Picture This

I have been reading a very interesting book, “Picturing Bushmen,” on and off for the last month or so. The book focuses on the 1925 Denver Africa Expedition – whose stated goal was to find the most primitive people in Africa – to try and find the lasting effects of its extensive production and distribution of pictures of Bushmen. The author, Robert Gordon, now at the University of Vermont, gives credence to many different theories. Some, like the idea that capitalism is to blame for making people “consume” images of Bushmen “in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex,” clearly must be taken with a grain of salt. But others I find more attractive and compelling, namely that images can create narratives and perpetuate myths that are damaging to the people they portray.

 

Gordon focuses mainly on “fairy tales” that have been perpetuated by imagery of Bushmen in popular and pseudo-scientific culture. These tales center on ideas of Bushmen as “noble savages,” “uncontaminated by Western civilization” and living “in a self-sustaining community.” Most of the pictures taken by the Denver Expedition reinforce these myths by focusing on “traditional” activities such as hunting, bead-making, dancing, and tracking. Pictures that do not fit into the fairy tale are excluded. Who wants to know that Snow White had a clubfoot?

 

The film “The Gods Must Be Crazy” is another good example of a portrayal of Bushmen that perpetuates these fairy tales. The main character, !Xoi, a Kalahari Bushman, is portrayed as simple, childish, incorruptible, and humorously uninitiated to Western life. The slapstick humor that centers on the collision of two cultures leaves the viewer with lasting memories of !Xoi driving a car while standing on its hood and asking how dozens of little people fit inside a pair of binoculars. It hints at the bewilderment that some Bushmen must feel as they try to adopt certain Western ways of life, but it does nothing to illuminate the more complex or troubling aspects of the Bushman assimilation.

 

That is precisely the problem. Gordon argues that the result of such one-sided portrayals of Bushman life is the perpetuation of a myth that does not represent the true nature of the people and that glosses over or ignores problems such as marginalization and poverty that have been serious issues in Bushman life since the time of the Denver Expedition. Of course I don’t expect a comedy film to address these issues, but I leaves me to wonder what outlet will take responsibility for accurately portraying Bushmen.

 

One source that I certainly expected to provide a more “realistic” picture of Bushmen was National Geographic. Its articles and photos tell the stories of countless cultures around the world in a way that is both captivating and informative. So how do they portray Bushmen? A recent article in National Geographic on the history of human migration as told by genetics identifies the Bushmen and a couple of other tribes in Africa as the possible original inhabitants of planet Earth. Accompanying the article is a picture of a Bushman hunter in South Africa – the only picture of any of the tribes mentioned in the article. We see the back of the hunter’s head; he carries a wooden bow slung over his shoulder and a digging stick in his hand. Two of his relatives – wearing loincloths and with traditional haircuts – approach him over the crest of a rusty red sand dune.

 

National Geographic’s selection of this picture as the representation of the original inhabitants of the earth is telling. As per the fairy tales, the picture tells the story of a timeless people as old as the earth itself whose ways have changed little since then. The people in the picture appear, predictably, to be pristine, in touch with nature and untroubled by the modern world. Ironically (for Gordon and I – it was surely planned this way), the results of the genetic studies in the article reinforce the ideas associated with the featured picture and with the myth that accompanies it. Ultimately, the picture is a metaphor for the beginning of human life as we know it. These Bushmen may as well be walking through “the sands of time.”

 

The unfortunate and untold story is that, in all likelihood, the hunter and his two companions are returning home from a hunt and will arrive soon at grass huts in a settlement with no running water or sanitation. Their kids will be hungry and malnourished and they will go to bed only to wake up and face another day of struggle – that is the reality of Bushman life.