The ensuing and ongoing survivalist drama has teeth. Lots of them, starting with the rapacious fish introduced to Lake Victoria's ecosystem. The perch are breeding machines and eating machines. Having eaten all but a few of the lake's other fish species into extinction, they now devour their young. But the daisy chain of predatoriness only begins with the fish, very few of which are eaten by the Tanzanians who flocked from their subsistence farms and rice paddies to better-paying jobs in the fisheries.
The huge fish are filleted and sent iced to Europe on Russian Ilyushin cargo planes. What's left behind are the heads and tails and spines with bits of meat clinging to them. That's what the shantytown dwellers dine on in the boomtown of Mwanza, on the lake's southern shore. Yes, jobs have been created, but so have victimized prostitutes, including Eliza, who wistfully speaks in an interview of going to school to learn to do computer work, but is stabbed to death by a lout of an Australian "client" before the film is completed. We never learn what, if anything, happens to him, but we do see Eliza's colleagues in the sex-for-hire trade weeping at her funeral.
We hear as well from Raphael, who works for $1 a night as an armed guard protecting the fisheries. He's fatalistic about death and war, says he has learned not to shoot anyone until they have penetrated the fence and are inside fishery grounds, and keeps hope alive by volunteering as a teacher of the young. There's no end of free-floating street kids if street is the term for a lakeside jumble of makeshift accommodations linked by trails of mud. The kids include one whose leg was blown off by a land mine. Not that it stops him from competing with the others for handfuls of boiled rice and maggoty fish from communal pots.
Land mines? There's a link between deadly hardware and the fish, or rather our appetite for consuming them and other African bounty. The big cargo planes that fly the fish out return with loads of weapons, land mines included, to be used by insurrectionists and governments in Sudan, Rwanda, the Congo, Liberia, Zimbabwe and wherever else in Africa wholesale slaughter happens. The owners of the planes have to make a living, no? Arms dealers, too, presumably. There are a lot of helpless shrugs here. The Russian pilots interviewed salt of the earth types, all of them are melancholy, even soulful at moments, but serving death all the same.
And so the circle widens, as the devouring fish segue into a predatory metaphor of globalization itself. There's even a cargo plane carcass lying in pieces because it took off too full and crashed handily providing an image of rampaging capitalism destroying itself. Not all the Tanzanians are crushed by the steamrolling biological, geo-political and socio-economic juggernauts. Jonathan, a painter, makes a living chronicling daily life in Mwanza on cardboard and canvas, lives in an apartment. But most of the money generated by the fish leaves Africa with them.
Although he does plenty of finger-pointing at the so-called First World, Sauper slides over the role played by corrupt Africans without whom Darwin's Nightmare's cavalcade of ruin couldn't happen on such a massive scale. Yet for all the trenchancy of his indictment, he's the anti-Michael Moore. While he approaches his profoundly important subject with hellish images, he never polemicizes, realizing he doesn't have to, that we can connect the pieces all too readily.
The interviews sometimes meander, unfolding as if over drinks in a bar. But Sauper nevertheless extracts the story and the testimony. Like Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, he points out that it would be an unpardonable mistake to succumb to despair, despite the film's ravaged landscape of human waste and destructiveness. It's reversible, he says. We just have to muster the resolve to reverse it. Meanwhile, we're haunted by the leitmotif of the cargo planes continually flying over the wounded lake and its festering shore, taking wealth out of Africa, bringing death in.
For more information about Darwin's Nightmare, visit Homevision Entertainment. To order Darwin's Nightmar, go to TCM Shopping.
by Jay Carr
