Vol. 3 Response

District 9's Intentions And The Road To Hell

In the 1940s two new critical scholars announced that a text should be considered separately from an author's intention in writing it. A text could and did mean things that an author never intended, they argued, and to suggest otherwise was to commit "the intentional fallacy." In the 1960s, deconstructionist critics pushed this further, arguing that the best criticism does not rely on pointing to an author's political views or national background.

Yet, in the 2000s-which started with fears of a Y-2K catastrophe, continued with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and concluded with the near-meltdown of the world economy--intention seems to be all. As the decade draws to a close, my U.S. students and colleagues regularly suggest that good intentions count and that those wounded by such should get a grip. (Can the expanded U.S. role as global policeman be incidental to this belief in the redemptive nature of intention?)

Thus, since South African director Neill Blomkamp intended to make a film interrogating race, and since such audience members as professors enjoyed the film due to that interrogation, then District-9 cannot be racially problematic. The intention of the director and sophisticated viewers (moved by the science-fiction film's depiction of the Hobbesian reality that results when aliens arrive in Johannesburg and are rounded up in concentration camps) is to lambast racism, not to perpetuate it, therefore it cannot be racist. But is this really what a century of literary criticism teaches us? Are good intentions sufficient? And can such be used to defend the film?

The Aliens Are Coming

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 J.M. Coetzee's 1980 novel, which also centered on an unnamed threat at the empire's borders, a threat that did less harm to the empire than what 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 concern: immigration, invasion, co-dependency, 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.

Who Are The Africans In DISTRICT 9?

Trying to think about what one might do with District 9 pedagogically reminded me of a discussion that took place on campus last spring semester after a very long screening of Adio Africa.  From what I remember, the crowd that night was roughly split between filmmakers, Africa scholars from humanities and social science fields, and undergraduate students.  If we all spoke the same language, it seemed that we did so using different accents.  Adio Africa, as we all know, is an astonishingly racist film that continues to be publicly screened because, we are told, it is also a beautiful film.  It purports to give us a farewell look at Africa as Eden before it was finally delivered over to newly independent savage natives.  By airtime, the film argued, the savages had already begun their vile work of deforming or reverting Africa as Eden into Africa as Hades. 

During the discussion that followed I remember that the Africa scholars seemed to read Adio Africa primarily as a film about Africa while the filmmakers read it as a film that happened to be set in Africa, but that had an identity grounded in its aesthetics that was independent of geographical considerations.  I remember one of the Africa scholars saying that if one wanted to make a point in an African studies class about how racist the colonial world was, there were a million other sources one could employ to illustrate the point that would be more faithful to the experience of Africans and actually present African perspectives on the matter.  The question was, wouldn't employing Adio Africa in the classroom lend undue legitimacy and scarce syllabus space to a racist project at the expense of other more complex and productive material? 

Hollywoodland: District 9 and the ‘Old' South Africa

District 9 can count much of the mainstream South African press among its most fervent supporters. This is reflected in uniformly rapturous reviews and sky-high box office receipts, despite the country's ongoing and painful iteration of the international financial crisis. The cinematic experience of the movie only accounts for part of its South African success, however; more telling is the glee South Africans of all stripes have expressed about District 9 as an international cultural phenomenon. This glee is about more than nationalist pride, with its story-lines of local (emigrant) boy done good. Nor is it the self-satisfaction of a nation-on-the-make, poised to ascend the international stage as World Cup hosts in only a few months time. No, when South Africans celebrate District 9, I think they are experiencing that moment of bashful hubris we all know - the recognition of one's voice, one's face, broadcast to rapturous applause. District 9 is the world we know! South Africans seem to say. For good or for ill, that's "us" up there on the screen! And they (especially the American film audience) like us! They really like us!

'There is much to critique in both the film and its success - from the obviously racist depiction of the Nigerian gangsters, to the film media's evident self-satisfaction for so quickly identifying the historical tropes and analogues that make the movie work. But I will leave that heavy lifting to others and will instead grind a much lighter axe - interrogating the politics of self-recognition within District 9. Is it really "them" that the world is watching? And, more provocatively, after generations of seasoning by Hollywood representations of South African reality, can South Africans recognize themselves anymore?

