Contrast Between Heart Of Darkness And The Movie The God Must Be Crazy

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Compare and contrast between "Heart of Darkness" and the movie "The God Must Be Crazy"
Introduction
The movie The Gods Must Be Crazy and the novel Heart of Darkness have been set in Africa. The literary pieces still structure contemporary ways of presenting, and therefore understanding, the continent. They were published in two different time periods almost a century apart. However, they still have the same portrayal of the continent. Though the continent has not yet reached western civilization standards, the portrayal of the people and their way of life is more subjective rather than objective. These literary pieces have been crafted to match the pervasive picture of the west about the continent and its people. The view is meant to match the imaginations of the authors about a continent with no regard to impartiality. It is obvious that the good of a continent has been overlooked and selectively published that which suit their imaginations. The authors are white and their subjective opinions are perceptible in their works. This essay offers a comparative analysis of how the two authors perceive Africans from a western perspective.
Authors describe Africa from their perspective without contextualizing their ways of life. Throughout the novel, Conrad portrays Africans as savages while Uys in the film shows they are uncivilized and have weird beliefs. (Conrad, Pg. 16), “A lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants.” This vivid description shows how Africans are perceived as savages. Another instance of the movie shows African children eating and playing like savages, naked and barefooted (Uys 00:4:34 – Uys 00:4:50). The media and artists have exported this distorted and inaccurate picture of the continent to build the credibility of their work. They selectively choose the image they want to portray and package it for the consumer to ‘establish’ the credibility of their work since their perception of the continent is also skewed. Unfortunately, they also come out as racists and judgmental of the culture from the western perspective.
The two literary pieces describe the clothing of the people to be uncivilized. Conrad describes the dressing of the people in the Congo basin as “Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails”(Conrad, Pg. 17). Conrad’s depiction of the African culture was that of very uncivilized population still uncivilized and their way of life was pitiful. By describing a vivid picture of how the people he found in the Congo basin clothed shows his subjective view of their culture and traditions. A scene in the film shows the people living and interacting together with both genders barely sensitive to their dressing (Uys 00:11:3 – Uys 00:11:30). These people were comfortable in these clothes and had lived much of their lives in them. The general African perspective of nakedness was if your groin area was visible. Even women did not wear anything to conceal their breasts and some parts of the continent they still do not wear them. However, he goes ahead and describes their clothing as, ‘waggled to and fro like tails’. That’s a degrad...