A 1980s Comedy Broke Box-Office Records Worldwide—Then Disappeared. The Story Behind It Is Stunning. (2024)

Forty years ago this month, a low-budget, whimsical comedy made in South Africa opened in art-house theaters across the United States. A proto-mockumentary by a director who wrote, shot, and edited his own films, starring a charismatic actor who the director claimed had seen hardly any white people before, The Gods Must Be Crazy became a box-office sensation. In a way that seems impossible today, it stuck in theaters for months, even years, building audiences of curious and repeat viewers. At the 68^th Street Playhouse in New York City, it did double the weekly business in December that it did in July. One report claimed that a theater in California stopped playing the movie only when the film reels were damaged—532 days after its premiere. It was named America’s highest-grossing foreign film of all time, making more money than Rashom*on or The Seventh Seal or La Cage aux Folles.

One of the theaters where it played forever was at Prospect Mall in Milwaukee, which is where I saw The Gods Must Be Crazy at the age of 9. I saw it again for my 10^th birthday party. I remember getting my parents to drive me to the east side to rewatch the movie with friends and, at least once, all alone. I believe I saw it six times in total. It was almost certainly the first African cultural product I’d ever encountered, and its images defined that part of my childhood, fostering a fascination with Africa—a word I barely understood, at that point, to define a continent, not a country.

When I told a friend I was revisiting The Gods Must Be Crazy 40 years later, he said, “Oh, I remember that movie! It must be totally racist.” It really is. It’s also a fascinating artifact, and one that spread myths that persist even today. Made by a white director with funding from the apartheid government yet starring an unusually diverse cast, reverent of Indigenous traditions while deeply patronizing of its Indigenous main character, The Gods Must Be Crazy delivered an idealized, false picture of South Africa into the international marketplace. It highlighted the centuries-old Khoisan culture while misrepresenting and seeming to exploit the Khoisan actor at its center. Once one of the most popular movies in South Africa’s history, it’s now seldom discussed in the country and unavailable on either of the nation’s two primary streaming networks. And in America, where theaters once played it so long they wore out the film, it might as well be invisible—if you’d like to watch it, you’ll need to buy a DVD, if you can imagine.

That’s what I did recently, to reacquaint myself with one of the movies of my childhood. Watching it for the first time in decades, I laughed, I winced, I groaned, and I wondered how this gentle, faux-naïve, fundamentally racist, sui generis comedy was even made—much less how it came to rule the global box office. The story is even weirder, and more disturbing, than I imagined.

A former schoolteacher, Jamie Uys (pronounced “Ace”) made his first movie in 1951, starring himself as a bumbling farmer who must drive his brakeless jalopy to pick up a pretty young schoolteacher (played by his wife, Hettie). For decades, he made documentaries, and dramas, and comedies. A low-budget auteur, he wrote, edited, and often starred in his own films, which occasionally made a minor international splash. Dingaka, a drama about a traditional tribesman persecuted by the South African justice system, made it to the U.S. in 1965. Lost in the Desert, starring Uys and his young son, played for years on Chilean television.

Uys claimed that it was while encountering Khoisan people during the filming of a popular nature documentary, Animals Are Beautiful People, that he came up with the idea for The Gods Must Be Crazy. “They don’t have a sense of property,” he later told the New York Times of the Khoisan. “If I put my jacket down, one of them would put it on. They share everything. Where they are, there is nothing you can own.” He began to wonder, he said, what such a culture would do if they encountered an artifact of the modern world.

To play his hero, Uys cast a Namibian man credited as N!xau. (Exclamation points and other special characters are used to represent his language’s many different types of tongue clicks.) In later years, English-language publications would also render his name as G/aqo, Cgao, Gcao, and Nǃxau ǂToma. Uys spent three years filming with a small crew in Namibia, then a South African territory—particularly in the “homeland” of Bushmanland. (To marginalize and minimize Black political power, the apartheid government created a number of majority-Black homelands—quasi-independent states in which the people were subject to South African rule but stripped of their rights as South African citizens.)

