The Gods are Probably Not Entirely Crazy

I watched The Gods Must Be Crazy tonight for the first time since I was a child. It made me surprisingly emotional, but not so much for the explicit content of the film as the context of experiences with which it was juxtaposed.

The plot is rather unique - if you haven’t seen the film yet, go to Wikipedia and read the synopsis. This essay will make little sense without it.

Of course, as a child, it was just an odd film; most of the jokes sort of went over my head at the time, except the broader slapstick stuff, so I guess I must have been quite small. I don’t really remember where I was when I watched it.

But I watched it tonight home alone with my 16 month old son sleeping in another room of the house, at the end of a day which started with the birth of my daughter Emma. Emma hasn’t come home yet because my wife is being kept overnight for observation due to her elevated blood pressure.

I had started watching it during the lunch break after the morning shift of my self-imposed daily work routine, and was interrupted by me spilling a coke on the keyboard, just after the scene in which Xi decides the glass coke bottle is evil and he will have to throw it off the edge of the earth.

The local repair shop luckily saved it.

Director Jamie Uys took some not inconsiderable liberties with accuracy, and appears to not have had much personal knowledge of Botswana, where many rural peasants wear Basotho hats and plant bananas in a climate that is both too cold at night, and too dry all year round to sustain such a crop. The clothing also looked wrong, and the dialect of Setswana sounded awfully like the variety spoken in South Africa rather than the softer northern variety spoken in Botswana.

Much of the Benny-Hill style shenanigans were a bit irritating, though much of the scenes were at least creative and amusing for their use of various tropes which anyone who has lived in the rural Transvaal or anywhere else in the wilder parts of Southern Africa would be familiar with - McGuyvered Land Rovers, hostile foliage, and surprise wildlife cameos.

The American dub is a pain, but it’s a mission to find the original Afrikaans version anywhere.

So while I was watching, I did the usual thing of looking up the film while I watched it. What I was drawn to was the ludicrous hysteria of the reactions to the film from critics at the time.

The idea that a film set in Botswana was aimed at whitewashing life in South Africa seemed to me patently absurd. That it was a distraction from the bitter nature of apartheid was fair enough, but even a remark like that seemed to miss the point.

There was a remark an old undergrad lecturer of mine made - she was a rather intellectually intimidating woman called Annette Seegers who, while a liberal Afrikaner, was often rather blunt about the facts of life. After all, she studied conflict for a living.

But on the topic of apartheid itself, she said that everyone imagines it was an unending river of blood and suffering, and one forgets that there were also birthdays, quiet moments, and daily chores, and that life went on between the drama we prefer to remember.

When someone insists that no lighthearted joy is permitted when one lives in the midst of an unjust system, they aren’t insisting on a return to reality, they are insisting on an exclusively selected edit, in which anything outside of politically useful suffering must be sent to the incinerator.

It makes me think of the songs Fokofpolisiekar made in their return album after their long hiatus, where the burden of keeping alive the culture, of trying to be seen as ordinary people while having a separate existence as a real existing people, has become too much heat and pressure to bear, and they chose to reject it for songs about middle class escapism and emigration.

This came as a disappointment for many fans, who expected their biting social critiques to finally come full circle - from teenage punk rebellion against impotent conservative stasis, to despair in the face of decay and liberal-consumerist nihilism, to bewilderment at their racial and cultural alienation and demonisation - and finally take up the mantle and inspire their younger fans to no longer feel ashamed and get back to rebuilding with worn out tools (to paraphrase a “snoring old colonialist”).

The poets of our youth, steeped in a deep knowledge of our literary past as Francois “Van Coke” Badenhorst is, should have known better than to give into the emotional blackmail of people who despised them. But they grew tired, preferred to ride out the high of the last fumes of civilisaiton, stay mellow on the last of the summer wine before slipping off to dissolve in the trails beyond the sea.

The Gods Must Be Crazy was a sort of prelude to this impulse - an attempt to escape the (at the time) seemingly insoluble tensions of apartheid by placing a couple of Afrikaners in the bush in Botswana, where segregation had never been, colonialism was over, and that rarest of things, a competent and tolerant African government, had managed to eke out a niche in the most miserable landmass on earth.

It was a place where the freedom of the frontier and the peace of rural African life could be pictured alongside a modern state system, and the bitter tragedies of conflicting modes of life, modern, ancient, and prehistoric, could be raised into something life-affirming.

And it was this which stood in such stark contrast to the bitter recriminations and depravities that life in Southern Africa consists of, and which colour so many daily activities. But it also stood in contrast to what we are allowed to even dream of, to imagine, when we let ourselves be sucked into the useful narratives of outsiders.

I have watched a review or two by modern YouTube film critics, and they either marvel at the oddity of the film and claim Jamie Uys’s vision was incoherent, or else play the same daft spiel as the old activist types who believed, as our contemporary national counterparts do, that all life and memory outside of official political narrative, and any flicker of joy or nostalgia, no matter how benign, should be consigned to the flame.

