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Neill Blomkamp’s story of space aliens abused by Earthlings is about racism without actually involving race—and therein lies the problem. The parallels reflecting atrocities committed against black South Africans by white ones are clear: the aliens, called hateful names (“prawns”) by human bureaucrats are being forced from their shantytown in a multiple-of-three district in Cape Town to a smaller, more out-of-the-way compound. Signs read, “Humans only;” the aliens are constructed as violent for no real reason (they like to blow things up “for fun,” says the human protagonist), while the humans destroy them with impunity.
This is the kind of racism that white people easily recognize, are able to understand because “we don’t do that anymore.” From this distance, white storytellers like B. turn such overt racism into a morality play that reads like something out of the old EC Comics. District 9 isn’t so much about racism as it is about racists—people who do horrible things that are clearly horrible.
Bureaucrat Wikus Van de Merwe (Sharito Copley), who’s trying to serve one of the aliens an eviction notice, notices the man’s young son. He offers the boy a lollipop,who promptly beans him in the head with it. Later, Wirkus calls, “It’s the sweetie-man! Remember me?” Post-apartheid, post-Civil Rights legislation, Wirkus’s privilege looks ridiculous—really; my mom and I both laughed at this scene—especially because he clearly doesn’t notice it.
But as Wirkus is unaware of his white privilege, so Blomkamp is unaware of his. Due to a quirk in the aliens’ DNA, catfood is an addictive substance to them (“Like catnip for cats,” a white MNU agent says, giggling—although it’s more analogous to heroin). Considering the white government’s need to control the aliens, it seems natural that MNU would supply them with drugs, as a means to get the aliens to obey. Instead, Blomkamp chooses a gang of Nigerians for his drug dealers. Called “the Nigerians” by Wirkus and other white MNU agents, they not only trade catfood to the aliens, but kill and eat them to ingest their power. As Nnedi Okorafor points out in My response to District 419…I mean District 9. 😉:
“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.
The gang’s leader uses a wheelchair; when Wirkus starts transforming into an alien, Obasanjo wants to eat his alien flesh himself. (Nnedi points out that Obasanjo is the name of Nigeria’s former president; its use here is sloppy writing at best.) On the one hand, Obasanjo’s interest is a sign of Wirkus’s specialness, like the interest of the white government who wants to use him as a biological weapon. Yet, the meaning of that interest is different, and because Blomkamp doesn’t recognize that, his allegory breaks down. Yes, in the film’s fictional power hierarchy, Obasanjo is a human and Wirkus is an alien (which has elements of disability and oppressed race). But in the power hierarchy we’re all familiar with, Wirkus is an able-bodied white man while Obasanjo is a black man with a disability. Wirkus has power that Obasanjo does not, and should. And as the only disabled “Nigerian” who is also the most hungry for alien power, the implication is that Obasanjo will do anything—even kill and eat another (mostly) human being—to walk. By having a disabled black man take power by such violent, scary means, Blomkamp is playing into the anxiety of privilege at having to give up some of its space.
And this is why a social justice allegory like District 9 fails. It packages oppression in ways that are palatable to privileged people, in steps removed just enough from actual racism to make white people comfortable. Any insight the film appears to have is only surface sheen, and it steps on the feet of black Africans while trying to make its “anti-racist” point. In an interview with Brad Balfour at the Huffington Post, Blomkamp says:
“The Nigerian thing is there because I wanted to take as many cues from South Africa as I could. I wanted South Africa to be the inspiration. If I try to keep South Africa as true to South Africa as I could, then, unfortunately, a massive part of the crime that happens in Johannesburg is by the Nigerians there. It’s just the way it is. I wanted to have a crime group, and thought the most honest refraction of a crime group would be Nigerians, for one.
