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African bushman, who shot to
stardom in film The Gods Must Be Crazy, dies
TANGENI AMUPADHI
Canadian Press
Saturday, July 05, 2003
WINDHOEK, Namibia (AP) - N!xau, the diminutive bushman catapulted from the
remote sandswept reaches of the Kalahari Desert to international stardom in
the film The Gods Must Be Crazy, has died, police officials said Saturday.
He was estimated to have been
about 59, although N!xau himself said he did not know his exact age.
Police in the remote area of
Tsumkwe in the Namibian part of the Kalahari where N!xau lived confirmed his
recent death, but did not have any details of how or when he died. His name is
a usual transliteration of his tribal language, which uses clicking noises
that have no letter in English.
He had suffered from tuberculosis
in the past.
The Gods Must Be Crazy became a
worldwide hit and a top-grossing foreign film after its release in 1980.
Audiences swooned over his portrayal of an earnest bushman with a sheepish
smile whose discovery of a Coca-Cola bottle sets off a comedy of errors.
N!xau starred in several sequels
before returning to the familiarity of life as a herdsman raising cattle and
vegetables in the Namibian bush.
When he was discovered by the
South African director of the film, Jamie Uys, he had only had minimal
exposure to modern life.
According to a 2000 story in the
Namibian newspaper, he had only seen three white people in his life before
being cast and had never seen a settlement larger than the village huts of his
San people.
The San are the indigenous
hunter-gatherer people of southern Africa. Today they number about 100,000 and
mostly live in the Kalahari.
Not knowing the value of paper
money, he let his first wages, $300 US, blow away.
By the time of The Gods Must Be
Crazy II, N!xau had learned the value of money, demanding several hundred
thousand dollars before agreeing to be recast in the film.
He said the money was needed to
build a cinderblock home with electricity and a water pump for his family,
according to the Internet Movie Database Web site.
Uys dismissed criticism that it
was cruel to take N!xau out of his home environment. He said he was born to
act.
"All Bushmen are natural
actors. I suppose it's because they don't have television, and they spend
their evenings telling stories and acting them out. And they don't have any
hangups or inhibitions at all," Uys said in a 1990 interview with The
Associated Press.
After the sequel, N!xau's career
took a zany twist with his appearance in several Hong Kong action films and
the Chinese film The Gods Must be Funny.
In one of the films, the spirit of
Bruce Lee takes over N!xau's character.
After his film career petered out,
N!xau returned home to a newly built brick house. He tended his cattle and
raised corn and pumpkins.
For awhile, he had a car. But he
had to employ a driver because he had never learned to drive, the Namibian
paper said.
Copyright 2003 The Canadian Press
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