American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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to make amends for the damage his family’s visits helped to instigate by forming a foundation with Claire Ritchie to help the Ju/’hoansi learn a new way of life. Since gathering-hunting could no longer support the Ju/’hoansi, Marshall and Ritchie, and some of the Ju/’hoansi, too, have come to believe that the only chance for a decent life is to move away from Tshumkwe and back to Gautscha Pan and learn to garden and raise cattle. The episode ends on the morning of Christmas Eve, when Marshall, who is “pissed in more ways than one” (angry that talk of moving out of Tshumkwe has seemed to be all that was happening, and drunk), discovers that the group left Tshumkwe for Gautscha while he was sleeping. As he stands alone in Tshumkwe, looking lost and befuddled, we understand that Marshall-as-filmmaker is celebrating the initiative of the Ju/’hoansi and recognizing that it is their efforts that make change; he and his foundation can only follow them.
“Real Water” and “Standing Tall” reveal the struggles and successes of the !Kung group at Gautscha, first to get their farms up and going and then to develop a place where the diaspora of bushmen spread across southern Africa can return to and build a new life. Tsamko and G≠kao Dabe become increasingly important figures during these episodes, when wells are drilled, farms started, and as Tsamko and his colleagues work to ensure the political viability of eastern Bushmanland by resisting first a wildlife preserve, then the luring of lions and elephants to the area for trophy hunting. At the conclusion of “Real Water,” we see the Gautscha Farmers Cooperative meeting under a tree—evoking that Edenic tree in Baobab Play and the other early films, but within a new, politically aware, progressive context.
“Standing Tall” is a road movie, focusing on Marshall, Tsamko, G≠kao Dabe, and N!xau, the star of The Gods Must Be Crazy, venturing into Hereroland and Ghobabi in a van (Marshall drives) to locate members of !Kung families and let them know that there is now an option for them, other than the near-slavery of their lives on white farms and their destitution in Hereroland. During their travels, they meet /Ui Chapman, who seems particularly excited about the prospect of having his own place. “Standing Tall” ends with the celebration of the victory of SWAPO and Namibian independence in 1989 and with /Ui Chapman leaving a white farm and coming home to Gautscha with his family to start his own farm.
The look, as well as the overall mood, of the middle episodes of A Kalahari Family could hardly be more different from what we see in Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out and To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report. As mentioned earlier, the fragile optimism evident in those field reports is reflected in their tenuous image quality, but by the end of the 1990s, as Marshall looked back on how events had developed, once his foundation had been established and a group of Ju/’hoansi had come to believe that gardening and ranching (combined with local gathering and hunting) could provide them with a subsistence and move them away from dependent desperation in Tshumkwe, a sense of the rightness and excitement of this moment and these developments seems to have allowed him to see that all was not lost, that the Ju/’hoansi might still recover from the unfortunate cultural transformation exacerbated by his family’s arrival in Nyae Nyae in 1951. In general, the beauty and emotional power of A Kalahari Family, at least up through “Standing Tall,” reflect this new hope and excitement.
During “Standing Tall” we also see Marshall and his Ju/’hoansi colleagues returning to the films of the 1950s, not simply to provide a contrast between a comparatively idyllic past and a desperate present and not to reconfirm Marshall’s earlier naïveté about filmmaking. Marshall and his colleagues look at early !Kung films on a tiny television in order to determine who of those seen in the films might still be alive and where they might be found. As the lives of the Ju/’hoansi are transforming, so is Marshall’s (and our) understanding of the significance of the early films. Instead of being accidental contributors to the demise of a culture, they have become an important resource for those trying to create a new, healthy Ju/’hoansi way of life on a resettled homeland. That the group is watching the films on a tiny black-and-white television is a final confirmation that while these films may be valuable as artful, often gorgeous records of a lost past—as is evident throughout A Kalahari Family—they have also become, even in their most degraded form, a potential force for positive change.