“And then secondly, the Muti, the African witch doctor, is also a huge part of Africa and many African countries. So I wanted to incorporate that as well. At the time I was writing the movie, there was all these tribal witch doctor attacks on Albinos, because Albino flesh were worth more than normal humans. That was the analogy to a different group or a different race, [with their] traditional medicine, or traditional Muti–even cannibalism, in some instances. I incorporated aliens into that.”
In other words, Nigerians are criminals in District 9 because…Nigerians are criminals. And they eat (mostly) human flesh because they do.
District 9 is not the first movie to miss its own point by not thinking through it. (One of the most notorious is Ruggero Deodoto’s title=”Wikipedia: Cannibal Holocaust”>Cannibal Holocaust,). It’s not even that I disliked District 9–I really did enjoy it. But it’s hard to fully enjoy a work that means one thing in theory, and another in practice.
Sweet Perdition 
Why do people who pride themselves on their “smarter than this” analysis of the film always somehow manage to get the lead character’s name wrong?
It’s “Wikus,” not “Wirkus.” It’s even written out on screen for you in the first five minutes. If you can’t pay attention for five minutes, how are we supposed to really take the rest of your attention span seriously?
I liked this very much, it really made me think about the role of the nigerian characters (who I only dimly registered as racist, but certainly realized were crappy stereotypes). I felt that the treatment of the aliens was also classically racist, in that the story was never from their perspective – except for a few seconds – reducing them to props in a white man’s transformational journey. In fact we were rarely shown anything that contradicted the human populations view of them as unstable and barely sentient. The scientist alien seemed to be an exception – “one of the good ones”.
It bumps me a bit to hear you say “white storytellers like”, which strikes me as an unfair generalization based on his race. While I can see how he probably would have done better if he were from Nigeria, it’s no excuse – I call it certainly a personal failing that he lacked the insight to see what he was doing.
Every good story is written for an audience – in this case, humans. You have to meet people where there at. So you have only one white male protagonist that the majority group can identify with. And I don’t know about you, but I was rooting for the aliens the whole time; from their eviction to when they saved Wikus & tore the bald mercenary a new one. In that sense, telling the story from the majority perspective is not a minus but a plus, like The Merchant of V. Also, if the scientist alien is treated as an exception (I’d add his son, and his friend, and the ones who save Wikus) wasn’t Wikus also one of the few “good ones?”
Hey Tera, a well written review, but unfortunately you missed the boat on the message of the film. I find that a lot of the “outside” worlds perception of South Africa is frozen in time. The mass media consciousness moved on after the fuzzy afterglow of the end of apartheid, and South Africa seems to inhabit a curious nook in which white South Africans are angst ridden icons of an unjust and evil age. Meanwhile South Africa has evolved behind this veil, and while growing into its democratic mould, it has developed some ugly socio-economic warts.
The film is actually an allegory of current events in South Africa. After the fall of the apartheid government, one of the first acts of the new government was to open the borders. This caused an unprecedented migration of people from the absolutely impoverished countries to the north of South Africa. Even though South Africa has rampant crime, corruption and wide spread poverty and joblessness, is in comparison to these countries wealthy and has a strong infrastructure. The people migrating from north of South Africa were welcomed by the government, but reviled by the common working man, because they would work harder for less. The story is a warning. It is comparing the racism that exists (primarily from the black working class and bureaucracy in South Africa), towards these migrant workers, with the racism of the apartheid government of the past. It is telling current South Africa to avoid the pitfalls of the past. It is a complex cautionary tale about current oppression and corruption committed by South Africans of all colours against migrant African workers, not some simplistic rehashing of the classical white compresses black 1980’s popular perception of South Africa.
By the way, the Nigerian gang is a very very real thing. Nigerian gangs moved in to South Africa almost straight after the fall of apartheid, seeking to take advantage of the open borders and the relative wealth of South Africa to establish more sophisticated distribution points for their drug and human trafficking.
South Africa also deserves a better understanding and treatment of the complex issues it currently faces, but unfortunately the “western” media and popular perception seems to be content to sit back and beat the straw man that is the old white South African apartheid.