Kalahari People

In this essay I am going to write about a movie called “The Gods Must Be Crazy”. The movie is about people that live in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, Africa. The movie focuses on the contrasts between the lifestyle of the Kalahari people and modern society.

The Kalahari live in a very different landscape to that of ours in New Zealand. In the Kalahari Desert It is a very dry and remote place. Here in New Zealand it is very green and filled with forests and ranges. They have a very in the open lifestyle. They do not have houses to live in, they just all sleep on the ground and sit around an open lit fire.

The Kalahari people did not have TV’s, computers, radios, or any type of technology so they had different ways to entertain themselves. They would sit around a fire and sing and dance. The others would go out and hunt for food to feed them. There style of hunting was very different to the way we would do it. They would use a small bow and use arrows dipped in some kind of tranquilizer and shoot the animals. The tranquilizer would put the animal to sleep and then the bushman would explain to the gods that he needed this beast to feed his family.

The Kalahari people were not aware that there were any other people living on the earth other than them. A plane had flown over and the pilot had thrown a coke bottle out of the window. The coke bottle had landed where the Bushmen lived. The Bushmen didn’t know what it was and thought it was a gift from the gods. They started using it for many things because it was a very hard object and they found many uses for it such as making patterns and other things. Eventually everyone wanted to use this incredible object and they started fighting over it. After that it was named “the evil thing”. It had also shown them some new emotions like greed, anger and shame. The coke bottle had caused so much trouble for them that someone had volunteered to take this “evil thing” to the edge of the earth and dispose of it.

The Kalahari people spoke a very different language to ours. They spoke Bushmen. It was a very different language to most languages, it involves strange clicking noises at random during there sentences. They did not wear much in the way of clothing at all. This was probably because of the heat in the Kalahari Desert.

The blond lady in the movie didn’t seem very comfortable around the Bushman. She finds wearing that little clothing embarrassing and shameful. The Bushman didn’t know of the feeling of shame so he didn’t worry about the amount of clothing he wore.

The Kalahari people seem a much happier society as they have no such thing as money or wealth. They are all equals and do not know of greed. We are a very selfish society and revolve around money and power.