys' case weekend-drunk quality of !Kung there isn't a trace of opposition to life in a Namibian native reserve, a apartheid. picture that will have uncomfort In addition to the film's pa able parallels for Canadians. A tronizing attitude I was appalled Canadian or American film-maker by its bald-faced misrepresenta could never get away with the tion of the contemporary San. To patronizing condesencion of Uys' say that there are San today who portrayal of the San, and it is are untouched by civilization is a high time that The Gods Must cruel joke. The !Kung San of be Crazy be recognized for the Namibia where the film was made, smarmy whitewash of Apartheid have been subject to 25 years of their trunks for clothing, long since that it is. Jamie Uys was in Los forced acculturation and 10 years abandoned, sewn from the skins of Angeles in April for talks with 20th of wholesale recruitment into the game animals. All of the actors in Century Fox so you can be sure South African army (see article the film had themselves spent time that Gods-II is in the pipeline. A recent letter to the New York Times by anthropologist Toby Volkman sheds more light on Jamie Uys' misuse of the Bushman. The illusion of the "innocent charm" of Bushman Because the myth of Bushman innocence and life in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa may bliss underlies the popularity of The Gods Must Be explain the immense international popularity of The Crazy, it is no surprise that Mr. Uys would like us to Gods Must Be Crazy (Arts and Leisure, April 28)'but believe in it. There is, however, little to laugh about that should not make you uncritical of everything the in Bushmanland: 1,000 demoralized, formerly inde film's director, Jamie Uys, says of the Bushman's lot. pendent foragers crowd into a squalid, tubercular homeland, getting by on handouts of cornmeal and N!Xau, the leading Bushman in the film - who sugar, drinking Johnnie Walker or home brew, fight has never seen such a thing before as the Coca-Cola ing with one another and joining the South African bottle dropped from a plane that begins the action Army. had certainly seen more than one white man before he encountered Mr. Uys in the late 1970's. White The most disastrous consequence of the Edenic administrators had been in the Kalahari for decades. myth is a plan to expropriate the last fragment of So had white schoolteachers, anthropologists, writ land belonging to N!Xau's people for a game reserve, ers, film makers and, since 1978, the South African on which Bushmen will not be permitted to raise Defense Force. N!Xau grew up as a herdboy on a crops or livestock. On land that cannot sustain them Herero farm in Botswana and moved in 1976 to Bush as foragers they will be asked to hunt and gather manland (Namibia) to take a job as a cook in the with bows and arrows and digging sticks, recreating local school.. .. images of the past for the pleasure of the tourists. 20 june 1985 Southern Africa REPORT.

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