District 9

I have been reading on the internet about the portrayal of Nigerians in the new South African movie District 9. I haven’t seen it so I have generally refrained from writing anything about it. This review seems to be the only one I have read that has treated the portrayal of Nigerians in the movie with a fair measure of clear-headedness. Some might even argue that Teju Cole, the writer of the review, is being charitable to Neill Blomkamp, the director of the movie.

H/T Sean

The Aliens are coming
Teju Cole

Near the end of his 1904 poem, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians,’ C.P. Cavafy writes: “night’s fallen and the barbarians have not arrived.” And: “Now what will become of us without barbarians./ Those people were some kind of solution.”

The title, and the sentiment, migrated to the other end of the century in Coetzee’s novel, which also centred on an unnamed threat at the empire’s borders, a threat that did less harm than the empire was able to do to itself.

The spectacular (and spectacularly successful) new film ‘District 9’ settles itself into precisely the same precincts of immigration, invasion, co-dependency and fear.

‘District 9’ is a film made in South Africa by the young South African director Neill Blomkamp. It is very much up to the moment, shoehorning into the science-fiction genre immediate and not at all fictional realities: immigration, war, terrorism, slums, the 24-hour news cycle, video surveillance, and xenophobia.

It is a testament to Blomkamp’s sharp, smart storytelling that we have such a convincing sensation of these subjects, even though the immigrants in question are not human at all, and not even of this planet.

Full-grown, the aliens are of larger than human size, with a crustacean-looking appearance that causes some to call them “prawns.” They are discovered in 1982, more than a million of them, in the hold of a giant spaceship that has come to rest in the sky over Johannesburg.

The opening scenes of the movie are truly wondrous, with the camera jumping between various talking-heads discussing the aliens, and footage of the prawns themselves, living in a desolate shanty town on the outskirts of the city.

“Prawns”: the name, introduced as a slur, soon becomes the standard way of referring to them. They are the barbarians: the unknown other, vaguely human in their behaviour and their communities, but different enough that persecution is sure to follow.

The main action of ‘District 9’ takes place twenty years after the prawns are rescued from the hold of the stalled ship. In that time, they have drawn the ire of “normal” South Africans (both white and black). They are feared and mistrusted, and are suspected of plotting against the government.

The decision is made to transfer them out of the demarcated area, the District 9 of the title, and into a concentration camp farther away from inhabited areas.

In charge of the move is a private company, the ominously named and heavily armed Multinational United (the name brings to mind the ‘Multi-National Force’ which invaded Iraq in 2003). The MNU operation is led by Wikus van de Merwe (played excellently by Sharlto Copley), the son-in-law of one of the corporation’s leaders.

The idea is to get all the prawns to sign the necessary paperwork, and then to evict them with minimum force. But things go badly. There are plenty of plot twists in the rest of the film, notably one in which Wikus undergoes a transformation of sorts and his loyalty to MNU gets called into question.

The strength of ‘District 9’ is that it tries to do too much. It goes for broke. The film can be plausibly read as an attempt to do a blockbuster film like ‘Independence Day’ (there is no shortage of explosions, chases and special effects) and underpin it with ideas taken from Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis,’ ‘City of God,’ ‘Schindler’s List’ and Nollywood.

The description of an explosion as a terrorist attack (when it is obviously not), the insistence on legal procedure when evicting the aliens, the spouting of banalities by government functionaries like Wikus: these are all things we recognise from our day to day world, and they are presented in a cinema verité style here that is so convincing that the viewer, every now and again, must be reminded that this is a science fiction film, and one produced, for that matter, by Peter Jackson (of ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘King Kong’ fame).

It is all done very well, and it illuminates the genre of the action movie like nothing else I’ve ever seen. It takes a very serious question-how do we treat the strangers among us?-and makes an honest attempt at an answer.

‘District 9,’ though, also has serious flaws. Perhaps most notable among them is the depiction of Nigerians in the film. Even making allowances for the fact that this is a fable, with strong elements of satire and allegory, the one-dimensionality of the Nigerian characters is striking.

The Nigerians live in District 9 with the prawns, and sell cat food to them (the prawns are cat food addicts) in exchange for weapons. In addition, the Nigerians run a prostitution ring (renting out their women for sex with the aliens) and occasionally murder prawns to use for juju.

In other words, the most violent and offensive clichés of Nollywood have been grafted onto the film, without the humanising, narrative context of Nollywood.

The decontextualization is brought home by the fact that the Nigerian gang-leader is actually named Obasanjo (no, I couldn’t believe my ears either), and these so-called Nigerians all speak Zulu.

This raises the questions of why Blomkamp, who is so scrupulously realist in other parts of the film, has chosen to depict his Nigerian characters as caricatures. One possibility is that he is trying to extend the film’s larger argument: that we are callous to strangers among us.

It is a fact that Nigerian immigrants in South Africa are often persecuted, stereotyped as drug dealers and prostitutes, and denied housing and jobs. Perhaps Blomkamp is simply holding up a mirror to society, reminding his viewers that the film is not about humanoid prawns who, after all, do not really exist, but rather about people, who do.

‘District 9,’ which has been read by most critics as an allegory of apartheid (parallels have been drawn to forced removals from the real-life District Six in Cape Town during the 70s), might be more profitably viewed through the lens of ongoing anti-foreigner sentiment in South Africa.

There’s a particular harshness in the violence that the disenfranchised mete out to the even more disenfranchised. Perhaps this is why the Nigerians in the film are depicted as sub-human: because, to many, they are.

Perhaps he wants audiences to ask: why do you have such a lurid imaginary notion of Nigerians? Why this need to designate others as barbarians? Or perhaps it is simply a massive blindspot on Blomkamp’s part, a failure that mars what is otherwise a remarkable work of art.