The Gods Must Be Crazy is a 1980 film, written and directed by
Jamie UysJacobus Johannes Uys , better known as Jamie Uys, was a South African film director.-Early life:Prior to his foray into film, Uys was a math teacher in his hometown of Boksburg. He then married Hettie, a fellow math teacher and the couple started farming and opening trading posts along the Palala...
. The film is the first in
The Gods Must Be Crazy series of films. Set in
BotswanaBotswana, officially the Republic of Botswana , is a landlocked country located in Southern Africa. The citizens are referred to as "Batswana" . Formerly the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, Botswana adopted its new name after becoming independent within the Commonwealth on 30 September 1966...
and
South AfricaThe Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
, it tells the story of Xi, a Sho of the
Kalahari DesertThe Kalahari Desert is a large semi-arid sandy savannah in Southern Africa extending , covering much of Botswana and parts of Namibia and South Africa, as semi-desert, with huge tracts of excellent grazing after good rains. The Kalahari supports more animals and plants than a true desert...
(played by Namibian San farmer Nǃxau) whose band has no knowledge of the world beyond. The film is followed by four
sequelA sequel is a narrative, documental, or other work of literature, film, theatre, or music that continues the story of or expands upon issues presented in some previous work...
s, the final three of which were made in
Hong KongHong Kong is one of two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China , the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is renowned for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour...
.
Plot
The film is a collision of three separate stories—the journey of a Ju/'hoansi
bushmanThe indigenous people of Southern Africa, whose territory spans most areas of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia, and Angola, are variously referred to as Bushmen, San, Sho, Barwa, Kung, or Khwe...
to the end of the earth to get rid of a
Coca-ColaCoca-Cola is a carbonated soft drink sold in stores, restaurants, and vending machines in more than 200 countries. It is produced by The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia, and is often referred to simply as Coke...
bottle, the romance between a bumbling scientist and a schoolteacher, and a band of guerrillas on the run.
Xi and his tribe of San/Bushmen relatives are living well off the land in the Kalahari Desert. They are happy because the gods have provided plenty of everything, and no one in the tribe has unfulfilled wants. One day, a glass Coke bottle is thrown out of an aeroplane and falls to earth unbroken. Initially, this strange artifact seems to be another boon from the gods—-Xi's people find many uses for it. But unlike anything that they have had before, there is only one bottle to go around. This exposes the tribe to a hitherto unknown phenomenon,
propertyProperty is any physical or intangible entity that is owned by a person or jointly by a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation...
, and they soon find themselves experiencing things they never had before: jealousy, envy, anger, hatred, even violence.
Since it has caused the tribe unhappiness on two occasions, Xi decides that the bottle is an evil thing and must be thrown off of the edge of the world. He sets out alone on his quest and encounters Western civilization for the first time. The film presents an interesting interpretation of civilization as viewed through Xi's perceptions.
There are also plot lines about shy biologist Andrew Steyn (
Marius WeyersMarius Weyers is a South African actor. He received international attention playing Andrew Steyn in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy . He recently starred in Blood Diamond.-Selected filmography:...
) who is studying the local animals (which, because of his nervousness around women, he once described as "manure-collecting"); the newly hired village school teacher, a former newspaper reporter named Kate Thompson (
Sandra PrinslooSandra Prinsloo, also known as Sandra Prinzlow, is a South African actress best known for her role as Kate Thomson in 1980 film The Gods Must Be Crazy....
); and some
guerrillasGuerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians use military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and...
led by Sam Boga (Louw Verwey), who are being pursued by government troops after an unsuccessful attempt to massacre the Cabinet of the fictional African country of Burani. Also taking a share of the limelight is Steyn's
Land RoverLand Rover is a British car manufacturer with its headquarters in Gaydon, Warwickshire, United Kingdom which specialises in four-wheel-drive vehicles. It is owned by the Indian company Tata Motors, forming part of their Jaguar Land Rover group...
, dubbed the Antichrist (also "son of a mlakka") by his assistant and mechanic, M'pudi (Michael Thys), for its unreliability and constant need of repair. Also part of the chaos is a fresh safari tour guide named Jack Hind (Nic de Jager), who has designs on Thompson and would often steal Steyn's thunder.
Xi happens upon a farm and, being hungry as well as oblivious to the concept of ownership, shoots a goat with a tranquilizer arrow. For this he is arrested and jailed for stealing livestock. M'pudi, who lived with the bushmen for a long time, realizes that Xi will die in the alien environment of a prison cell. He and Steyn manage to hire Xi as a tracker for the 11 weeks of his prison sentence, with the help of M'pudi, who speaks Xi's language. Meanwhile, the guerrillas invade the school where Kate teaches and use her and her pupils as human shields for their escape by foot to the neighboring country. Steyn and Xi manage to immobilize the guerrillas as they are passing by and save Kate and the children. Steyn allows Xi to leave to continue his quest to the edge of the world.
Xi eventually finds himself at the top of a cliff with a solid layer of low-lying clouds obscuring the landscape below. This convinces Xi that he has reached the edge of the world, and he throws the bottle off the cliff. This scene was filmed at a place called God's Window in the then Eastern Transvaal, South Africa (now
MpumalangaMpumalanga , is a province of South Africa. The name means east or literally "the place where the sun rises" in Swazi, Xhosa, Ndebele and Zulu. Mpumalanga lies in eastern South Africa, north of KwaZulu-Natal and bordering Swaziland and Mozambique. It constitutes 6.5% of South Africa's land area...
