I rarely go to the cinema, and when I do, I never go on opening weekend. If you wait a while, you can enjoy the same film on the giant screen in less-crowded circumstances. There have been zero movies I thought were so good that I had to go see them early, lest they prove commercial failures and disappear from theatres before I can see them. Like I said, I rarely go to the cinema anyway (and no, I don't watch much TV either).
Yet there I sat, in a stuffily crowded theatre to see District 9. In the ads, it looked like something I'd enjoy. More importantly, it was a big-budget, sci-fi action movie shot in Africa (South Africa) with a mostly African cast and an African writer/director; big box office numbers on the opening weekend (assisted by my $10.00 ticket) could mean more of the same in the future. The beneficiaries of such future investment would likely be South Africa, Botswana and the other handful of countries that combine the "safari-style" locations the rest of world believes to be "Africa", and a global reputation for being "stable" in the African context. South Africa has the additional benefits of urban landscapes familiar to Europe/America (I know of one film, starring the beautiful Rachel True, that was set in Southern California, but which was actually filmed in Sandton City, north of Johannesburg).
I don't care that Nigeria would not be a direct beneficiary; the continent of Africa needs economic expansion and job-creation desperately. Even South Africa is facing problems with high unemployment and under-employment. Besides, Nigeria has its own film industries (plural, because of the different independent nodes). I hope and pray Nigeria's film industries raise the quantity of investment, as well as the quality of output, so we can tap into global markets as the "voice" of African movie-making. This is already happening; compare recent output with output from the early days and you can see a clear upward trajectory on all counts. Long may it continue.
Yeah, I felt great sitting there, supporting the "African" film industry, watching District 9 amidst the close-packed crowd, as the movie began. Alas, midway through the film, I deeply regretted wasting my hard-earned money on yet another example of South African Naijaphobia.
District 9 is supposed to be an allegorical film; everything is a metaphor or stand-in for something else. Allegories are not meant to be blunt instruments. That staple of fiction, the archetype, is the preferred tool of this most distinguished of genres. The reader (or in this case viewer) either instantly knows or discovers along the way that the name and circumstances of the archetype are irrelevant; it is what he, she or it represents that is important. Animal Farm by George Orwell is one of the best in the genre; read it if you haven't already.
In District 9, the extra-terrestrial Prawns symbolized refugees, illegal aliens, foreigners targeted for xenophobia and black South Africans under Apartheid. Multinational United (hence MNU), stood in for powerful, globe-spanning businesses, but also governments, governmental bureaucracies and civil services, and (I suspect) for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well. And the worst crimes and catastrophes in history were possible only because of seemingly decent, "just doing my job and making a living" people like the character Wikus Van Der Merwe -- they act without malice or malevolence, in line with the operative societal ethos (if it is wrong, it would be illegal, they say to themselves) but without them, no big, eye-catching horror would have been possible.
The South African writer/director of District 9 set his tale in "Johannesburg" but beyond that, nothing in the story is connected to the real world, and everything is a metaphor disconnected from any real person or entity. If there was a South African government in the world of District 9, it was a curiously invisible body that allowed MNU act as thought it were the government. Indeed, the writer/director was careful to make clear Multinational United's mandate came from some fictional, metaphoric stand-in for the United Nations (itself probably an allegoric comment on the UN's policies and performance in such situations).
Everything was a metaphor, symbolic, a stand-in. Everything except the disgusting, ultra-violent, sub-human criminals who exploited the Prawns. These were clearly identified as "Nigerians".
In an allegorical context, you need only depict the criminal archetype. If there was a need to ascribe a name to them, it could have been something blandly decriptive, in the way "Multinational United" is a very unimaginative name for a "multinational" business. He could have said "gangs" and everyone in the world would understand what you meant. He could have said "organized crime" and everyone would know what he meant. We all watched the mercenaries hired by MNU, and we all knew exactly what and who they represented, but we did not care about the nationality and citizenship of the mercenaries, did we? Were they Ukrainian? French? Russian? South African? Who cared? They were "mercenaries", hired killers, and we understood.
So why did the retch-inducing crimninals have to be "Nigerians"?
Because in South Africa, "Nigerian" is the archetype for "dreadful criminal". In much the same way as we all understood the other archetypes, the South African writer/director of District 9 expected us to understand the moment we heard the word "Nigerian". In truth, we Nigerians are the victims of dreadful stereotyping worldwide, so I guess he figured the whole world would understand the metaphor; the people exploiting the vulnerable and broken Prawns represented the worst of humanity, ipso facto "Nigerians".
Had he not ascribed a specific nationality to the crooks, the viewers might have assumed they were "South African" like everyone else in the movie, except we all knew as viewers that these "South African" characters were not in fact South African at all, but were commentaries on all of us; indeed, all of our nations have nasty, disgusting criminals. But no, the bloody man had to specify, just so we know, that these were "Nigerians".
Mind you, this blog post is NOT about countering the world's stereotypes about Nigerians. True, we seem to be the only people in the world for whom it is still politically correct to hold and express nasty stereotypical views. So what if the Nigerians narcotics industry is microscopic compared to its peers in the United States, the EU-members, Latin America and South and Southeast Asia? So what if every Naira and Dollar stolen by 419 operators combined is nothing compared to the individual frauds of Madoff, Enron, and quite frankly the entire global financial industry (which seems to have been either a giant Ponzi scheme professing to have created wealth where none existed, or a 419 scheme inspiring millions to exchange real money for make-believe value). I cannot think of a single criminal endeavor in which Nigerians are the world's number one, yet we get typecast as genetic crooks or something.
