Epic Kalahari documentary may help bushmen repel ‘the Myth’ Originally published in Current, Feb. 26, 1996 By Geneva Collins Other teenagers might have used a three-day trip to the African bush to write a "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" essay. John Marshall has made it his life's work. Nearly a half-century after his first visit to what is now Namibia, the anthropological filmmaker is reviewing a million--yes, a million--feet of film to piece together A Kalahari Family, a three-hour documentary that PBS expects to air in three parts. [Broadcast had been expected in 1997 but has been delayed for further shooting until 1998 or later, according to the producers in 1997.] The documentary is a remarkable 46-year film record of the Ju/'hoansi (pronounced "jhu-wahnsi," popularly called bushmen) of the Kalahari Basin and their struggle against dispossession, disease and even the well-meaning but harmful actions of development agencies. But equally remarkable is that this film footage in a sense represents the home movies of the Marshall family, prosperous Bostonians who became so taken with the Ju/'hoansi that they returned to Africa again and again and again. To start at the beginning: John Marshall's father, Laurence, founded the Raytheon Corp., a company that made millions during World War II as a pioneer in radar and other defense products. On a business trip to Cape Town in 1950 he met a surgeon obsessed with finding a legendary Lost City in the Kalahari. Laurence Marshall agreed to accompany the surgeon on the hunt and returned to America to make preparations for the trip. As John Marshall tells the story 45 years later: "Since we lived down the street from the [Harvard] Peabody Museum, he asked experts there: 'My son and I are going to the Kalahari to look for the Lost City. Is there anything useful we can do?' And they said, 'Look for wild bushmen.' " Needless to say, the intrepid bunch didn't find a Lost City, but they did meet a bushman named Toma under a baobab tree. The Ju/'hoan tribesman, following an African custom, gave his family's names to the Marshalls, forging a deep psychological bond that brought back the Marshall entourage (including John's mother, Lorna, and sister, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, now a prominent writer) the following year. By this time Laurence Marshall had been forced out at Raytheon and had ample leisure time. The family stayed a month and a half. Unschooled anthropologists Lorna Marshall, an English teacher with absolutely no anthropological training, began unraveling the intricacies of the Ju/'hoan clan's familial relationships and filming (with 18-year-old John as cameraman) the people, one of the last known hunter-gatherer populations in the world. The film caused a sensation in anthropological circles and is still considered a landmark work today. Lorna Marshall started studying anthropology in earnest. The family returned to the Kalahari in 1953, this time staying for a year and a half, doing the film and field research that catapulted Lorna Marshall to acclaim in the academic world. John Marshall, during an interview with Current in November [1995] while in Washington to screen a rough cut of A Kalahari Family for the American Anthropological Association, is asked whether he knew as a young man that he would continue his mother's work. "My real dream was to be a Navy officer," he said. "I volunteered for the draft in 1953, but asthma kept me out." Marshall got degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Yale, went to France and studied sculpting briefly, worked as an unpaid intern for a film company. "At the time, I didn't want to be a filmmaker. ... But it was what I could do," Marshall said. During the '60s and '70s Marshall tried periodically to return to what was then the South African colony of South West Africa, but was always denied a visa by the government. (His father, who had bought land there, was allowed entry and went back occasionally). Meanwhile, Marshall's documentary film career was taking off. In 1969, he and Timothy Asch, who had filmed the Yanomamo Indians in Venezuela, founded Documentary Educational Resources, a nonprofit organization now based in Watertown, Mass., that produces and distributes anthropological films for classroom use. Suddenly it was 1978 and he was wrapping up "If It Fits," a documentary about the shoe industry in Haverhill, Mass. "I realized it had been 20 years since I'd been back. I said, 'My God, if I don't go now, I never will.' " Although he had two film jobs waiting in the wings, he ditched them to return to the Kalahari region of Nyae Nyae. Dispossession and despair What he found was a sorry sight. The South African government had expropriated more than 70 percent of the Ju/'hoan land, and the people could no longer live as hunters on the little acreage that was left. Most of those who didn't flee the region or die of starvation wound up