Who’s Crazy? Students Critique the The Gods Must Be Crazy
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Rethinking Schools
By Chris Hawking, with Cresslyn Clay and Colin Pierce

Illustrator: David McLimans

I wish I could say my colleagues Cresslyn Clay, Colin Pierce, and I had it all worked out from the beginning, and that we carefully crafted each nuance that prompted and supported our students in their thoughtful work. But as we discussed what to do with the three weeks between winter break and the end of the semester, we simply wanted to study a film. We felt our students deserved a break from the typical novel-poem-essay routine. Cresslyn happened to have a copy of The Gods Must Be Crazy , a 1980 film written and directed by South African Jamie Uys, and it seemed interesting in a vaguely multicultural kind of way.

On the surface, The Gods Must Be Crazy is a campy confluence of three independent plotlines involving Xi, a Kalahari tribesman, who journeys to the end of the earth to dispose of a Coke bottle that has begun to disrupt the harmony of his community; Mr. Steyn, a white scientist, and the beautiful blonde schoolteacher he escorts through the bush; and a group of fugitive black guerrillas on the run after a failed assassination attempt. To be sure, the film is charming and funny, and it’s no wonder it remains a popular international film. But as I watched, I became fascinated with its political nature and began to think of ways we could explore not only its overt message, but also its covert support of the same systems of inequity it claims to critique.

During our first planning session, Colin mentioned how the film uses the concept of “the Other” to make its point about the craziness of civilization, and Cresslyn noted that the documentary Journey to Nyae Nyae (included with the DVD) brilliantly illustrates the disconnect between the real lives of the San people in Namibia and the romanticized Kalahari “Bushmen” depicted in the film. By the end of the meeting, it was clear that this would be anything but a break; it would be an exploration of the ability of popular culture to subtly reinforce and justify a colonial worldview through the manipulation and distortion of the cultures it works to subjugate.