Uys spent another year editing, giving himself a heart attack in the process, but finally released the film in 1980. The country’s prime minister and members of his Cabinet attended the film’s premiere; cinemas reportedly had to add extra showtimes to accommodate demand. It’s not well documented what Black audiences thought of it at the time, or how many of them saw it. In that era, many movie theaters were white-only, though some cinemas in big cities allowed Black people in the balconies. Black movies were often shown in church halls or community centers. “A movie would first play in cinemas in white suburbia,” said the University of Pretoria historian Nisa Paleker. “A couple of weeks later it would screen in the townships, in Black and Indian neighborhoods.” Though Gods was made in English and Afrikaans, identifying it as a movie for white audiences, Paleker believes that the movie nevertheless had a substantial nonwhite audience—though there’s no hard evidence of that. (For his part, Uys wrote off the Black audience, claiming that only 10percent of Black South Africans watched movies, an assertion that was almost undoubtedly untrue.)

Those audiences certainly interacted with the film later, when it was shown frequently on state television. “It was a perennial,” said the University of Cape Town professor Litheko Modisane, who grew up in a rural township in the Bophuthatswana homeland. “I was a teenager when I first watched it, though I don’t remember if it was on television or on VHS. But that movie just didn’t go away. It was always playing.”

An initial American release, by a tiny independent distributor based in Utah, went nowhere. (Reportedly, the distributor tried selling it as a sexy comedy, advertising the scene in which the pretty schoolteacher falls into a river and has to take off her dress.) But the film’s wild success in other countries—under the title Bushman, it was the No. 1 movie in all of Japan in 1981—persuaded the international division of 20^th Century Fox to try again, in July 1984. By January 1985, according to an amused New York Times report, it was “the most successful art-house film in the country,” and Fox expanded the movie to commercial theaters, as “a comedy for the whole family.”

Rewatching The Gods Must Be Crazy, I was immediately reminded of its ingenious charms. It begins like a nature documentary, with a plummy narrator contrasting the traditional lifestyle of the “bushmen,” who “must be the most contented people in the world,” with the hectic life of a modern city—Johannesburg, in this case. “Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment,” the narrator says, over shots of factories, traffic jams, and alarm clocks. “The more he improved his surroundings to make his life easier, the more complex he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into.”

But if “civilized men” are treated with gentle satire, the Khoisan are portrayed with utter condescension. They are “the little people of the Kalahari, pretty, dainty, small, and graceful.” The narrator tells us, “They have no crime, no punishment, no violence, no laws, no police, judges, rulers, or bosses.” Into this desert Eden falls the apple of this tale, a co*ke bottle tossed from a plane window by a bush pilot. The Khoisan band is astonished by the beautiful object, which they believe is a gift from the gods. Stronger than any material they’ve ever seen, the co*ke bottle can smash roots, smooth skins, and even make music if you blow across its top.

“But the gods had made a mistake,” the narrator explains. “Here was a thing which could not be shared, because there was only one of it.” When fights break out, the family’s patriarch, Xi, played by N!xau, declares that the bottle—the “thing,” as the band calls it—must be evil. (We see Khoisan characters speaking, but it’s the narrator’s voice we hear, telling us what they’re saying.) “The gods must be crazy” to have given it to them, Xi says, and sets out to throw the evil thing off the end of the world.

I remembered all these details—as well as the subplot about a white field biologist, Andrew Steyn (Marius Weyers), terribly shy and clumsy around women, who, in a setup taken straight from Uys’ first movie, must pick up the new schoolteacher at the bus stop in a malfunctioning Land Rover. The car gets stuck in a river, and they must stay overnight in the bush, where a series of misunderstandings make Kate Thompson (Sandra Prinsloo) think Steyn’s set on taking advantage of her. The famous comic set piece comes when Steyn attaches the Land Rover’s front winch to a tree limb to pull it out of the river, only to be distracted when Kate gets stuck in a prickly tree—in her underwear, of course. While a bumbling, blushing Steyn tries to help her, the Land Rover pulls itself all the way up the tree until it’s dangling 10 feet above their heads.

