Ridwan comments on a recent commercial advertising the Rugby World Cup which is meant to conjure up images of the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, a racist movie from apartheid South Africa from the 1980s. After explaining the concept of the movie and its white supremacist undertones the blogger goes on to explain the commercial and his dismay to it ever being created:
The background music is also taken from a very popular Afrikaans song known to conjure up images of the mythology of Afrikaner (whites of northwestern European ancestry) culture and their “trek” history.
The advert ends with a ’sane’ voice-over by a white South African. The white voice reasserts the hegemonic rationality of whiteness against the barren and undeveloped childishness of the Khoisan!
Why are we still here? Who are the idiots who re-hashed this racist crap? And why does our national broadcaster, the SABC, not know better than to allow Vodacom to stand on the dignity of the Khoisan.
We will not be free anywhere until whiteness is broken so that it cannot degrade our bodies and our dignity anymore.
See more prtotests over the advert here.
I thought “The Gods Must Be Crazy” was supposed to be one of those “outsider notices the obvious absurdities that the people living in a culture can’t see” kind of things.
/me shrugs
I’m bad at seeing racism/sexism.
Now I’ll admit that I was in my early teen years when I saw the movie (13? 14?) but I thought at the time that it was pointing out that much of modernity really was crazy. I especially remember some scene as Xi enters the city, where it is really obvious how disgusting that parts of the city are, and I thought it was portrayed as odd that anyone would want to live there.
Now this may very well have been a version of the racist ‘black prophet’ typology, but that doesn’t seem to be what Ridwan was saying.
However, again, I was like 13 or 14 so I could be totally wrong–just mentioning how I received the movie at the time.