Apartheid cinema and indigenous image rights:

Abstract

This article reads Jamie Uys's film, The gods must be crazy, in the context of apartheid ideologies and social inequalities. It argues that the film is complicit with apartheid institutions and that its ethnographic myths of “the Bushman” naturalize Uys's exploitation of his San actors. Additionally, Uys's media hype mystified the social conditions of the San community and the film's popularity institutionalized perceptions that were ultimately damaging to San interests. Despite Uys's claim that his film was an innocuous comedy, this essay suggests that his auteurist and slapstick techniques work unilaterally to “disarticulate” the bodies of black subjects. In other words, the film intervenes in the black characters’ moments of speech and interferes with black movement. As such, the film's humour works largely by impeding black agency. The essay concludes by suggesting a progressive methodology within which we might argue for San part-ownership of The gods must be crazy. Accordingly, the film may be reconceived as an indigenous performance of image rights that sets an enforceable legal precedent.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.