But then there was all the stuff I’d forgotten. When I spoke to Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk, a lecturer in film studies at the University of Cape Town, he told me that everyone who viewed Gods as a child seems to selectively remember the movie in the same way. We recall the virtuosic slapstick bits with Xi and Steyn and the Land Rover. We forget that there’s an entire bizarre subplot about freedom fighters who shoot up a government meeting, blow up a helicopter, and kidnap a classroom full of schoolchildren at gunpoint. Especially considering what was actually going on in Namibia and Angola at the time, Rijsdijk said, “that stuff about African liberation and Cuban soldiers, that political parody—it’s quite grotesque.”

Sam Boga, the guerrillas’ grumpy general, has a name suspiciously similar to that of Sam Nujoma, then the leader of the South West Africa People’s Organisation, who fought for decades to free Namibia from South African rule. (In 1990 he became president of a newly independent Namibia.) Their portrayal as hopeless morons was, at least to some audiences, very funny—the running gag of two distracted gunmen who can’t stop playing gin is particularly effective—but was also politically useful to those in power. “As the apartheid state would have it, they are incompetent buffoons who could not even use the weapons they have in hand,” said Modisane.

“I bet you the Ministry of Law and Order didn’t look at the guerrillas of the ANC or SWAPO as bumbling incompetents,” the South African screenwriter Mfundi Vundla said in a 1991 interview, referring to the insurgent African National Congress and South West Africa People’s Organisation. “They regarded those people in very serious terms. They had a major draft to fight those ‘incompetents.’ ”

“There is a point being made,” said Modisane, “that African people and modernity simply did not go together.” Nowhere does the movie more strenuously separate Africans from modernity than in its treatment of Xi. The Khoisan people of The Gods Must Be Crazy are so premodern they haven’t even reached the Stone Age. Uys portrays them as living in a kind of state of grace, in harmony with nature, completely ignorant of civilization. (They believe that the sounds of airplanes are the gods farting and that contrails in the sky are evidence of the gods’ flatulence.) This representation too was politically useful to the apartheid government. How can Black people, the movie tacitly asks, be trusted to rule themselves? “Certainly you can’t even begin to think of them governing a complex industrial society like South Africa,” said the author Mbulelo Mzamane in a 1991 interview, “when they still think there’s something magical about an empty bottle of Coca-Cola.”

In interviews about the film, Uys invented tales about his lead actor that reinforced this image of the “noble savage.” He told reporters that N!xau had never seen a toilet or slept on a bed. He said that because the Khoisan have no word for work, he simply invited N!xau to come play with him for a while, and “they are such nice guys that when you ask them for something, they say OK.” He said he tried paying N!xau $300, but the actor simply let the money blow away in the wind. He later said at various times that he’d bought N!xau a dozen cattle, or that he was sending a local game warden $100 a month to spend on N!xau’s behalf.

It stuck in theaters for months, even years, building audiences of curious and repeatviewers.

The truth is that N!xau certainly understood the concepts of work and money because when Uys found him, he was working as a cook at a school in Tsumkwe, Bushmanland, where by one account he was making 300 rand a month (in those days, about $360). “I thought that being in a movie would help people in other countries to understand how we live here,” he told a documentarian in 1990. “They told me to imitate what a bushman does,” he continued. “To pretend to be a real bushman, just like it was in the old days. Like wearing a loincloth.”

By the late 1970s, the idea that the Khoisan people had never seen whites, as Uys suggested, or that they still lived in harmony with nature, hunting and gathering, was absurd. Most Khoisan interacted frequently with missionaries, bureaucrats, and above all—to their sorrow—the South African Defence Force. Forced off their communal land by white farmers and a series of draconian laws, N!xau’s people lived, as the American ethnographer and filmmaker John Marshall described in a 1992 interview, “in a rural slum around the shining houses of the white officials in Bushmanland.” The anthropologist Toby Volkman bitterly described the state of N!xau’s community in a 1985 letter to the Times:

Because the myth of Bushman innocence and bliss underlies the popularity of The Gods Must Be Crazy, it is no surprise that Mr. Uys would like us to believe in it. There is, however, little to laugh about in Bushmanland: 1,000 demoralized, formerly independent foragers crowd into a squalid, tubercular homeland, getting by on handouts of cornmeal and sugar, drinking Johnny Walker or home brew, fighting with one another and joining the South African Army.

