The Gods Must Be Crazy

Xi, a San hunter in the Kalahari, finds an empty Coca-Cola bottle dropped from a plane. His band first takes it for a gift from the gods, and because there is only one of it, quarrels start. Xi decides to carry it to the end of the world and throw it away. On the road his path crosses a biologist, a schoolteacher and a group of guerrillas. Jamie Uys wrote, directed and produced. N!xau, from what is now Namibia, plays Xi. The budget was 5 million dollars and it was shot around Tsumkwe in South West Africa and in Botswana. The actor's pay is the most argued-over part. Uys said he paid N!xau 300 dollars at first and later gave him cattle and a monthly sum. The scholar Josef Gugler noted that Uys fictionalised the production story: N!xau had grown up herding on a farm rather than as a traditional hunter-gatherer. It failed in US test markets in 1982 and took off after 20th Century Fox re-released it in 1984, going on to take roughly 200 million dollars worldwide. Roger Ebert called it a nice little treasure. The real objection came from elsewhere. The film was accused of sustaining racial stereotypes and of ignoring apartheid; anthropologists called it patronising and described it as apartheid propaganda, and the New York Times noted that a viewer might suspect apartheid did not exist in that world. Who it is for: viewers who like wordless comic sequences and slapstick of the eighties. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by how the San are depicted. The objection is sound and the film has carried it from the first day.