SOUTH AFRICAN DIRECTOR MEETS
NOBLE SAVAGE
In a recent telecast of Sneak
Previews (PBS) Jeffrey Lyons and Neil
Gabler discussed changing film
portrayals of aliens--f rotn other
countries, "primitive" cultures, and
outer space. From dangerous, cruel, and
"inhuman" beings, aliens in recent
years have begun a return to Rousseau's
"noble savage" represented by E.T., the
Iceman, and Tarzan' s ape mother. As
technological progress threatens to
destroy the world rather than save it,
some films may be expressing a desire
to return to a simpler, preindustrial
"Garden of Eden". But, when such films
draw on anthropological data, an
important line between documentary and
fantasy blurs.
In The Gods Must Be Crazy , a highly
successful South African comedy, the
San (bushmen) are depicted as remote
inhabitants of the Kalahari desert--in
the 1980' s. They are innocent of any
contact with the harried, materialistic
and purposeless life of the European
industrialized societies which South
Africa (much sanitized in this film)
supposedly exemplifies. Although the
bushmen utterances are as unintelligi-
ble to most viewers as the musical
whistles of R2D2 in S tar Wars , the
viewer finds much to admire in this
portrayal of their simple life with its
ample food, shelter and clothing, and
its lack of materialism, jealousy, and
poverty.
The introduction of the most
minimal contact with the West threatens
to destroy this happy society. A coke
bottle from an airplane drops at the
feet of Xiang who immediately
interprets it as a gift from the gods.
Though the bottle offers multiple
uses, it creates new desires and
jealousies. Unlike the apple in the
"Garden of Eden," the bottle was given
"by the gods," so Xiang sets out to
remove the irritant by returning it to
its owners. This journey to the gods'
home at the edge of the world offers
many occasions for gentle humor, poking
fun at the innocence of a man who
thinks trucks are rude noisy animals
and who wonders how little people get
into telescopes.
The portrayal of other African
societies in the film represents an-
other extreme-- the Hobbesian view of
the cultural "other" as savage, cruel,
stupid, and childlike. So heavy-handed
is this caricature of emergent black
African countries that one Washington
reviewer ( City Paper , November 15,
1984) thought Botswana was an imaginary
country. While it is easy to see bias
in this negative view of black Africa,
it is harder to see it in the "noble
savage" portrait of the bushmen. Yet
bias is no less prominent there.
The film fails on two levels to
give an accurate picture of bushman
life. On one level, the bushmen in the
film do not behave "naturally" or
according to their own cultural rules.
Instead, they move and speak according
to direction given by someone not
versed in their culture. They walk too
quickly and too closely together when
going out to gather. They behave in an
uncharacteristically demonstrative way,
weeping, laughing, and embracing, at
the departure and subsequent return of
Xiang. A single oversized hut, rather
than a circle of small huts, serves far
too many people for a single "family"
or hearth group. The camp is located in
the midst of a treeless grassy area,
unsuited to a climate where air
temperatures in the shade regularly
exceed 110 degrees. In addition, the
bushmen speak !Kung, but extra clicks
were overlaid on the sound track to
make the language seem even stranger.
Throughout, the translator uses the
English word "thing" to refer to the
coke bottle, although Xiang is using
the !Kung word for bottle "n!abesa"!
The second level of bias is
immediately apparent if the film is
compared with John Marshall's N!ai: The
S tory of a_ !Kung Woman , filmed for the
Odyssey television series in the same
place (Namibia near the Botswana
border), in the same year (1980), and
using many of the same people as The
Gods Must Be Cra zy . From N ! a i it is
very clear that the !Kung San are
hardly isolated from western influence
today. A remnant of their ancient
territory has been made a bushman
"homeland." There, an administrative
center has been established where !Kung
are encouraged to settle and to become
dependent on handouts of mealie meal
from the white administrators. It is
also evident that the !Kung are not
unaware of bottles, particularly those
which contain alcoholic beverages.
The "Garden of Eden," if any, in
N !ai lies in her childhood memories.
Returning to the hunting and gathering
life of that "Garden of Eden" is
impossible, since the resources no
longer exist given the numbers of
people crowded into the homeland. In
any case, few would wish to give up
their new life entirely, despite its
drunkenness, fighting, army service,
and jealousy.
Even in the hunting and gathering
past, life was more difficult than The
Gods would suggest: infant and maternal
mortality was high, girls were jealous
of each other, young women were married
to husbands chosen by their parents,
and people accused each other of
adultery and fought about it. N!ai
shows the ambivalence of the hunter-
gatherer in transition, for both the
present and the past have attractive
and unattractive aspects.
N!ai is an ethnographic document,
an extraordinary window into the life
of someone in another culture. It is
not without bias either, since N!ai is
not entirely representative of women in
her culture. Furthermore, Marshall
focuses more on riveting scenes of
contemporary cultural clash and
disintegration and less on ordinary
scenes of peaceful daily life. But
choosing scenes is not the same as
directing actors from an alien culture
in actions they never would have
performed.
In real life, the bushmen share our
humanity, as aliens such as E.T. and
R2D2 cannot. The idealized portrayal of
the bushmen in The Gods Must Be Crazy
is as much a rejection of that common
humanity as is the negative portrayal
of black Africa. It is good theatre but
poor ethnography.
Alison Brooks