District 9: Just Another Hollywood Movie, Except for the Response

 We have seen this movie before. 

It's called Blood Diamond.  It's called Rosewood.  There are probably ten other movies I have refused to see which adopt this same story line.

It's a movie about an unappealing white man, who doesn't quite meet our approval in some way, who through a predictable turn of fate recognizes his own complicity in a racist social structure, and so through a moment of counter-intuitive self-sacrifice, manages to save an entire race from destruction, and along the way learns a very important lesson about love.

The basic premise is so basic that translating it into the South African context is actually offensive.  According to the South African born and Canadian-educated director and writer, Neill Blomkamp, the film is about "a guy who starts off as a sort of unaware racist who is creating a lot of harm and a lot of poverty and suffering, and he goes from that to becoming someone who is aware of what he's done, and comes out toward the end of the film making the right choices instead of the wrong choices."  Putting this same tired and racially problematic storyline into a South African setting simply reinforces the myth that what the world needs is a few brave white saviors to end all of our race problems.

Perhaps after a summer of truly dreadful films and, even more importantly, after decades of Hollywood neglect of African filmmakers and African issues, we might think this is finally a film we need to see, a film we need to discuss with our students.  I'm disappointed to say it is not.

A "Real" Sci-Fi Flick in Africa?

I usually don't get riled up to see action movies, never feeling the compulsion to sit through the loud sound effects, hard blows, and blood-everywhere scenes; but I got excited about District 9. The reviews were all a-buzz about it too. Here was a sci-fi action movie set in South Africa, using local, un-seasoned actors on a ridiculously low budget for this genre. What's more, who associates science fiction, much less modernity, with Africa? My interest was piqued. Then I started hearing things about "the Nigerians." First, my partner, all chuckles begged me to see it. According to him, they really indulged in the portrayal of our national reputation for criminality. A good friend of mine insisted, with full outrage, that I go straight to the theatre and see for myself...yet another film produced with white protagonists and Africans as silent, buffoonish props.

Then, I read the Salon interview (August 12^th). I had to go. In the interview the filmmaker, Neill Blomkamp, "insisted he had no specific allegorical, ironic or didactic message to deliver;" but the interviewer, Andrew O'Hehir, was not persuaded and after seeing the film, neither was I. The film's scenarios play on structures and events all too real. The aliens evoke unwanted Zimbabwean refugees; the Nigerians play their part, satisfying the South African stereotype of them as crude, violent thugs; and then there is the superstructure of the Apartheid past (and present). It was definitely an allegorical movie. At least Peter Jackson and Mark Johnson had the good taste not to beat us over the head while they offered us the well-known and well-loved allegorical tales of Lord of the Rings and Narnia.

Unthinkable Nigeriana: The Social Imaginary of District 9

The first part of my title is borrowed from a piece I wrote after my first ever visit to Nigeria in 1993.  My six-week trip happened to coincide with the 1993 June general elections that were subsequently annulled by then President Ibrahim Babangida.  I recall the palpable and abject sense of shock and disbelief of the students at the University of Ibadan amongst whom I sat watching the television announcement.  I have never encountered such a collective gasp of despair as was emitted immediately after Babangida's speech.

But I recall this incident for another reason.  Thinking back at what Nigeria has meant to me as a Ghanaian, it now seems to me that 1993 and the dire events that were unleashed after that coincided with the gradual shift in the nature of urban myths that were to come out of that great country.  Going to boarding secondary school in Ghana in the late 70s and early 80s, I remember that we used to spend an incredible amount of time trading tales about the wonders of Nigeria. There was good reason for this. My own uncle, Uncle Castro, was one of thousands of Ghanaians who had left for Nigeria to search for greener pastures.  "Castro" had not been my uncle's given name, but he had been such a radical at school and so attached to the ideals of the redoubtable Cuban leader that he changed his name and was forever after branded as the incurable radical of the family.  He was a teacher, and was a radical in more ways than I can recount.  He took off to Nigeria in the late 70s, learnt to speak Yoruba, married a local woman, and was never seen again.  Not even the Nigerian expulsions of Ghanaians and other foreigners in 1983 could prize him out of his adopted country.