Carey Baraka in Equator:
To talk about The Gods Must Be Crazy, we have to start with the VHS tapes. We didn’t have many of them when I was growing up in Kisumu, a port city in western Kenya on the banks of Lake Victoria. They were a kind of luxury. We had Gods, Sarafina!, Coming to America, The Lion King, and my parents’ prehistoric wedding video, which offered the endless entertainment of matching the uncles and aunts we knew to younger, thinner versions of themselves. My siblings and I watched these over and over on Sunday afternoons, slouching on our green couch between piles of economics books and old Reader’s Digests, my father serving us cups of jelly. This was Kenya in the 1990s: the economy was crumbling, rumours abounded about devil worship in schools, state workers were losing their jobs under IMF-mandated structural adjustments, men were shaving themselves bald to look like Michael Jordan, and The Gods Must Be Crazy was playing on repeat.
The Gods Must Be Crazy – the first, and most famous, film in what would become a five-part franchise, comprising two originals and three knockoffs – is one of the most successful African movies of all time. For many in the West, it is the only movie with an African protagonist they’ve ever seen. It’s nearly impossible, today, to describe the plot in an inoffensive way. A tribe of Bushmen lose their minds because they encounter a Coca-Cola bottle? Which they think has magic powers? The imagery is absurdly on the nose: half-naked tribesmen in the Kalahari desert, a white damsel in distress, lions and goats and elephants. If you didn’t see the film at a formative age, before you could question such things, to encounter any element of it as an adult can make you squirm.
More here.
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