Amid these signs of hope in “Standing Tall,” there are also what, during the final episode of A Kalahari Family, “Death by Myth,” are premonitions of problems to come. Marshall and Claire Ritchie retire as directors of the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation and are replaced by Dr. Marguerite Biesele; and when Tsamko goes to a Herero-DTA rally during the buildup to the vote on Namibian independence, we learn more of what is only hinted at during To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report. Marshall himself is attacked by a speaker at the rally: “John, what are you doing to the Ju/’hoansi? You are meddling in my people and their concerns. Does the money from John’s father help everyone? Or a chosen few, including John himself?” It is after this speech that Tsamko tries to access the microphone but is denied the opportunity to refute these charges. The sequence ends with Marshall arguing with a Herero man and asserting that Nyae Nyae is, and has always been, Ju/’hoansi territory: “I was a kid here; I saw with my own eyes!”
Later in “Death by Myth,” Marshall returns to Nyae Nyae after a two-year absence to discover that things have not developed as he had hoped—in large measure because various constituencies in the region, white and black, have been promoting the bushman myth in order to profit from it. The myth, as Marshall explains it and as demonstrated in the film by a considerable range of men and women, is that the bushmen are “natural hunters and gatherers” who remain capable of supporting themselves if they adhere to their traditional ways, and that efforts to assist the bushmen in developing a new way to maintain themselves are misguided: as a people they are more beautiful as nature made them, in their original, primitive, hunting-gathering state. Of course, this is the myth promoted by The Gods Must Be Crazy, which has been a motif in Marshall’s !Kung saga since N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman; but in “Death by Myth” we hear the same ideas expressed by those who want to remake the region as a nature conservancy and/or to promote trophy hunting (and in the case of the Herero, to annex the land for their herds). During Marshall’s absence, assistance to farmers has ceased to be a priority for the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation, which has allocated the funds coming in from donors to building offices at a new town called Baraka, buying trucks, and hiring experts who do studies of the region and produce books about it—an echo of those earlier whites who established Tshumkwe as the political center of Bushmanland and allocated government aid primarily to facilities for the whites. All the decisions relevant to Nyae Nyae are now made in Windhoek by a German administrator and those who answer to him.
During Marshall’s 1994 and 1995 visits, it is clear that the Ju/’hoansi struggle for their Nyae Nyae territory and a practical means of subsistence is failing. Even the baobab tree in the center of Tshumkwe has collapsed as a result of an infection. The original leaders are no longer listened to, and elephants have destroyed many farms. The German administrator is ultimately fired by the Nyae Nyae Farmers’ Coop, but Tsamko, who in earlier films was the leading proponent of the new farming communities, has been persuaded to support the Nature Conservancy, which has promised the Ju/’hoansi money from hunters and from filmmakers; in 1995 Tsamko, furious at whites who have once again taken over Nyae Nyae, refuses to be filmed by Marshall (“You make money from your film!”). Near the end of “Death by Myth,” we learn that the annual payment to each Ju/’hoansi from the conservancy is $10.50 American.
The main body of the episode ends with tourists visiting a fake bushman village, where a group of Ju/’hoansi pretend to be living a traditional way of life. “Epilogue 2000,” which concludes A Kalahari Family, provides a tiny spark of hope: G≠kao Dabe has started farming again; Tsamko is a leader again, settling disputes between his fellow Ju/’hoansi the way his father once did; Tsamko’s sister Bao has become a health worker and the first Ju/’hoan woman to have a driver’s license; and Baraka and its fleet of vehicles has fallen apart. Still, the local road signs are hidden so as not to interfere with the tourists’ fantasies, and !U makes jewelry to sell to them. “Death by Myth,” and A Kalahari Family and the entire Marshall !Kung saga, conclude with a return to the monument to ≠Toma and with the narrator’s indication that in 2001 six members of ≠Toma’s family continue to live at Gautscha. This ambiguous ending is entirely appropriate to this remarkable project and a final