MayesFilmAnnotation8

Meredith Mayes Annotation #8 Darwin’s Nighmare 11/13/11 Word Count: 1,047

Darwin’s Nightmare, directed by Hubert Sauper in 2004, is a documentary on the invasive Nile Perch in Lake Victoria, Tanzania. The film’s narration is largely composed of the cobbling together of different Tanzanian stories and black slides with pertinent information on who is speaking at the time. It really relies heavily on the emotional appeal of the poverty and pain that these people experience due to the Nile Perch trade. There are interviews with children and how they were abandoned so their fathers could fish and the women who movie to the lake front to sell their bodies to the fishermen. The narration provided little in the way of scientific impact aside from a brief promotional film on the harm of the Nile Perch.

One of the issues with the fishing industry is economic and therefore political. The perch is quite valuable, and therefore the people in charge of selling the filets and the national GDP depend on the selling of the fish, since there is not much else coming out of Tanzania. The packing and fileting industry employs about 1000 people per factory. The men running the cargo ships come from wealthy nations who covet the fish.

There are social and cultural issues as men leave home and leave children abandoned to the streets, their wives get AIDS from them and then become prostitutes or fish hawkers. Those that become prostitutes then spread the disease. The fishermen have dangerous work, and in a small village, about 100 men die per year. Diseases are not the only causes of early deaths, another contributor is drowning. There is also crushing ignorance in the community. One child wanted to become a teacher and many of those around him laughed. There are films that attempt to educate the fishing community, but they seem to have little effect on the community. The problems of disease are further complicated by the pilots who spend time with their “girlfriends,” such as the one interviewed in the film. These women often want more education but cannot afford it. She was paid $10 per night, which was considerable for an Angolan worker. Her life, even if she avoided disease was still dangerous, and she was stabbed during the course of filming for the documentary.

The primary environmental problem with the Nile Perch is that the invasive species has wiped out most of the indigenous population of Lake Victoria. The fish has so little food that it has resorted to eating its own young. Additionally, the fish is only exported by cargo planes, every day. This is a huge drain on world resources just for 55 pounds of fish per plane. Broken planes are not taken care of appropriately, as one segment of the film showed people hanging around the remains of one such plane, which had evidently been in that area for a prolonged period of time.

The film was definitely geared to pull on humanitarian heart-strings, and the film focused heavily on the terrible poverty and the lives of people affected. One particularly moving scene was of a young widow who moved from her farm to sell fish heads crawling with maggots, and how she was happier because she made more money. It was very disturbing, as was the shots of young boys drinking and smoking in the streets, and the testimony of a young boy about a young girl who stuck with the younger boys and endured their abuse to avoid the greater possibility of rape on the streets if she was alone. But the film was not convincing in scientific matters. There was very little discussion from scientists on the impact the Nile perch had on the lake and the wildlife besides the fact that it was gone. The narrative was also difficult to follow and the problems were sometimes difficult to isolate. It really felt like an hour and forty minutes of just poverty and was difficult to tell the other problems in the people’s lives caused by the fish because it was a mite distracting to see maggots and focus on what other problems there were. The film really could have been enhanced by educated third party analysts discussing the ecology and the population in question. More facts about the perch’s impact on the ecosystem would have made more of an impact on the film. It also provided little in the way of solutions and left a feel of “there is nothing to be done but wait,” which was terribly depressing. Some solutions that I thought of would be to overfish the perch and then work in conservations with some species that were in the lake and work to rehabilitate them. Additional humanitarian efforts and education for Tanzanians would also help alleviate the problems. Since the film did little to discuss the governmental structure and the lake itself, I further researched their government and the facts about Lake Victoria.

The government of Tanzania is a republic, where the infant mortality rate is 68/1,000 and the life expectancy is only 52.4 years. Everyone over 18 has a right to vote, although in 2005, only 42% of the population voted. Their economy is donor dependent, and they rely on cash crops for employment and profits. The farming industry is crippled by pricing and poor cash flow to farmers ([]). Only the southern half of the lake belongs to Tanzania, and it feeds into the uppermost portions of the Nile. The perch was introduced when the natural tilapia and riverines were overfished ([]). The perch was first introduced in 1954 by the British in hopes of creating larger fishing exports. Originally, the cichlid family of fish was the primary fish caught on the shores of Lake Victoria, which was home to over 300 types of cichlids alone. But these fish were small at a few ounces, while Nile perch can reach 300 pounds. The introduction of the perch resulted in the extinction of at least half of the cichlids. The loss of this fish has resulted in the growth of large algal blooms and the insects once eaten by the fish now overpopulate the area. Today, the only food source remaining to the perch besides itself is one type of small shrimp ([]).