The Multiplication of Centers

Abstract

Truths often fall from the sky, just like ideas, flowerpots, or glass bottles. Let’s take the case of a hunter bushman, a Sho, located in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, somewhere between Botswana and South Africa. Let’s imagine that he found a soda bottle in the sand that a scruples-less aviator threw out his window into the void, a concept that is eminently relative. The first lesson of this fable, which is important, would be that the name of Occi-dental products is not universal, because the Sho, whose name is Xixo, believed he had found a gift that the gods made to his people. The message of the second lesson would be even more important. Xixo hurried himself to take the “bottle” to his own people, whose wisdom was put to the test. What purpose could this curious meteorite serve? How should they interpret this divine gift? As, in the end, doubt about the object created tensions at the heart of the Sho community, Xixo was asked by the council of his village to travel to the world’s end in order to get rid of the encumbering thing: “We don’t want the thing. You should get rid of it yourself.” In short, Xixo was very disappointed. He felt that it was being disloyal to the gods to require him to throw the thing out of the world. As a result, he started to ask himself if the gods really existed. For Xixo, the world’s end was not so far. Along the way, he had the chance to live some adventures, as told by Jamie Uys in The Gods Must Be Crazy, a South African film that, in 1980, flew Botswana flags in movie theaters around the world in order to circumvent restrictive apartheid laws.