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?
The curator of the film series that Adio Africa appeared in was the fascinating South African filmmaker and film scholar Francois Verger. Being an artist probably placed him in the minority in the screening room that night. From his point of view as an artist, the import of the film, historically and contemporarily, was more related to its place in the history of filmmaking than in the history of Africa. Adio Africa, he informed us, innovated certain methods in editing and sound sequencing that remain in use to this day and that have secured it a place on film studies syllabi around the world. We heard him out but I felt that there was a lot lost in translation between the artists and the humanists. I don't think many of the African scholars present were convinced that it was simply a matter of (bad) luck for Africans that they and their continent had to form the backdrop for this otherwise disinterested technical and aesthetic project. It seemed to me that for the vast majority of audiences, people who are not likely to be trained and committed film scholars, the Africa of the film and the arguments made about it as opposed to the techniques of their communication, would be at the center of their understandings of the importance of Adio Africa. Africa was too central a character in the film to be ignored. Ethical engagement with the project required addressing the politics of knowledge production about Africa that were involved in its making.
Like Adio Africa, District 9 can be read on stylistic or thematic levels, as a sci-fi flick, an action thriller, or an African film depending on the context of its viewing and the inclinations of the viewer. Each reading would produce a different list of strengths and problems. Taking District 9 as an Africa movie, one is overwhelmed by its myriad problems. The film provokes too many questions to list and more than it is able to adequately address. In the interest of time I will focus only on the two questions that most interested me. Who are the Africans in this movie and how are they constructed?
In the universe of the film, although there are enemy countries in the distant background somewhere, the world of concern is really just South Africa. Within this world, there are three groups: the prawns, the humans, and the Nigerians. Although noting the presence in the film of three key groups, reviewers who read the film as a metaphor for apartheid and post-apartheid South African policies towards racially and later economically marginalized people, have nevertheless behaved as if there are only two groups featured: the humans and the prawns, the racist state and its helpless victims. In this reading, the film is sympathetic to the victims of history and critical of the racist state. It allows us to see the side of the victims of racist regimes by taking us into prawn homes, where parents and children work patiently and cooperatively to fulfill their simple dreams of returning to the motherland. The poor prawns weren't so bad, the audience is supposed to learn. They were just misunderstood.
In a different way, the state is also portrayed as being not so bad after all. The film presents MultiNational United (MNU) and the South African state by extension as simply interested in maintaining competitiveness in a militarized world. In order to do so it has to push the limits of scientific knowledge about human physiology, prawn physiology, and the possibilities of combining the two. Since the imperative to increase military advantage in our permanently terrorized world has long been normalized as a central responsibility of prosperous states to their citizens, MNU's deadly efforts to extract intelligence from captured aliens register as morally ambivalent at best.
Finally we have the third group, the "Nigerians" or what I call the generic Africans. What makes these "Nigerians", not the prawns, into the generic Africans of the film, is the weird African language they speak. From what I could make out, the "Nigerian" language combined made up sounds with accents and words from around the continent, including southern Africa. The resulting generically African language is all too familiar to us, thanks, as Achebe once wrote, to the imagination of our old friend Josef Conrad.
What are the properties of the generic African? The generic Africans of the film are the people who have been untouched by the enlightening hand of civilization. Unlike the other dark skinned people, they live in an insular and racially homogenous society governed by unthinking submission to their mad and mysteriously powerful leader. They feed on each other's madness and for all we know, on each other bodies. They are ignorant misogynists who despise and exploit women and anti-scientific cannibals; as such, they are an anachronism in this future time.
The generic Africans are a predatory group; they prey on the prawns, themselves the scavengers of society. In a possible dig at Chinese investors, the "Nigerians" provide services to the bottom dwellers of this fictional world; they go to the places where discriminating humans could not go. Thus the generic Africans are constructed as bottom dwellers themselves.
A sci-fi action thriller may work without any clear heroes but it cannot work without villains. Notwithstanding all the anxious silences around MNU's activities and the government's imprisonment of the South African whistleblower in the end, the state is not in fact the film's bogeyman. The true villains of the film are the "Nigerians." They threaten security, order, and the legitimacy of the state. They may have more of the highly coveted prawn weapons than MNU itself. They are armed, organized, and united; they are the enemy within.
It was pointed out to me that these bottom dwellers, despite or because of their questionable status, are quite powerful figures in the movie. But the power they hold is common destructive power. Even then, theirs is only a potential and unrealizable form of power. Their danger might lie in the combination of their stupidity plus access to firepower. Their failure to organize the prawns into a slave army or understand basic principles of biology guarantee that they will forever be kept from actually using the prawn weapons they so gleefully hoard. But they are just stupid and savage enough to raise a whole lot of hell trying.
District 9 the sci-fi movie would resonate with ordinary sci-fi fans as a story in the tradition of metamorphosis/miscegenation narratives, Jeff Goldblum's Fly being a classic of the sub-genre. As a science fiction flick, District 9 was okay, not great because it left fundamental questions about the science of the film unanswered. Why does exposure to recovered alien fuel have the effect of genetically modifying the protagonist? Are the prawns as a species composed of the transformed remains of species across the galaxy? Is the alien ship a sentient being composed of biological material whose fuel acts like blood or reproductive fluids do for humans, carrying viruses and genetic data from one generation to the next, one species to the other? This fundamental explanatory gap in the science of this science fiction film was an intensely frustrating distraction but not fatal shortcomings of the movie. As an Irish anthropologist friend pointed out, most viewers would probably have seen District 9 as a simple exciting action film. On that level it worked well. It contained enough guns, explosions, and sharp plot and vehicle turns to satisfy most action adventure fans.
The morning after I saw District 9 I was talking with some students in my Intro to African Studies class as we waited for everyone to trickle in. I mentioned that I had just seen the film. They all piped up that they had heard about it, they had heard it was really good, they wanted to see it, and did it have something to do with Africa? Good question. It did have something to do with the real Africa in the sense that it was set in Johannesburg. But I told them that I wasn't sure the setting was allowed to introduce anything special or new to standard sci-fi narratives. Nor did the sci-fi format introduce any perceptible critiques of received knowledge about Africa.
In Reinventing Africa, Annie Coombes examined the role of the museum and the transactional relationship between museums and their publics, in the perpetuation of colonial ideas about Africa. How, she asked, are colonial era ideas of Africa reproduced, circulated, and disseminated beyond the confines of the disciplines that originally created and have for the most part abandoned them? How do strategic silences, repetitions, and the expansion of the discursive circuits in which colonial categories are used invest these categories for thinking Africa with such staying power? Through District 9, Africa has been inserted into mainstream sci-fi discourse. What this might mean for science fiction is for filmmakers and film scholars to think about. Does the new encounter between Africa and sci-fi perform any new work for African Studies?
Science fiction creates metaphorical worlds that enable us to look at our own world, the actors who inhabit it, and their relationships to one another anew. So who are the important actors in District 9? If this film is going to be read metaphorically as a critique of racist regimes in Africa, who are the Africans? While District 9 is certainly of interest as one of the first mainstream science fiction films to be set in Africa, the question for me is still does the use of an African backdrop complicate any ideas of the Black or the African inherited from the colonial and apartheid libraries? I would say no. I sincerely hope someone else is able to say yes and explain how. But I doubt it.