The name of one of South Africa’s most famous actors, the recently deceased N!Xau, as he was known in his filmstar days, is transliterated in so many ways that it is almost impossible to fathom how the Namibian became so well known.
Noting his death from tuberculosis on July 2, obituaries have recorded the name as Gcao Coma and G/qa’o /Xana.
This is proof enough that the diminutive San, who came from the Ju/’hoansi language group, was not famous in the same way as other movie icons. His role in African film was characterised by duality. On the one hand, N!Xau was the quintessential noble savage, Xi, in Jamie Uys’s The Gods must Be Crazy I and II, filmed in 1978 and 1989 respectively.
On the other hand, the actor stood, in the late 20th century, for all Africans who found themselves portrayed in art as free from burden, while being sorely underpaid and suffering the realities of underdevelopment at home.
Documentary filmmaker Peter Davies’s 1996 book In Darkest Hollywood devotes considerable space to the making of The Gods must Be Crazy, and specifically to the journey that Uys and N!Xau took in its construction and distribution.
Davies notes that when Uys found his “Bushman” in the late Seventies “there was no more hunting-and-gathering. Everybody … lived in a slum around the shining houses of white officials.”
N!Xau was earning a wage by cooking for school kids in the town of Tsumkwe, where he lived until his death.
Later, upon the success of Uys’s films, the actor would travel internationally and ultimately reinforce stereotypes about the San people in his film appearances.
Davies, and American filmmaker Daniel Riesenfeld, made a documentary of In Darkest Hollywood in 1990 that took them to Tsumkwe where they interviewed the actor whose name they have spelled as G/qa’o /Xana.
Riesenfeld says: “One of the first things he said to me was ‘The people here don’t have any food.’ Later, I filmed the family cracking nuts with rocks for their breakfast. G/qa’o /Xana’s circumstances then reflected what was true about the Ju/’hoansi whose lifestyle was (and still is) in grave danger.
“What we saw depicted about their life in The Gods Must Be Crazy was a fantasy, and G/qa’o /Xana was the first to recognise that. He told me that the film crew ‘asked me to pretend to be a real Bushman, to wear the skins like it was in the past … I never wore skins when I was a child’.”
In June this year Riesenfeld returned to Tsumkwe. This time he found, “a senior citizen, distinguished looking in his black waistcoat. I showed him the footage that I had shot of him in 1990 and he was moved to tears as he saw his late wife and son on screen.
“In the ensuing years he had enjoyed success, he was receiving royalties from his acting days, he was no longer bitter about the experience. He lived with his family just outside Tsumkwe. He had a new wife and baby girl…
“I snapped a photo of G/qa’o /Xana standing tall in his black waistcoat, he was the picture of a happy man. Little did I know that it would be his last portrait,” Riesenfeld says.
The one time actor’s age is believed to have been about 59. The cause of death is believed to have been tuberculosis. He is survived by his wife and, according to Riesenfeld, seven children.
G/qa’o /Xana, born circa 1944, died July 2 2003