Initially, I wasn’t going to post a response to District 9. I felt like doing so would be equivalent to walking through a field full of very sensitive land mines. But what’s life without danger, eh? So, here goes:

*WARNING: This review is one huge spoiler of a film that is already spoiled*

I despised District 9. It sucked eggs. Not impressed. Boooooo! Back to the drawing board.

Before writing this, I researched District 9’s director Neill Blomkamp a bit. I went to Wikipedia to see what informative links I could find. Here’s what the first sentence of his entry read:

“Neill Blomkamp is a racist South African born, Vancouver, BC-based director of feature-length and short films and advertisements.”

Guess I wasn’t the only one thoroughly pissed off by his film. I’m not one to laugh at other people’s misfortune but, honestly, Blomkamp had that coming. And as a Nigerian, it certainly was NOT my job to remove the slanderous word from his Wikipedia entry. So I left it (the word “racist” was gone in a matter of minutes).

I saw District 9 with my two older sisters (Ifeoma and Ngozi). Like me, both are huge fans of science fiction and Peter Jackson (despite his King Kong savages). We were so excited that we were giggling and snickering as we took our seats. We’d been waiting months to see this film.

Within the first fifteen minutes, this happy ambiance changed to something negatively charged. Our initial annoyance was mainly due to the lack of darker skinned faces interviewed in the opening sequence of the film. This was a film set in and about an African country, for goodness sake. Last I read, blacks made up about 80 percent of South Africa’s population and whites about 10 percent.

Finally a black woman was interviewed. But from what I recall (I’ve only seen it once, so this is all from memory), she isn’t given a designation as everyone else was! She was just someone off the street, not a person of authority (God forbid). My sisters and I began to get antsy. 

Our whispered cursing really started when the film got to… “The Nigerians”. It was all downhill from there. I’d say this was the whitest big budget “African science fiction” film ever but really it’s the ONLY big budget “African Science fiction” film ever. Go figure. Even when the mainstream science fiction film is set on the “Dark Continent”, the central character is still white, ha ha, wow.

A summation of my issues with District 9:

1. Gender- Did the aliens HAVE to be, well, “male”? I say “male” because the “Nigerian” prostitutes servicing the aliens were female, the aliens behaved “male”-ish and they even DRESSED like “males”. Christopher the alien was male (at least by name) and had a son, too. There was an alien in a bra but I got the feeling he was a male transvestite (is that what you’d call an alien who is “male” yet dresses as a human female? I mean, he had a bra on…the aliens didn’t have breasts). So again I ask, did they HAVE to be “male”, which is what non-humans are usually assumed to be in such films unless otherwise specified? And how much more interesting would the film have been if they were female? Oh, but that would require complexity, which this film sorely lacked. 

2. Casting.

3. The ease the two central aliens had flying that humongous ship after so many years.

4. The existence of a substance that turned humans to aliens (Uh, why would the aliens have that? Maybe I missed something).

5. The unexplained little fighting aliens (whose only purpose seemed to be to show how barbaric “The Nigerians” were).

6. The weird obsession Wikus had with destroying himself (pulling off his nails, tearing his skin, etc…if your nail came off would you PULL off another?! It was all for shock value).

7. The “Transformer” showing up at the end of the film (mind you, I LOVE “Robots in Disguise”…just not in D9).

8. The use of black Africans as mere setting (especially when the film needed to show chaos, scared mobs or atmosphere).

9. Only two smart, ambitious aliens?

10. The simplicity of the plot when there was so much potential complexity. Sigh, so much potential. :-(.

The issue I feel was the most harmful, however, was the portrayal of peoples from the country of Nigeria. 

After seeing the film, I vented to SF author and dear friend Alan Dean Foster. He’s a white guy who has travelled and really experienced the world and has written kick-ass SF based in Africa (Into the Out Of) and India (Sagramanda), amongst other places. He also writes a lot of film novelizations, the most recent being for this summer’s Star trek and Terminator films. He’s one of my favorite people to get perspective from when I’m infuriated about stuff like this. 

“Your reaction to the one-sided portrayal of Nigerians was (understandably) visceral and protective,” he told me. “I winced, but could not have the same reaction even if I wanted to.” 

He’s right, I am in super-protective mode. Let’s get it straight, most Nigerians are just trying to live their lives. Only a small tiny teensy miniscule minority are sending out those annoying 419 scam emails, drug dealing and participating in other forms of corruption. I recently had to explain this to a FedEx reprehensive who gave me a big lecture about 419 scams when I called about a package I was expecting from Nigeria. So excuse my sensitively. Nigerians are just like any other group of people from a particular country; we’ve got our crooks and saints. However, District 9 spoke otherwise. Through the way it told its story and its chosen images, the film generalized Nigerians in a very negative way.

“The Nigerians”, that’s how they were described in the film, as if the mere title is enough to explain their savagery and baseness. My sisters and I are Nigerians and as Nigerians, this aspect of the film was AGONY to watch.

