UnderwoodDarwin'sNightmare

Darwin's Nightmare

Darwin’s Nightmare was directed by Hubert Sauper and released in 2004, and is banned in some countries. It is about the Nile Perch in Lake Victoria, and how it effects both the ecology of the lake, and the society around it.

The movie starts out at the airport, where they are waiting for an empty plane to come in. Why empty? Because the Europeans bring nothing for the Tanzanians, they just come to take away fish. It then goes to a shot of fishermen unloading the fish to wait for the plane. The fish are unnaturally huge, they are almost as big as the fishermen, and probably weigh more, since the fishermen are practically skin and bones. Then the movie shows the pilots land and come in, and they are all big, fat white men. We follow them to a restaurant, where they are joined by a girl named Eliza, who we are told is a “girlfriend to many pilots.” Why are these things important? We don’t really know yet. As the film goes on, everything is explained piece by piece.

We soon find out that the fish are not native to the lake, but are the result of a “little experiment.” These huge fish have wiped out most of the other fish in Lake Victoria, which used to be home to thousands of species. Then we talk to a security guard at the research center for fish. No one knows what they actually research in there, but it often gets attacked. The security guard makes a dollar a night, and often has to shoot people (meaning with a bow and arrow, not a gun). The security guard before him was murdered.

Then we talk to Eliza, who it turns out, is a prostitute. She makes $10 a night, but still can’t afford the education she wants. After that, we talk to a priest, who is burying a fisherman. He tells us that many of the fishermen die, but before they die, they give their wives HIV. After they die, their wives have no source of income, and often turn to prostitution, thus spreading the HIV further. The prostitutes don’t use condoms, because it’s “elitist,” and yet the priest can’t tell them to use condoms, because he has to tell them not to have premarital sex instead.

We then talk to factory owners and workers, and find out the factory employs 1000 people, and two flights full of the fish leave every day, feeding two million white people every day. And yet, there are thousands more people in Tanzania who are starving. Why? The fish is too expensive. Then we find out that Eliza has been killed by a client.

I think the power of this movie is in its confusion. It is difficult to understand what’s going on at first, but I think that this is exactly what the Tanzanians are experiencing. They don’t really know what’s going on with the fish, no one is giving them information. They just know that if they’re lucky enough to get a job at the factory, they will have steady pay. If they’re lucky enough to get any job, they will get steady pay. In order to eat, they must make money, so they make money however they can. There is a huge amount of prostitution, because that’s one of the most expensive commodities a woman can offer. There are people that hope for war, because one of the best jobs they can get is to be a soldier.

All of this is caused by the corporations, the few people that are getting ridiculously wealthy off of these fish. They don’t care about the Tanzanians, they just care about getting as much fish as they can, and selling it for as much as they can. This is why the fish were introduced to the lake, to make profit. The introduction of the fish destroyed the native fish populations, which was the food source for the Tanzanians. The Tanzanians now have nothing to eat, which is the cause of the famine. They can’t eat the big fish, because it’s too expensive. They won’t destroy the big fish to allow the native fish to come back, because then they would lose the small amount of money they do make from the fish. They can’t see the big picture, because they are forced to live on a day to day basis, where their only hope for eating and thus surviving is to make money. Many of the Tanzanians live off of the fish guts that the planes didn’t want, they live off of the white people’s scraps.

Near the end of the movie, we find out that the planes aren’t actually empty when they set out for Africa. They are full of weapons, and stop in war torn areas like the Congo to sell the weapons before they go to Tanzania to get the fish. So basically, the European corporations are making money by fueling war, then making money by taking away the Tanzanians food. They are making money by killing people. And they are supported by people like you and me, consumers that don’t know where their food came from or what effects it has on other people. And the corporations, that do know about this, are only concerned with profit, because they are not people, they are business entities.

So how can we stop this? Well, for one thing, we can get educated about where our food comes from (try []). The next step would be to buy locally, from people you can actually see and talk to (try to find a local campaign, like [] in the midwest). You may say that this is actually hurting the Tanzanians, because now the factory workers will be without a job too. But actually, if they are not making money, the corporation with probably leave Tanzania, and as a result, the fish won’t be exported anymore, so at least the Tanzanians can actually eat the fish they catch. There are also organizations working to help the locals there, like [], who work in projects like microfinancing and trying to help create markets for local crops. There are also programs that bring animals like goats to impoverished areas, so that the goat can provide nutrition and fertilizer for many years, rather than just bringing food which only provides nutrition for the one time it’s consumed (like []). Basically, it all goes back to supporting local economies, rather than global corporations.