No, this is not about that.
This is about my fellow Nigerians, participants in a discussion form I am part of. You see, in the aftermath of District 9, a thread was started to discuss the extremely negative perception of Nigerians in South African pop culture. As this South African writer laments in the Mail and Guardian ( paragraph 13 ), "Must Nigerians always be the bad guys?" Ironically, the Mail and Guardian is one of a handful of South African news sources that have angered me over the years with reporters and columnists just casually repeating what are nasty stereotypes about Nigerians as if they were confirmed facts.
The thing that flabbergasted me, that always flabbergasts me when topics like this come up, is the NIGERIAN discussants on the forum in question predominantly agreed (over 85% by rough estimate) that we Nigerian had EARNED the negative reputation South Africans had of us. As always, the existence of Nigerian criminals in the "other" country (doesn't matter what country) as proof that Nigerians were deservedly identified as criminals.
Again, this blog post is not intended to argue against this obviously wrong, and obviously stupid conclusion. I wouldn't waste my time on that.
There is something more important here.
Black Africans and people of Black African descent worldwide have a hair-trigger, knee-jerk reaction to "racism" from every other "race". It doesn't take much for a non-black person to be accused of racism by a black person.
While we spend all our energy chasing "external racism", we seem oblivious to the fact that the biggest threat to Black Africans is the racism of Black Africans against other Black Africans.
Our nasty stereotypes about each other, prejudice toward each other, our superiority complexes focused on each other, distrust of each other, internal discrimination and segregation from each other, and in extreme cases our hatred of each other are prime causative factors of our stagnation, the slow pace of our progress, and of the disasters (including violent, murderous massacres) that scar our continent. It is why our countries are weak; and frankly, given the fact that such behaviour exists even between sub-groups of the same ethnicity and/or religion, the idea that the blame lies with "colonial" borders creating multi-ethnic countries is farcical. If we do not defeat black-on-black prejudice, it will continue to bite us in the nyash whether we break the colonial lines or not.
It baffles me that any Nigerians would suggest that any manifestation of this black-on-black prejudice was justifiable. If Nigerians are so terrible that South Africans are justified in holding prejudices against us, how does that explain the prejudice and recurrent VIOLENCE in South Africa against Mozambicans, Somalians, Malians and Zimbabweans? Are they genetic criminals too?
If it seems I am scapegoating South Africa, trust me, I am not.
This black-on-black prejudice and VIOLENCE exists in Nigeria too. In Rwanda. In Burundi. In Senegal. In Cote d'Ivoire. In both Congos. In Kenya. In Zimbabwe; it is strange that the world reacted when Mugabe turned on the white farmers, but no one, sadly not even African countries, said anything during or after the Mugabe regime's black-on-black, Shona-vs-Ndebele Gukurahundi massacres of the early 1980s. In (amazingly and depressingly) uni-lingual, uni-religious, uni-cultural Somalia.
I could go on and on and on, but the point is simple. The exterior descriptions of the prejudices differ from place to place (though the belief that "they" are trying to politically and economically dominate "us" is the most popular), with the same single person or group of people often holding different negative prejudices for different peoples in their vicinity. The "explanations" and "rationales" people offer themselves and others for their prejudicial beliefs are different (a Gambian I know excused violence against Somali refugees in another African country because, as he put it, "The Somalis are too clannish"; yes, that was his explanation of the murder of human beings and the burning down of their businesses), though the idea that "we" must defend ourselves against "them" is again the most popular.
Substantively the prejudices are based on outright falsehoods, massive exaggerations of comparatively infinitesimal historical facts, wilful and involuntary ignorance, and (above all) the principle of collective punishment where the crimes of a single individual or a small group of individuals serves to indict and convict every other person that shares an ethnicity, religion, region or nationality with the guilty party.
Violence is the consequence of these attitudes, but is treated by true believers as the proof of the belief. As such it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle; it happens because we believe it, and we believe it because it happens.
The sad irony is the South African writer/director of District 9 intended his film to highlight several things about human beings, one of which is our treatment of immigrants within our midst. Yet, by using the South African vision of the criminal archetype, the "Nigerian", he in fact commits the same fault he ostensibly is trying to highlight.
To be honest, by the end of the movie, as I trudged out, angry that I had wasted my money boosting District 9's box office, and entirely aware that I was probably the only person in the cinema who knew (or cared) about South African stereotypes of Nigerians (wouldn't it have been different if the examples of the worst in humanity had been called "Americans" or "Frenchmen" or "Indonesians"), a thought occurred to me: District 9 would have been so much more effective at making its allegorical point if the extra-terrestrial aliens had been called amakwerekwere instead of Prawns. Better yet, he could have called the disgusting, criminals amakwerekwere. Then again, the "Nigerians" and the Prawns had sex, well not so much sex as inter-species prostitution. That does make sense; in real-life South Africa, everyone "knows" the immigrants are responsible for all of the crime; as such, both the Prawns and the "Nigerians" are amakwerekwere, explaining why their sexual organs were compatible enough for inter-species sex.
I wish I could ask for my money back.
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