). This is at the edge of the
escarpmentAn escarpment is a steep slope or long cliff that occurs from erosion or faulting and separates two relatively level areas of differing elevations.-Description and variants:...
between the
HighveldThe Highveld is a high plateau region of inland South Africa which is largely home to the largest metropolitan area in the country, the Gauteng City Region, which accounts for one-third of South Africa's population.-Location and description:...
and Lowveld of South Africa. Xi then returns to his band and receives a warm welcome.
Themes
The first two stories present the Ju/ʼhoansi as
noble savageThe term noble savage , expresses the concept an idealized indigene, outsider , and refers to the literary stock character of the same...
s leading a simple, fairly
utopiaUtopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
n life in contrast with
Western cultureWestern culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
. Initially, the arrival of a
Coca-ColaCoca-Cola is a carbonated soft drink sold in stores, restaurants, and vending machines in more than 200 countries. It is produced by The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia, and is often referred to simply as Coke...
bottle, thrown from a passing light aircraft, represents the only exposure that the Ju/ʼhoansi have with Western culture.
Richard LeeRichard Borshay Lee is a Canadian anthropologist. Lee has studied at the University of Toronto and University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. Presently, he holds a position at the University of Toronto as Professor Emeritus of Anthropology...
, an anthropologist who studied the Ju/ʼhoansi, argues that the film's representation of the group was a "cruel caricature of reality" given the decades of highly problematic social changes. In Namibia, the Ju/ʼhoansi were relocated and forced to abandon their foraging lifestyle in favor of government food handouts so that, by the time of filming, the
BushmenThe indigenous people of Southern Africa, whose territory spans most areas of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia, and Angola, are variously referred to as Bushmen, San, Sho, Barwa, Kung, or Khwe...
actors had long ceased to be hunter-gatherers and were even confused by the instructions given to them by the directors, as briefly demonstrated in the film
N!ai, the Story of a !Kung WomanN!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman is a film by ethnographic filmmaker John Marshall.The film was first broadcast in 1980 as part of the Odyssey series on PBS and is distributed by Documentary Educational Resources....
, the filming of which overlapped in part with the filming of
The Gods Must Be Crazy. Even before this rapid change, the Ju/ʼhoansi had not been completely untouched by surrounding cultures and a single foreign artifact would not have upset the society's equilibrium.
While Western audiences found the films funny, there was considerable debate about its racial politics. The portrayal of Xi (particularly in the first film) as incapable of understanding the gods was viewed as insulting by some, including the government of
Trinidad and TobagoTrinidad and Tobago officially the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is an archipelagic state in the southern Caribbean, lying just off the coast of northeastern Venezuela and south of Grenada in the Lesser Antilles...
, which consequently banned the film. However, the film's many fans believe that it is exactly the opposite, a send-up of so-called civilization and a condemnation of
racismRacism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
with Xi as the hero. Xi's life is portrayed as the norm, while the Westerners are portrayed as strange. The film's progression from documentary style to comedy to the fantastical ending adds its allegorical point.
Some of the debate centered on Xi's reaction to the first white people he met: he assumed they were gods since they looked and acted so strangely (he had only known other Sho before), had road vehicles (which he also had never seen before), and were comparatively huge. However, within minutes he began doubting they were gods. The second film clearly shows Xi's greater understanding as he tells the children about the people he had met: "Heavy people... who seem to know some magic that can make things move," but are "not very bright, because they can't survive without their magic contrivances".
The films' depictions of the Bushmen, even if they were superficially accurate in the decades before the rapid social changes of the 1970s and 1980s, are clearly no longer accurate. The DVD's special feature "Journey to Nyae Nyae" (N!xau's homeland in northeastern Namibia), filmed in 2003, demonstrates this.
Release
The Gods Must Be Crazy was released in South Africa in 1980 by Ster Kinekor Pictures; it became a box-office record breaker in that country. For the film's overseas release, the original
AfrikaansAfrikaans is a West Germanic language, spoken natively in South Africa and Namibia. It is a daughter language of Dutch, originating in its 17th century dialects, collectively referred to as Cape Dutch .Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch; see , , , , , .Afrikaans was historically called Cape...
dialogue was dubbed into English, and voiceover work was provided for
!Kung!Kung or !Xun, also called Ju, is a dialect continuum spoken in Namibia, Botswana, and Angola by the !Kung people. Together with the ǂHoan language, it forms the Kx'a language family...
and
TswanaTswana or Setswana is a language spoken in Southern Africa by about 4.5 million people. It is a Bantu language belonging to the Niger–Congo language family within the Sotho languages branch of Zone S , and is closely related to the Northern- and Southern Sotho languages, as well as the Kgalagadi...
lines.
In mid-November 1986,
The Gods Must Be Crazy was released on videocassette in the U.S. by
CBS/FoxCBS/Fox Video was a home video company formed and established in 1982, as a merger between 20th Century Fox Video, formerly Magnetic Video Corporation, and CBS Video Enterprises....
through their Playhouse Video label.
Reception
Based on nineteen reviews,
The Gods Must Be Crazy has carried a 95% "Fresh" score on
Rotten TomatoesRotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
.
Aftermath
Despite the film having grossed over $100 million worldwide, Nǃxau reportedly earned less than $2,000 for his starring role. Before his death, Uys supplemented this with an additional $20,000 as well as a monthly stipend.
External links