History

Introduction
The films Zulu (Great Britain, 1964) and The Gods Must Be Crazy (South Africa, 1986) are contrasting in themes and approach but bring a common conception about what is White and what may be perceived as African by outsiders of this culture of mainly Black men, women, and their children.
This paper will try to discuss the ideological relationships between primitive and modern in said movies.

Discussion
The movies Zulu and The Gods Must Be Crazy bring to mind rather strong and vivid depictions of a primitive other. To be more precise, the films suggest a pristine innocent past that have somewhat found its way into the extant living societies such as those living in Africa. And yet the load does not so much lie in the description of the primitive but more in how the modern is invisible in the referents. This is probably an even stronger proposition to emphasize the disparateness of the primitive and modern, where the modern is akin to an invisible Big brotherinvisible but present.  Notice further the lack of any direct textual reference to modern in the titles Zulu and The Gods Must Be Crazy but how they immediately and effectively suggest a difference to something.  Such is the nature of ideology in the construction of perception and field of imagination where a horizon of similarities and differences are so meticulously laid out.

While surely different on their depictions of life in the primitive world, both films reiterate a singular idea of the modern meanwhile laying down the certain multiplicities of the primitive. Here we see what Arjun Appadurai proposes as the site of tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization (Apparudai, 1996). Whereby through the depiction of heterogeneity a homogenous proposal is at the same time being laid out.  The distinctive difference of these films is not in its content, as they both attempt an objective portrait of the primitive, but rather in the visual narratives and genre applied.

Zulu is through and through a feature film in the guise of a historical document. It begins with a brief historical reference to the disastrous engagement of the British Colonial forces with the Zulus in 24th January 1869, dramatically read out by a narrator. Still without any direct knowledge of actual historical facts that transpired, it is easy to assume this as a strategy conveniently employed in the genre of historical fiction films. The film then proceeds with a scene showing the aftermath of the said abduction  the British clearly defeated by the natives. White here represented as the defeated ideology, or does it Nowhere in the scenes that follow is modernity or white visually articulated except for the English father and daughter witness to the celebratory ritual of the mass wedding. Here they are almost mute, their bodies drowned by Africa  a sea of near naked brown bodies dancing and singing. Yet their presence carries a visual anomaly that calls attention to its very difference and hence their uniqueness.

What more that the film is mediated through the language of English. It is interesting to point out one scene where the Zulu chief whispers something to his associate who in turn speaks to the white man, who is asked by the daughter, only then do we know what the chief has articulated, mediated through the body and voice of the foreign English guest. Isnt this exactly how ideology works when Slavoj Zizek when he says, explicit ideological text (or practice) is sustained by the unplayed series of obscene superego supplements (Zizek, 2006).

The Gods Must Be Crazy on the other hand, starts off with the tone of a non-fictional documentary film complete with the authoritative and somewhat soothing tone of voice of the invisible narrator.  The voice that creates not only the visual frame for the movie but that, which sets the ideological frame of what primitive, is. What is potentially dangerous in this format is seemingly undisputable tone and appearance of objectivity, to be taken as truth without the creative mediation of an artists or a filmmakers imagination. This kind of narration progresses throughout the film, meanwhile capturing some dialogs that transpire between the subjects. The film follows the noble-savage depiction of the Kalahari Bushmen, living in symbiosis with their natural environment, pretty, dainty, small and graceful. The narration goes saying that they must be the most content people in the world as they live in a place where there are no crimes, no punishment compared to those who live in the city where actions and activities of people are based on appearances, at 8-0-0, they should start looking busyat 1-0-3-0, they should stop looking busy.  Here the narrating voice clearly sets apart what the primitive is gentle at tune with its environment almost paradise, vis a vis modernity which works like clockwork, and disruptive. The disruption appropriately represented by the bottle of coke that falls from the sky  a gift from the gods as so the bushmen deemed that was initially a source of happiness among the tribe only to cause animosity later on. Truth is almost depicted as fiction.

Conclusion
Both films Zulu and The Gods Must Be Crazy employ the anthropological lens in presenting the disparity between the primitive and modernity with deliberate effort to sound representation or political correctness. In the past, this was the task of anthropology to accumulate vast amounts of ethnographic information of different cultures, with the attempt to espouse respect for otherness. However, as already seen, even these attempts at objectivity are silently laden by ideological constructs that are much more challenging to overcome. It becomes more compelling to challenge this objective lens, and acknowledge its Eurocentric frame. The task is to abandon the traditional structures of otherness altogether and discover instead a concept of cultural difference based on the notion of singularity (Hardt and Negri, 2004, 41).