surviving in squalor and despair in a town called Tshumkwe. As captured on film, a leader named Tsamko, the son of the man the Marshalls met at the baobab tree in 1950, would get his people out of the slums of Tschumkwe to establish sustenance farms on the remaining land. Although they had never farmed before, the Ju/'hoansi realized the only way to regain their turf was to occupy and till it. But their plan was met with resistance on all sides: from a competing tribe that wanted the land to graze its own cattle, to World Wildlife Fund officials who wanted the land as a game reserve, to development specialists who argued that it was not "natural" for bushmen to farm and proposed that the Ju/'hoansi make money as tourist attractions by scampering about in animal skins and hunting with spears and arrows. During this stay abroad, Marshall met Claire Ritchie, who not only served as assistant director on the burgeoning Kalahari film project but also helped him establish a development fund for the Ju/'hoansi. The fund allowed the Ju/'hoansi to drill for water, buy cattle, and do other tasks that brought them closer to self-sufficiency. A Kalahari Family follows the Ju/'hoansi in their struggles through 1994, including the political turmoil before and after Namibia gained its independence in 1989 and the Ju/'hoansi's search for displaced relatives to bring them back home. Marshall will return to Nyae Nyae to film a five-minute epilogue before the PBS broadcast, to update viewers to what has happened to the struggling farmers since then. The anthropologist has made more than 40 films ("N!ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman," aired on PBS in the early 1980s) and has earned a reputation in the field that equals or surpasses his mother's. But clearly A Kalahari Family is a once-in-a-lifetime project, with 45 years' worth of sweat equity invested in it. Although Marshall does not diminish his personal involvement over the years with the Ju/'hoansi, he said he considers himself a reporter and chafed at a remark that he is serving as a spokesperson for the Ju/'hoansi. "Definitely not. That's the trouble--everybody's been claiming that they were speaking for the Ju/'hoansi and weren't letting them speak for themselves. My role as a filmmaker is to let the people speak for themselves. The narration in the film is very limited. It's cinema verite style." Debunking the myth What Marshall does rail against at every chance he gets is the Myth. You can tell he says the word with a capital M. The Myth is the notion that these primitive bush people don't know what's best for themselves and need help from "developed" society. Or that they should go back to hunting and gathering, as they did for thousands of years, and stop trying to live in the 20th century. The Myth is romantic hokum like James Uys' 1981 film The Gods Must Be Crazy (which Marshall has skewered in some of his other films) or a pseudo-documentary the anthropologist recently saw on a cable channel: "It had people running around in jock straps and skins, with not one single word, not a title, not even a subtitle, explaining that this was a reconstruction!" he raged. Marshall, who has an NEH postproduction grant to organize the material and prepare the script, was also in Washington to make copies of some of the 16mm film he shot nearly five decades ago that is now archived at the Smithsonian. A Ju/'hoan translator had recently been flown in to help translate the !Kung dialect. Marshall is using interviews and archival material from other filmmakers to fill in the major gap that resulted from his 20-year absence. His mother, now 97, will narrate some of the early scenes. At Marshall's presentation to anthropologists that day, someone had spoken of "the tyranny of broadcast quality." Marshall is asked if PBS technical standards had affected the project. "It's been my observation and experience that if the subject, what you've got on the screen, the content, the people, and things at the other end of the camera are presented with honor--and that doesn't mean that you agree with them--that if it's shot well, cut well, it doesn't matter if you do 8mm. PBS will take 8mm." Most of his film work has been seen by anthropologists and students. For a PBS audience, he is asked, does he have to think more in terms of entertainment value, narrative flow? "I don't. You shoot with all your heart, all your skill, all your conviction that the person at the other end of the camera is a lot more important than you are. And you do that whether you're shooting an ad, for the classroom, a feature--that's the way you shoot. If you don't, you're not doing your job."

John Marshall's series, airing through PBS in 1997, follows a southwest African tribe for 46 eventful years. In photo, the producer talks with Ju/'hoan people during a 1957 expedition. (Photo: Documentary Educational Resources.)

 

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