Leon Schuster, Mr Bones 3 and South Africa's Cancel Culture
Our box office juggernaut is back...
I’m in Durban this week reporting on the devastating floods while also investigating an assassination (for a new podcast series) and most days have been incredibly upsetting.
So, on trips like this, to unwind, I tend to visit malls and casinos, not to gamble, but just walk around and feel cosseted by uncaring opulence, surround myself with people who are worried about the amount of foam in their cappuccinos rather than the gruesome stuff I’m meant to be reporting on.
This is how I discover (at Suncoast on Durban’s beachfront) that Leon Schuster’s Mr Bones 3: Son of Bones has been quietly released.
This shouldn’t be surprising because Mr Bones 2: Back from the Past is the only South African film to top South Africa’s own box office in the past twenty years. The man is our only true box office darling. But the advent of “Bones 3” is surprising because in 2020 Schuster was cancelled, scrubbed even from his beloved Showmax, for racism in his films.
His defence at the time: “I try to bring people together with laughter. There is no race in my heart. I don’t see black, white, pink or purple. I just see a person.” Now… this is clearly baloney. It’s a boiler plate apology from a man who has made a career from his obsession with race (and been financially rewarded by an audience that shares that obsession).
My initial relationship with Schuster was one of relief. I saw There’s a Zulu on My Stoep in 1993 at the cinema in Cape Town and laughed. I had been in the country less than a year, was 11-years-old, obsessed with comedy and desperate for a local talent to appreciate.
This appreciation didn’t last. But, there’s a debate to be had for how South Africa should feel about Schuster.
I watched the first Mr Bones for this column (it’s worth mentioning that in 2001 it was also a monster hit). It is a bananas film, and there is definitely a take which says it is aggressively racist (the premise of the film is Schuster plays an African traditional healer and this is done for laughs mostly at the expense of the black characters). But the film also feels like a gigantic cathartic exercise by a certain kind of white South African.
It’s like with the world of Mr Bones, Schuster is creating a fantasy South Africa that he’s comfortable with. This South Africa is centrally controlled by a rich white man (Schuster) who is respected and knows the culture of black people (while secretly mocking and laughing at them about it).
I imagine Schuster would argue the white man at the centre of his film is the biggest fool, but he is most foolish when he is adopting (and bastardising) black culture.
Meanwhile, there are rich black men in the film playing golf and also those that shit their pants for laughs. There are African chief stereotypes that show black people as idiots who believe any old nonsense and there are also beautiful black ballroom singers who white people desire.
In Schuster’s fantasy of “ubuntu South Africa” the whites still run the show. And black people are there to add “energy” and “laughter” and “excitement” to our white lives.
The movie ends with black people storming a golf tournament at Sun City (a place that Schuster adores in his films as peak Rainbow Nation consumerism). By invading the tournament a joyous lack of decorum is added to the proceedings.
As I understand it, Schuster mostly got cancelled for his use of black face (his defence is that he also includes black actors in white face in his films). But, man alive, there is a lot of inner-psyche hanging out here.
I can report: there is no blackface in Mr Bones 3 (but he does keep the crazily problematic accent).
My stance on cancel culture is I find it fascinating that we can have these strong calls for someone to be digitally erased (on mega corporate company streamers) and leave the actual celebrities with infinite choice as to where to distribute their “cancelled” content.
I watched (and loved) Louis CK’s Grammy winning special (which he simply sold on his own website). I hated Dave Chapelle’s tedious lecture on trans rights (on that, the only good joke about transitioning ever made has been on Curb Your Enthusiasm, in a bit starring famous trans man Chaz Bono).
For Schuster he must feel betrayed by the idea of South Africa engaging with this cancelling practice. He must think we all had an understanding. I have to say, audaciously releasing a sequel in the cinema for a franchise that less than two years ago got canned has officially uncancelled him: South Africa’s Department of Trade, Industry and Competition and M-Net Films are both on the credits.
I can say that Mr Bones 3, even at 80 minutes, is excruciating. For most of the runtime it feels defanged (and cheaply made) so Schuster resorts to what a lot of his films consist of: pranks involving poop, gay panic, golf, slapstick fighting, Home-Alone-themed climaxes and people getting hit in the groin. The people in the cinema (particularly a guy in my row) laughed a great deal.
Having said that, there is a subplot that is truly remarkable where the main black character (Alfred Ntombela, playing the titular Son of Bones) swoons after a “white beauty” for the whole film (and she is quite taken with him) while Schuster inexplicably disapproves. In the final minutes when you think they will get together romantically Bones uses some of his magic to direct Alfred away from the white girl to a black girl from the village which they all decide he should rather be with.
There is also a sequence where Alfred only appreciates that he is real man because he is endorsed by Paul Kruger’s ghost. And an ongoing gag where Alfred doesn’t know what a cellphone is and the “white beauty” has to show him. And a number of set pieces where a revered, black chief falls over.
I am still stunned by the plot twist involving the love interests. It didn’t seem to get any laughs or pathos from the audience I was with, but just served as a swift moral capper that Bones would always be here to “put things right”. In Schuster’s South Africa black people have freedom, but within very strict limits.
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