In the footsteps of time

A new feature documentary examines the fragility of life in the Kalahari desert, says Andrea Worsdale. From ZA@PLAY. 2000.

Jamie Uys’s 1980 mega-hit The Gods Must Be Crazy attempted in its own slapstick way to show the life of !Xo San bushmen of the Kalahari from the inside out using the metaphor of a Coke bottle dropping out of the sky like an apple of discord.

Twenty years later we are presented with a genuine and quite touching document of the Kalahari tribe in the form of the feature documentary The Great Dance, which, ironically enough, has been sponsored by Coca-cola. Presumably, the soft drink giant is making an effort to apologise for its past colonial, patronizing efforts on celluloid.

Shot over three years by Cape Town-based brother Craig and Damon Foster, on digital video blown up to 35mm, the film has had enormous success in New York where it is playing at an independent cinema in Greenwich Village.

Bruce Bennell of Time Out New York said: “Despite A DV-to film transfer that left me feeling a little like I’d work someone else’s glasses while taking it in, The Great Dance is a bonanza of energetic imagery—a springbok’s ecstatic leaps at the first drop of rain, one of !Xo San delicately rolling his face on the surface of a watering hole as he gratefully drinks, an antelope swooning like Lillian Gish, as a spear finds it.

The film is refreshingly unpatronising, speaking persuasively about this fragile area and its vanishing inhabitants at both ends of the food chain.”

The !Xo San hunters are often referred to as “The First People” and are widely acknowledge to be the oldest inhabitants of Southern Africa, with an unbroken link to their ancestors who have lived in the same region for more than 30,000 years.

The film follows a trio of !Xo San in the central Kalahari as they hunt for game. The central figure is Karoha Langwane who is a mater hunter. In one sequence he outruns a kudu and as the animal stands exhausted he slays it with his spear, winning food for himself and his people. At times I found myself extremely squeamish while watching the killings; after all as an urbanite I’m far more used to pre-packaged meat at Pick ‘n Pay.

But what’s enthralling about the film is the way that co-directors Craig and Damon Foster enter the minds of these bushmen. We are shown how they track using the most obscure of clues and read into animal footprints complete histories of their prey’s lives. As one of the hunters says, “tracking is like dancing. This is the great dance.”

After the film was completed the individual hunting licenses of the !Xo people were revoked so the movie is an act of preservation and also a requiem.

The Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (Wimsa), which is the official umbrella organization representing all the San of the region, gave the film its full support. Executive Producer James Hersov signed an agreement with Wimsa and the San agreeing to abide by certain conditions of conduct relating to the production and promotion of the film and The Great Dance is the first movie to have been fully co-developed by the San, with collaboration at each stage of the process.

Rough assemblies of the footage were taken back into the field and the San individuals who appear in the film were given the opportunity to comment on the portrayal and deepen their interpretation of the sequences. Their comments were also taken into account before the final edit.

Producer Hersov, who studied anthropology at Cambridge University before becoming a commodities trader in Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique, started researching the San people for a documentary for the Discovery Channel before meeting the Foster brothers. “I wanted to do a movie that had a broader dimension. Looking at wildlife through the eyes of the hunter,” he says. “Coca-Cola came on board partly because they thought that their placement in Gods Must Be Crazy reflected badly and also because they loved the fact that the movie was non-fiction. They didn’t want to be seen as exploiting the platform the film gave them and they paid for the blow-up to 35mm.”

Using mini-cameras that at times were placed on the back of animals, the film not only inhabits the eyes of the hunters but also takes on the point of view of beetles, scorpions, cheetahs, and even raindrops.

Despite a rather sentimental narration voiced by Sello Maake Ka-Ncube the film is an amazing visual feast and quite clearly avoids the patronization and condescension of many movies that look at the lives of indigenous people.

This is genuine, sincere and lyrical stuff; the major question now is whether South African audiences can be persuaded to go to the cinema to watch it instead of complacently waiting for National Geographic on telly—perhaps The Great Dance will only really develop real legs overseas where people are still entranced by a culture which we as South Africans take so much for granted.