COMM 2366 Aaron Miller Robert Boyd 7 December 2010

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The Gods Must Be Crazy

The Gods Must Be Crazy is an unusual film about unusual people from an unusual place

for films to be produced. It is both intriguing and comedic, and gives us a perspective of modern

western life in a way unseen in most films. It is a film about a Bushmen, or San, of Southern

Africa and his encounter with “modern man.” This film has an interesting director and

background, a main character whose life may amaze many westerners, and had good

international reception for a film of its type and origin.

The Gods Must Be Crazy was directed by Jacobus Johannes Uys, or Jamie Uys, who was

a math teacher in his hometown of Boksburg in the Gauteng province of South Africa prior to

getting into film. He made his debut as a director in 1951 with a film made in the Afrikaans

language called Daar Doer in Die Dosveld. One of his other notable films which he wrote,

produced, and directed was Animals Are Beautiful People, which was a documentary about

various plant and animal life in South Africa and contained a humorous scene about animals

eating fermented Marula fruit and becoming intoxicated. This film earned Uys the 1974

Hollywood Foreign Press Association award for best documentary, and also gave him experience

in shooting animals for his most successful and famous film, The Gods Must Be Crazy.

Uys’ film The Gods Must Be Crazy is about the interaction of western and Bushman

culture in South Africa. The film begins with a comparison between the complex way of life in

the modern western world, one of adapting one’s environment to oneself, and the simpler way of

life in the world of the Bushmen, one of adapting oneself to one’s environment, in such a way as

to glorify the latter. Then, the story begins with a pilot dropping a Coke bottle out of a plane as

he flies over territory occupied by Bushmen. A Coke bottle is a simple and common thing to

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people living in the modern western world, but an amazing and wonderful thing in the world of

the Bushmen. The Bushmen start to fight over the bottle, and it becomes known as “the evil

thing.” They decide that “the evil thing” needs to be dropped off the edge of the earth, and a

member of the tribe named Xixo volunteers to undertake this task. On his comedic journey to the

edge of the earth, Xixo encounters white people for the first time, gets arrested for hunting a

rancher’s goats, gets put in jail, is bailed out by a bumbling biologist who needs Xixo as a

tracker, and becomes the key element in taking down a terrorist who is trying to overthrow the

government.

The man who plays Xixo in the movie was a Bushman named N!xau, the exclamation

point stands for a click consonant in his native language. He was born near Tsumkwe, Namibia,

but was never sure exactly how old he was; only that he was born sometime around 1944.

Reportedly, he had only encountered 3 white people before he was cast for the film. Uys thought

that N!xau was “the perfect natural actor” for the part of Xixo. N!xau added authenticity to the

film by often ignoring directions from Uys and acting “naturally.”

N!xau lived much the same way as the bushmen in the movie although perhaps not quite

as detached from and unaware of the outside world as those in the movie. N!xau’s people, the

Bushmen, or San, of South Africa are a hunter-gatherer people who number about 100,000 and

mostly live in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia, Botswana, and Angola. They live in small family

units, and most everything is shared. Similar to what is portrayed in the movie, they have many

creative techniques for survival. Ostrich eggs and roots of plants are used to gather water, for

there are no significant sources of water in the Kalahari Desert during the dry season. The

Bushmen speak a few different dialects of the Juu language family. This peculiar family of

languages consists mostly of clicking sounds with vowels and consonants in between. N!xau

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spoke several languages including his native tongue Jul’hoan, Otjiherero, Tswana, and some

Afrikaans, but like most Bushmen, he could not read or write.

The Gods Must Be Crazy was a relative hit internationally, and ran for 3 years straight in

the United States. It won Uys the 1981 Grand Prix at the Festival International du Film de

Comedy Vevey, and grossed over $100 million internationally. The film also made N!xau into an

international star, especially in Japan. The Namibian named him "Namibia's most famous actor."

Although N!xau made a relatively large amount of money and became famous over his lifetime,

he ended up going back to living the way he had before being cast into The Gods Must Be Crazy.

At first, N!xau didn’t fully understand the value of paper money, and according to

legend, let his first earnings from the film blow away in the wind. Whether this legend is true or

not, Uys started paying N!xau in cattle and set up a trust fund to help pay for expenses. By the

time Uys was ready to start making a sequel to The Gods Must Be Crazy, however, N!xau had

come to appreciate the value of money. N!xau wanted several hundred thousand dollars before

he agreed to act in the sequel in order to build a house with water and electricity for his family.

He even bought a car and hired a driver for a while, but he ended up selling it to buy more

livestock.

After a few years, he ended up selling his house because his relatives abused it and

because he wanted to return to his roots. He sold most everything he owned except for some

livestock and tools, and moved to Djokhoe, a village 27 km east of Tsumkwe. In the mid 1990’s,

he developed tuberculosis, and finally succumbed to the disease while hunting guinea fowl on 1

July 2003. He was buried in Tsumkwe next to his second wife.

Because of N!xau’s contribution to the film and Uys’ direction and creativity, The Gods

Must Be Crazy remains a favorite of many people around the world. It gave many people who

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may never have heard of a Bushman a glimpse into the lives of these interesting people in a way

that is entertaining and enjoyable.

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Bibliography

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Howell, Nancy. Demography of the Dobe ǃKung. New York: Academic Press, 1979.

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Hunt, Dennis. "Gods Must Be Crazy' Drops Into Video Stores; 'SpaceCamp' Is Set for Modest

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