Even the term Bushman itself is both inaccurate and politically convenient. The broad population of native southern Africans who speak related, click-centric dialects are known as the Khoisan; N!xau’s specific band call themselves Jul’hoansi. “There’s no such thing as a Bushman,” Marshall explained. “Bushman is a racial classification that has no meaning. Its only meaning is in its use by the people who make the classification, and in South Africa the use has been to exterminate and dispossess people.”

At the time, it was unusual—even, to some viewers, inspiring—for a South African movie to include both Black and white characters. In interviews around its release, Jamie Uys insisted his movie took a pass on racial politics. “The thing about this film,” he told the New York Times, “is that everybody’s funny, whether white, black or brown. When you make a comedy, you like to see the funny side of the human condition, and you don’t see their color.” But in Gods, everyone is funny in very different ways. The movie displays what South African film critic Stephen Aspeling described to me as “a faux–color blindness, a faux-naïveté.” The white characters may fumble or misunderstand each other, but they’re clearly in the positions of power, and the ones who live in the bush are doing so out of a cooperative spirit—a biologist studying elephants, a schoolteacher who wants to help the locals, even (in a small role) a kindly pastor played by Uys himself. The Black characters, on the other hand, are out in the wilderness because that’s where they belong. They are helpmates and assistants, when they’re not bumbling terrorists. In some ways this division reflected the imbalance of power in South Africa at the time, and in other important ways it distorted it—even perpetuated it.

Uys may have claimed that his movie was colorblind, but that stood in opposition to its origins as a product of apartheid government funding. Uys was a great proponent of South Africa’s film subsidy scheme, as well as its greatest beneficiary; filmmakers making movies for white audiences (in English or Afrikaans) received payouts from the government based on ticket sales. (A separate scheme existed for films made in African languages, though those beneficiaries were still primarily white—due to the astonishing fraud in the system, they often received subsidies for films that didn’t even exist.) According to Paleker, Uys also lobbied the South African government to support filmmaking as a kind of “soft power,” glamorizing and normalizing South Africa in the international community.

In that respect, The Gods Must Be Crazy certainly succeeded. To elide boycotts of South African products, the movie was often described as being made in Botswana. (Parts were shot there, but its financing—and profits—was directly tied to South Africa.) Despite some protests from anti-apartheid groups, the movie was outrageously popular. Box Office Mojo puts the movie’s lifetime gross in North America at $30million, a little more than the sum earned by its fellow July 1984 comedy The Muppets Take Manhattan. In Japan, it grossed more than $40million.

“It was a standard-bearer for the industry,” said Rijsdijk. At a time when the apartheid government was unraveling, The Gods Must Be Crazy played a specific role. “The wheels were coming off,” he said, “but the film’s power was that it distracted from what was actually happening in South Africa.”

Some American moviegoers with New York Times subscriptions read Vincent Canby’s gently critical political appraisal of the film, published in October 1984. I sure didn’t. Like many viewers, I took the film’s presentation of life in southern Africa at face value, imagining a world where simple tribesmen foraged happily, where white scientists and schoolteachers were beloved by the Black people they helped, and where at any moment you might encounter a rhinoceros. (Rijsdijk noted wryly that some tourists flying into Cape Town are still surprised there aren’t lions walking the streets.)

As it happens, even a kid in Wisconsin couldn’t avoid eventually hearing what was really happening in South Africa, and within a few years, my Gods Must Be Crazy–fueled interest in Africa had led me to “Sun City,” “Biko,” and “Master Harold” … and the Boys. These cultural products reflected a white-centric view of the evils of apartheid but were nonetheless a step up from the willfully ignorant Gods. As a teen, I espoused my anti-apartheid position with the naïve enthusiasm of the newly converted; I cannot imagine what my Black classmates thought of my delivery, in a high school speech class, of a prison letter by Steve Biko, during which I attempted to channel Denzel Washington’s performance as the anti-apartheid activist in Cry Freedom. I certainly hope they don’t remember the presentation in as much withering detail as I do.

