The Tanzanians’ nightmare

The Tanzanians’ nightmare

Mwanza, the second port of Tanzania, lies on the shores of Lake Victoria. If you approach people and ask them what they think of Darwin's Nightmare, the documentary directed by Hubert Sauper, faces harden, the silence echoes around you. Four years after its premiere, the film, widely praised by international critics, maligned by some experts who described it as “voyeuristic” and “unethical”, has not been forgotten. And Tanzanians are still waiting for the investigation promised by their president, who, at the time, declared he was outraged by the film.

A quick reminder: the film shows us the damage caused by the EU funded establishment of a packaging plant for Nile perch fillets, exported to Europe and Japan from a port which had previously been limited to small-scale traditional fishing. The plant creates around a thousand direct jobs, but also leads to a rural exodus and causes many related activities to take place, such as the salvaging of by-products, but also prostitution, street children taking drugs and, as suggested by the director, arms trafficking, with weapons filling the holds of aircraft on their return to Africa after the fillets are unloaded in Europe. Not to mention the ecological disaster: introduced over 50 years ago, the voracious and carnivorous Nile perch has created a vacuum all around it, threatening to leave behind a dead lake.

In Bukoba, a port located less than 200 km north of Mwanza, tongues loosen around a meal of tilapia. “You see”, says an economist working for an NGO, “other species are still very much present”. It is true that the tilapia being served is itself an introduced species, the Nile tilapia, the endemic species having, if you believe some experts, virtually disappeared. But, he continues: “in our re-nutrition centres for orphans, we use large amounts of the fulu, a small pelagic fish, an important source of protein and minerals”. The fulu remains the fish of choice for rural people even if, statistically, it makes up only 1 per cent of the catch compared to 80 per cent, before the perch boom. “But putting it this way is misleading”, he says, “because that doesn’t tell us the actual volume caught”.

Professor of geography and former head of a humanitarian NGO, the Frenchwoman Sylvie Brunel, while not denying the reality portrayed in the film, condemns what she sees as the West’s eternally condescending and backward-looking gaze towards Africa, forever the victim. She also criticises Sauper’s  ‘deeply unethical’ analysis in establishing a direct link between the country’s calls for food aid and the situation of those demeaned in Mwanza, criticising the unfair manner in which the European representatives are derided. A country cannot develop without a domestic market she stresses, but experience shows that it is often the existence of an export-focused modern industry which creates it, rather than the continuation of a small-scale self-sufficient community.

Marie-Martine Buckens