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The Gods Must Be CrazyBut the producers know exactly what they are doing

BY RICHARD B. LEE Richa rd Lee is a Toronto-based anthro pologist who has worked with the San f or over twenty years.

Welcome to Apartheid funland,where white and black mingle easily, where the savages are nobleand civilization is in question, andwhere the humour is nonstop.

These are the images packaged

in Jamie Uys' hit film, The Gods Mus t Be Crazy now playing to capacity audiences around the world.

South Africa's previous successes in international film distribution have served their racismwell. The Wild Geese (1974)glorified the atrocities of whitemercenaries in the 1960's Congocrisis. Here a handful of macho whites routinely vanquishedcountless, faceless blacks. In the1964 production of Zulu the samepremise was transposed to the 19thcentury as a handful of British soldiers triumphed over wave afterwave of Zulu impis at the battleof Rorke's Drift. (In the pricelessMonty Python spoof of this filmone of the white soldiers pausesin mid-battle casually to light hispipe with the flames from his severed and burning leg). In thesefilms the message was simple andbrutal: 10,000 or more of thedarker races are really no match

for a few good (white) men.Given this track record, the

viewer is quite unprepared and initially disarmed by The Gods Must be Crazy. The white male lead isplayed as a klutz, and the "hero" is a naked brown man. Civilization is viewed with skepticism andthe virtues of the natural world areextolled . And the film is funnyand not preachy. Hey, maybe theseSouth Africans are not such a badlot after all!

The film opens with a highlyromanticized ethnography of theprimitive Bushmen in their remotehome in "Botswana", (Actuallythe film was shot in Namibia).The voice-over extols the virtuesof their simple life. Into thisidyllic scene co mes a Coke bottle thrown from a passing plane.Discord erupts among the happyfolk as they strive to possess thebottle. Clearly heaven has madea mistake (hence the film's title)

and N!au, the Bushman hero resolves to remove t he offending itemby carrying it to the ends of theearth. On his journey he encounters a white game biologist (theklutz) and his coloured side-kick, abeautiful white school-teacher anda band of Keystone Cops Marxist revoutionaries on the run froma botched coup in an unspecifiedAfrican country to the north (Angola?). In the end the Bushmanfoils the baddies, the biologist winsthe school teacher and the Bushman disposes of the bottle, andreturns to his people. Happinessreigns once again in Apartheid/and.

Both viewers and reviewers aretaken in by the charm and innocence of the Gods ... especially thesympathetic portrayal of the nonwhites. The clever sight gags evokelaughter that ignores political ideologies. But there is more to thisfilm than meets the eye. ... a greatdeal more .

First, there is the incredibly

patronizing attitude towards theBushmen, or San as I prefer tocall them. The Bushman as NobleSavage is a peculiar piece of whiteSouth African racial mythology. Inthe popular press the Bushman area favorite weekend magazine topic.Their remarkable skills as trackers,their oneness with the wild, andtheir cooperative and sharing wayof life are lauded, in contrast to theanxieties of urban life, and in unstated but pointed contrast to the

grasping, ungrateful and dangerous black majority the whites regularly come in contact with . TheSan represent the land as it oncewas and the good native as he oncewas. The message is clear. Left totheir own devices the unspoilt natives are good. Only when theyare exposed to civilization do theythen become bad, ie. communist.

These sympathetic attitudes of contemporary whites contrast withthose of the past. In the 18th

and 19th centuries the Afrikanersof the frontier invaded the lands of the San and hunted them for sportand bounty. The Cape Archivesdocument a century of systematic extermination. The San werehounded to virtual extinction bythe whites within South Africa by1880.

Compelled by complex motivesof romanticism, the conservationethic, and liberal guilt, 20th Century white south Africans have

Southern Africa REPORT june 198 5 19

ee, R.B. (1985). The gods must be crazy but the producers know exactly what they are doing. Southernrica Re ort 1 1 , 19-20.

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rehabilitated the San and giventhem a place as the virtual mascots of the Apartheid world-view.The books of Lauren Van der Postand the film of Jamie Uys bothspring from this vision. Beyondthis vague liberalism, in Uys' casethere isn't a trace of opposition toapartheid.

In addition to the film's patronizing attitude I was appalledby its bald-faced misrepresentation of the contemporary San. Tosay that there are San today whoare untouched by civilization is acruel joke. The !Kung San of Namibia where the film was ma d e,have been subject to 25 years of forced acculturation and 10 years

of wholesale recruitment into theSouth African army (see article

on Namibia elsewhere in this issue). The modern !Kung in order to appear in the film had tohide their denims, transistor radiosand canned beer, and reach into

their trunks for clothing, long sinceabandoned, sewn from the skins of

game animals. All of the actors inthe film had themselves spent time

or had relatives on South Africanarmy bases.

A much better film is N'ai: TheStory of a !King Woman made byJohn Marshall (1980). It documents the mission station, welfare,

weekend-drunk quality of !Kunglife in a Namibian native reserve, apicture that will have uncomfortable parallels for Canadians. ACanadian or American film-makercould never get away with thepatronizing condesencion of Uys'portrayal of the San, and it ishigh time that The Gods Must be Crazy be recognized for thesmarmy whitewash of Apartheid that it is. Jamie Uys was in LosAngeles in April for talks with 20th

Century Fox so you can be surethat 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 Bushmanlife in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa mayexplain the immense international popularity of TheGods Must Be Crazy (Arts and Leisure, April 28)'butthat should not make you uncritical of everything thefilm's director, Jamie Uys, says of t he Bushman's lot.

N!Xau, the leading Bushman in the film - who

has never seen such a thing before as the Coca-Colabottle dropped from a plane that begins the action had certainly seen more than one white man beforehe encountered Mr. Uys in the late 1970's. Whiteadministrators had been in the Kalahari for decades.So had white schoolteachers, anthropologists, writers, film makers and, since 1978, the South AfricanDefense Force. N!Xau grew up as a herdboy on aHerero farm in Botswana and moved in 1976 to Bushmanland (Namibia) to take a job as a cook in thelocal school.. . .

Because the myth of Bushman innocence andbliss underlies the popularity of The Gods Must BeCrazy, it is no surprise that Mr. Uys would like us tobelieve in it . There is, however, little to laugh aboutin Bushmanland: 1,000 demoralized, formerly independent foragers crowd into a squalid, tubercularhomeland, getting by on handouts of cornmeal andsugar, drinking Johnnie Walker or home brew, fighting with one another and joining the South AfricanArmy.

The most disastrous consequence of the Edenicmyth is a plan to expropriate the last fragment of land belonging to N!Xau's people for a game reserve,on which Bushmen will not be permitted to raisecrops or livestock. On land that cannot sustain themas foragers they will be asked to hunt and gatherwith bows and arrows and digging sticks, recreatingimages of the past for the pleasure of the tourists.

20 june 1985 Southern Africa REPORT