By clairemac93
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GorHLQ-jLRQ
The Gods Must Be Crazy. Though an appreciation for British humor was genetically lost on me, this film is worth a view in other ways. It takes place in Botswana, supposedly, but shows the experience of a Khoisan man, or “bushmen”. Khoisan, as written about previously, are the oldest “people” or ethnic group in the world and we can all draw our ancestry to them. I have been to the Khoisan reservation in South Africa three separate times, and each time have learned something new about their way of life, and especially how this group is adapting to ever-encroaching development. When visiting they showed me things like how to find medicine from basic bush plants (including delicious wild mint you can chew on), how keeping the camp area clean is a way of seeing if a snake is in the area by the disturbance of sand, and mating rituals within the tribe.
Aside from the Khoisan, this film is a nice display of, whether they meant to or not, varying viewpoints on who is the outsider in this world. So many look at tribes like the Khoisan and believe them to be underdeveloped or uneducated- as if they are at a disadvantage living their lifestyle, and that their natural progression should be towards a life more like the West. However, they may, and probably do, look at you as the dumb or weird one. I mean, from a personal perspective, I can’t even sew on a button let alone start a fire, and if dropped into the wilderness I would probably be running around trying to catch rabbits with my hands (in fact, as a child my cousins and I used to lie on the deck and dunk our heads in the water to try to catch fish with our bare hands, and were continually disappointed by our lack of success. There was literally no learning curve) In the end, does it make you smarter to be able to use technology and read a book or to be able to provide basic human needs for yourself? Whether it be tribes like the Khoisan, or low-income individuals all over the world, there is a high probability that they know how to do a lot more practical tasks than an “educated” person from the city or the western world, because they’ve had to learn how to do that.