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Wednesday, April 16, 2008
By Mark Franklin
A & E Reporter
Lake Victoria is source of the Nile River and thought to be the birthplace of humanity.
Darwin's Nightmare focuses on the social and economic impact of Tanzania's commercial fishing industry, specifically the Nile Perch fisheries, on Lake Victoria. The town of Mwanza plays host to the film crew as they talk to the people. Each of them has something to say, from the local factory owners to the fishermen to the Russian pilots who come to transport the fish to Europe.
The film also dwells on the paradox of European involvement in Africa. On the one hand, the UN and EU send their humanitarian aid; but on the other, it is European arms dealers who are smuggling in weapons to sell to local rebels and criminals. In fact, the weapons seem to be flown in on the same planes that take the Nile Perch fillets back to Europe.
The appalling living and working conditions of the people of Mwanza are also covered at great length. Sanitation seems to be nonexistent outside the factories, orphaned and homeless children turn to drugs and prostitution, and because the Perch net such a high price on the European markets, all the prime fillets are sold to European supermarkets, leaving the locals to subsist on the rotting carcasses leftover from processing.
Darwin's Nightmare is a film devoted to one cause-- shocking the audience. It portrays a scene which is, to the eyes of the West, a nightmarish hell. Children are without the bare necessities of life; people are paid almost nothing for their work. On the far reaches of the coast of the Lake, there are no doctors, no hospitals.
But the film feels like it does too much. It goes in-depth on a number of issues, but it seems to lose its coherency in doing so. It dwells at length on the gun smuggling, even going so far as to say that the guns are coming through the Mwanza airport, but that has little to do with the fisheries or Mwanza itself, since the guns are bound not for Tanzania, but for war-torn African states like Angola. The film also puts the pay of the night guard for a local fish research center at $1 per night, but there is no discussion of how much the factory workers who process the fish are paid, or the actual figures on the price the fishermen are paid for their catch, though it is implied that they are not paid much.
In all, Darwin's Nightmare seems like a film meant only to shock its audience into anger at the former colonial powers, who still, it seems, rule Africa. The film raises a lot of red flags about the economic and social problems in Tanzania, but it provides no suggestions about how to fix them, nor indeed does it seem to care about solutions. One of the Russian pilots in the film said he wanted to make all the children of the world happy, but didn't know how to do it. It seems that the filmmakers are the same way.
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