In the film, the head “Nigerian” was named Obasanjo. That name carries baggage. Olusegun Obasanjo is the name of Nigeria’s previous president. The character Obasanjo in the film was essentially a cannibal, for the aliens were more on the level of human beings than other animals, no matter how they looked or how poorly humans treated them. It was like slave masters eating their slaves’ body parts with the belief that doing so would make them powerful. 

Later on in the film, Obasanjo wants to even eat the main character, Wikus van der Merwe! You’d think a human turned alien wouldn’t be as potent, but I digress. This might have been a poorly thought out reference to the ritual killings that happen in Nigeria…I think. Or maybe it was just another racist depiction of Africans. You decide.

Was naming the cannibalistic leader of “The Nigerians” “Obasanjo” supposed to be a jab at Nigeria or just sloppy researching? If it was a jab…um, I don’t get it. 

Alan believed the latter, “The Nigerian leader’s name was Obasanjo because that's lazy writing...not enough time to research another, less readily-available name,” he said. “I don't think any political comment was intended. I think they just picked the first Nigerian name they came across.”

Humph, I say. Fiddle sticks. Once again minorities get to suffer from the sloppiness of the majority. 

Then there was the witchdoctor woman shaking her dreadlocks around, shrieking, and eeeevilly proclaiming that eating the aliens’ body parts would bring Obasanjo gggrrreatttt powah, o! She made me want to punch somebody. The director perhaps. My oldest sister was about to spontaneously combust! It was a surreal WTF moment. Our reactions were not just because we were Nigerian women with long dreadlocks. I mean, she might as well have had a bone through her nose and been muttering “unga munga”. She was just… alllll wrong. One great big very old stereotype.

Put yourself in our position, sitting in a theater full of mostly white viewers seeing that. It felt yucky!

That wasn’t the only wrong image. In some cases I was reminded a photo I once saw in a series of photos called “The True Stories Behind Famous WTF Images” (See it here): 

The “Hyena men” from Nigeria were featured in a photographer’s album. While these images were striking, the story behind them is apparently an embellishment:

According to Cracked.com the truth about this image was: 

“That’s just Mallam Mantari Lamal, and his pet, Mainasara. They’re part of a group of “Hyena Guides,” who were rumored to be elite gangsters, shadowy assassins and brutal bank robbers in their home country of Nigeria. But that’s just the Nigerians making up their own shit in an effort to explain the mysterious appearance of a raggedy man strolling into town, walking a wild predator on a chain like it’s a poodle. But the Hyena Guides, in reality, are basically just gypsy showmen, traveling from town to town and putting on performances with their animals in order to hawk homemade crafts and medicines, or just to trade. In fact, not all of them even have hyenas.”

Maybe Blomkamp was fed some wrong information in this way, too. Storytelling certainly is a Nigerian tradition. Maybe I should cut Blomkamp some slack. Uh…no. So let’s continue shall we?

Why were “The Nigerians” the only human beings living with the aliens? Were they the only ones primitive enough to live with aliens? Well, the Nigerian women were providing sexual “services” to the aliens, so I guess so (did they really have to go there? And why… ugh, my blood pressure is rising. I think I’ve made my point on this subject).

Why were the black South Africans portrayed so positively and the “Nigerians” so negatively? On top of all this, there was not one redeeming Nigerian character. They were all crazy, motiveless, and blood thirsty. And that’s why in the end, all “The Nigerians” were summarily killed off at basically the same time, complete with the “close on”, cliché, super violent killing of Obasanjo as the cherry on top. The director obviously felt that this would be satisfying to viewers in the sense that eeeevil was thoroughly vanquished. I’ve got an uncle living in South Africa. I hope he never sees this film.

I just sit here wondering what this director had against people from Nigeria. Maybe he was a victim of a 419 scam.

One person (who happened to be Nigerian) commented on my blog: “There has been some South African/Nigerian tension for a few years now.” Ok, that helps me understand this a bit but if there is such tension it wasn’t EXPLAINED or addressed in the film at all. And it was portrayed in a very one-sided way. 

It bothers me that this film has gotten such stellar reviews. But I guess that just shows how low people’s standards for Hollywood films are. The problem with setting your standards low so you can enjoy movies is that it allows them to get away with some serious irresponsible rubbish. And it makes directors, writers, and producers very very lazy. I want to see an SF film set in Africa as much as anyone but I don’t like to see things done half-assed. 

I will say I loved the parts in the beginning where the aliens interacted with human beings. I wanted a LOT more of that. That was where the film hummed. And the use of the word “prawns” for some reason made me laugh really hard (not WITH the name users as much as AT them). It was such a derogatory word for the aliens that were more foreign to humans than “uncivilized”. And I still want a “No Humans Allowed” t-shirt. The film did some things right but those were easily overshadowed by the achingly wrong. 

I hope Nollywood is paying attention. I’ll give it poke if it needs one. :-).

Alan just sent me this cartoon that had me rolling (note: click on it if you can't see the full image):

http://www.madamandeve.co.za/weekend_cartoon.php

That about sums it up.