After five years of development and filming, Uys’ sequel, The Gods Must Be Crazy II, premiered in 1989. It made $6million in the U.S.—not bad, but nowhere near the success of the original. It was his final film; he died, of another heart attack, in 1996. The Los Angeles Times reported that N!xau demanded several hundred thousand dollars for the sequel, but he didn’t look back fondly on either movie. The documentary short Journey to Nyae Nyae includes footage from a 1990 interview with N!xau in which he spoke frankly about the experience. “It would be better to get real help, rather than getting a few shillings, even though it does help to feed my children,” he said. “I have thought about it, and I think that I would not like to keep doing this film work. I look at this work and I reject it.”

Nevertheless, within a few years of that interview, N!xau starred in several Hong Kong ripoffs, including one marketed as The Gods Must Be Crazy III, in which his family befriends a Chinese hopping vampire (?!).He suffered, as did many Jul’hoansi, from drug-resistant tuberculosis, and he died in Tsumkwe, Namibia, in 2003. He was believed to be in his late 50s.

Their land expropriated for farms and safari reserves, today the Khoisan are among the most impoverished South Africans. As the University of Pretoria graduate student Birgit Hansen has noted, the only notable effect of the spotlight cast on Indigenous South Africans by The Gods Must Be Crazy’s success was a short-lived scheme by the South African government to create a kind of safari reserve for the Khoisan where they would not be allowed to work or farm but for the benefit of tourists would be forced to live “traditionally” on land that would not support such a lifestyle. That plan, at least, eventually failed.

These days hardly anyone talks about The Gods Must Be Crazy in South Africa. “It’s a nostalgic relic,” Aspeling told me. “It’s not highly regarded, and it’s problematic, so no one’s going to do an anniversary celebration of this film.” Gods’ clearest descendant in South African comedy, the madcap Leon Schuster, made a series of hits in the 1990s and 2000s. (Rijsdijk recalled that Schuster’s biggest movie, Mr. Bones, defeated The Fellowship of the Ring at the South African box office.) Like Uys, Schuster claimed to satirize every race equally—“Black, white, pink, or purple.” These films have similarly aged badly, and in 2020 they were removed from the streaming network Showmax. Schuster proclaimed himself dismayed but did admit, “I can’t say I will do blackface again, because there is too much uproar at the moment.”

Gods, like many products of its era, now lives in a weird place in the memory of those like me who once loved it. It inspires both nostalgia and embarrassment. It was my first introduction to a culture vastly different from my own—yet the movie, and its director, misrepresented that culture so thoroughly that it did more harm than good.

Yet I admit that when I watched it again, in between my wincing, I laughed quite a bit—in part because the racism isn’t the only thing in the movie that feels as if it’s from another era. Uys has an old-timey way with a physical comedy gag, and he knows how to build a joke over a scene or even the course of a whole movie so that it really pays off. His practical effects and camera tricks are throwbacks to the comedies of the silent era; he even speeds up the film during chase scenes, giving the whole thing a Keystone Kops feel.

Nisa Paleker, the professor at the University of Pretoria, still shows it to her students, a diverse group who come from all over South Africa. “They still find it hilariously funny,” she said. “And then when I push them to engage more critically, they see many of its problems.” Paleker herself first saw Gods as a child, on South African television, and still remembers how hard she laughed when the Land Rover went up in the tree. “Even now, when I watch the film,” she said, “I can see the awfulness of it, and I can see the humor as well.” As with so many other once beloved movies—Gone With the Wind, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Sixteen Candles—it can be a challenge to hold these kinds of conflicting ideas in one’s head simultaneously. But it’s both useful and important to do so, as a way of understanding how the world was, and how it is.

Perhaps I should give the last word to N!xau, whom The Gods Must Be Crazy did not let speak for himself. “I didn’t think it was right to do things which were not true,” he said in Journey to Nyae Nyae. “They said it would be good for me, so I did what they asked me to do.” He paused for a moment, then added, “It is better to show the way we really live.”