Darwin's Nightmare and Lake Victoria's Struggle

 

Despite the European Union’s claim that Nile Perch from Lake Victoria have not been allowed in EU market countries since 1999, the exporting continues, according to Darwin's Nightmare, leaving a Syrian factory owner free to play with a mechanical dancing fish while the UN discusses a food shortage in Tanzania on a television news program and starving children fight for food. As Noel Murray suggests, “only a movie could catch the irony and horror of an office manager proudly showing off his Billy Bass while local children beat each other senseless over handfuls of rancid rice.” 

At the end of the film, Tanzanians rally and pray for food while watching a film about Jesus as a fisherman. Factory workers pack fish in boxes and onto cargo planes, leaving only bones and fish heads for the locals. Eliza is killed, leaving her friends to mourn, and a one legged-boy walks down empty railroad tracks while a man reads a BBC Focus on Africa magazine claiming there are no supplies for Tanzania. It would be a good idea for his son to be a pilot, he explains, so he can bring back supplies from Europe. Boys in the street smoke glue from empty soda bottles and sleep, and another plane takes off in a storm with thunder in the background. A Tanzanian woman watches from the ground. 

Director Hubert Sauper used a minimalist unit to shoot Darwin’s Nightmare, relying only on himself, his camera, and his companion, Sandor to document the figures he followed throughout the film. Although Sauper and Sandor faced obstacles when shooting the film, including multiple arrests that required bribes to earn their freedom, Sauper found effective footage to make his point. According to Sauper, “When you look out for contrasts and contradictions, reality can become ‘bigger than life.’ So in a way it was easy to find striking images because I was filming a striking reality,” a reality that demonstrates the need for an interdependent biotic community. 

Even though Sauper argues that Tanzania’s dilemma is a product of evolution, we assert that Darwin’s Nightmare shows us what happens when the biotic communities of and between nonhuman and human nature are disturbed. Here, unlike The Cove, the film argues that a single species—either the Nile perch or the European colonizer—can destroy its environment and even itself. Instead of arguing for animal liberation, the film upholds the need for interdependent community. 

The consequences of such destruction are monumental and ultimately end in both lake and land turning into barren sinkholes. But the film stands only as a warning against disrupting other biospheres. It is too late for Lake Victoria and, perhaps, for Tanzania, the film suggests. Both Darwin’s Nightmare and The End of the Line, then, demonstrate that arguments against over fishing that are based in organismic ecology may or may not change behaviors. Documentaries with animal rights-driven arguments, however, may produce real change.