We see accusations of “patronising” attitudes toward the San, but of course, there is a profound affection for them. It is of course true that uncontacted tribes of hunter-gatherers no longer existed by then, but it is a fantasy based on a compassionate hope, that the tragedy of conflict between the weak and the overwhelmingly strong may at least somewhere have been delayed.

It is a fantasy of divine mercy, one shared ironically by many African nationalists, who wish devoutly that no white man ever set foot on this continent. But for the white African, such a fantasy would be suicidal ideation, and so the nearest our gaze can touch upon is the notion that there could be a place where all such conflicts were at least all somehow suspended.

Fear of the end of apartheid brought many wild speculations, but I suspect that between the extremes of a Rwandan-style genocide, and the cartoonish utopian worship of African saintliness found in Arthur C Clark’s Space Oddyssey sequels (from the wiki article):

On Earth, a period of relative peace has evolved between the United States, Soviet Union and China, although a non-violent revolution has taken place in South Africa (now the United States of Southern Africa or USSA); the white population has fled, taking most of the country's wealth with them and leaving the black population to rebuild the economy, which they do in a matter of weeks thanks to the country's diamond mines.

…between these two extremes, we lie at least a notch nearer to Rwanda than Wakanda.

Most of the fears of the conservative establishment proved true after all, even if the fears of the far right remain a little more distant even today. Ian Smith’s quotes about sewage running in the streets and hospitals becoming butcheries are not far from the mark.

Even the most fashionable reactionaries must be serious about the fact that, even with the rosiest possible picture one could paint of apartheid, it was a massive humiliation for the black population that had to have contact with the system (though some did live insulated from the racial tensions in the homeland areas, as Mandela’s autobiography famously details in its opening chapter).

It would hardly matter if you lived in a mansion, if the price was a daily humiliation ritual from the landlord. Having experienced life as a manual labourer without water or electricity, I would choose the latter. And in this way, the Land Question is not a matter of rational materialist argument, but a spiritual one, a question of dignity and pride. That is something no rational debate can change.

Of course, children change this calculus, as they do to all things. Before the birth of my children, I could fantasise about any sort of reckless and dramatic alteration of my life’s path, and the fingers of martyrdom still drew my heartstrings on occasion.

But now, there are other priorities that must be met, and one’s calculations and fantasies shift to more tangible horizons. Somehow, one must juggle mundane survival with grand collective survival strategies, if one is even within fingertip reach of taking part in the latter.

As Ernst van Zyl put it in his popular article about the pitfalls of emigration, it is time to dig trenches. But most opt out of even the first stage of a plan - fantasy, and won’t do as little as lip service toward digging trenches.

The childless are smug about their nihilism, but they are young, and are not yet staring down the barrel of a retirement as a hated minority in the future wasteland outpost of Western civilisation at the arse-end of the world.

The radicals that now populate and shape our institutions would, like the activists of yore, demand the harmony of the threshing blade, and forbid our little fantasy notions of life in harmony, where, however it may be achieved, a little adventure and romance may still be possible.

And so do the tired - let us have our wine and song, and our tables at the Spur, we can worry about the fighting when we have to flee. They don’t even dare to dream.

But these are not realistic ways to live. Even an escapist film like The Gods Must be Crazy, bears at its heart an admission of the fact that revolution, modern commerce, and rural idyll are all at war, and that childlike innocence is the grass that is trampled underfoot.

My nearby hospital still has a functioning system, nurses capable of basic functions, and enough student doctors to keep most common ailments at bay.

But the National Health Insurance Bill will become law next year, and take out the entire healthcare industry with it, by forbidding not only private insurance, but also one’s own selection of GP, hospital or therapist, all of which must receive prior approval from a national board (likely taking several months) to be covered.

Sure, the system will limp on in some state hospitals, but I doubt my wife will be able to have a safe birth legally after most doctors leave and this unfunded monstrosity wipes out the medical insurance industry.

The world of commerce, like the proverbial frog, trusted the scorpion’s revolution to carry it to some harmonious compromise. Ordinary people trust nothing, but live for whatever comes over the horizon.

The middle classes will debate what particular shade of damned we are, and refuse to risk the judgment of their peers for taking action. Yet action must be taken, all will admit, just hopefully by someone else.

Hope remains, and I eke it out wherever I find research work to do, because I have a very strange set of skills and contacts - the sum of my existing and pending research provides an almost complete roadmap for existing civil society institutions to break free and form an entirely new society within South Africa, insulated from the winds of destruction.

And it can eventually form an entirely new system, in which much (though not all) that is wrong can be made right, even for those who are not part of its robust new enclaves. But none of it will come to pass if we are forbidden to dream, or if we fear to act.

And the hope of some tenuous harmony, though surrounded by the eternal tensions of man’s struggle with man, though it may require some daring and some conflict to achieve, may yet be possible, if we are willing to take it to the ends of the earth.

But we will need to dispose of our saccharine comforts and discard our petty covetousness to achieve it.

The future will not see us all working together - we will certainly fight, but it need not be to the death, and we need not hold others’ children hostage to find our liberation.

But technical details are not to be found in film reviews.