Rwanda: L'histoire secréte by Lieutenant Abdul Joshua Ruzibiza, Paris: Éditions du Panama, 2005; pp. 494; €€ 22 (pb); ISBN: 2755700939. Reviewed by Linda Melvern, freelance journalist.
We may never know who was responsible for shooting down the jet aircraft killing Rwanda's president, Juvenal Habyarimana, in the night sky over Kigali at 8.30 p.m. on 6 April 1994. All that is certain is that several eye witnesses saw two missiles fired – others claim there were three – and then hit the Falcon jet as it was coming in to land. As the wrecked plane lay smouldering in the presidential garden, the rumours began and today there is a plethora of speculation about who was responsible. The unlikelihood of an international investigation would give it the appearance of a perfect crime. The International Civil Aviation Authority (ICAO) did not conduct an enquiry. The aircraft was a state aircraft in its own territory and so it was not covered by the ICAO international convention. No investigation was required and none was undertaken.
This event, which is popularly believed to have triggered the 1994 genocide, is today of pivotal political importance for in November 2006, in a judicial report published in France, it was claimed that the missile attack had been planned by and perpetrated by the current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame. Almost immediately, international warrants were issued in Paris for Rwandan officials named as responsible for the missile plot. These included senior Rwanda military and civilian officials who from now on will face restrictions on travel, especially within the European Union.
The report, written by a French investigative magistrate, Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, further alleged that so keen to take power in Rwanda Kagame, who was the military leader of the largely Tutsi Rwandan Patriot Front (RPF) which had fought a civil war for three years with the Hutu regime in Kigali, was prepared to risk the elimination of the Tutsi living in Rwanda. The ultimate instigator of the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi, according to Bruguière, was Kagame.
The response to the publication of the Bruguière report was swift. The Rwandan ambassador in Paris was recalled, and in Kigali the French ambassador expelled. France was accused by Rwanda officials of attempting to divert attention from Rwanda's own investigation in to the role of France in Rwanda and allegations that French military support was given to the regime that perpetrated the genocide. Furthermore, the French were accused of publishing the report in order to further undermine the Rwandan government, seen in Kigali as an ongoing process by the French which had never accepted an ‘anglophone’ government of Rwanda.
A few weeks after the publication of the Bruguière report and during public hearings in Kigali held in December 2006, exmembers of Rwandan government forces and militias who participated in the genocide alleged that they had been trained by French instructors and gave examples of how French military equipment was delivered by France to Rwanda during the genocide.
The credibility of the Bruguière report rests on its witness testimony. The witnesses quoted in the report include defendants on charges of genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and defectors from the RPF. One of the key witnesses is the author of this book, Lt. Abdul Joshua Ruzibiza. His central accusation is that the RPF shot down the plane and that he had been a witness to the planning of the attack and had taken part in it. Ruzibiza has repeated these allegations in testimony at the ICTR in defence of military officers on genocide charges. His book has been admitted as evidence. He claims he was a member of a ‘network commando’ created by the RPF leadership to carry out political assassinations in Rwanda on the orders of Kagame.
Ruzibiza's own story is intriguing. According to the Africa Editor of Le Soir (Brussels), Colette Braeckman, Ruzibiza was in Kampala in June 2003. She had met him there. He said he had fled Rwanda in February 2001 ‘for security reasons’. She said that the Ugandan intelligence service had given his name to the French intelligence services, the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE) who had ‘spirited’ him out of Uganda and brought him to Paris where he had made a statement before Bruguière. He had then sought and obtained political asylum in Norway. In Kigali, his superiors in the RPF insist that Ruzibiza was merely an auxiliary nurse trained on the job, and who was in Byumba in the north of Rwanda in April 1994.
In Ruzibiza's story about the assassination of president Habyarimana he claims that the missiles were fired from a farm near the airport on Massaka hill. There are flaws in his account not the least, as the journalist Colette Braeckman has shown, at that time Massaka was controlled by the presidential guard and French military officers and the one road leading to it had eight roadblocks. The farm itself belonged to Agathe Habyarimana, the president's wife, and access would have been all but impossible for RPF soldiers.
According to Bruguière, those who fired the missiles at the plane left the evidence behind them for in his report there are details of parts of missile launchers that were apparently found by peasants on Massaka hill a few weeks after the attack. The serial numbers of these particular launchers, according to Bruguière, prove that they came from Uganda, where the RPF had its bases. But this missile evidence was given to Bruguière by a colonel in the Rwanda army called Theoneste Bagosora, currently on genocide charges at the ICTR, and the one military officer most popularly credited by the press as the being a genocide ‘mastermind’. Indeed, the claim that it was the RPF which shot down the plane is the foundation stone upon which the defence case rests in these trials. The defendants and their lawyers claim that an international conspiracy has prevented investigation of the crash in order to protect the current leadership in Rwanda. They claim that the genocide – far from being planned – was caused by the spontaneous fury of the people at the death of their president and because they feared that the Tutsi RPF was coming to Rwanda to enslave them. They alleged that international opinion has been tricked into thinking that a genocide took place by an effective and educated ‘pro-Tutsi lobby’. With a denial of culpability in the missile attack, the defendants at the ICTR challenge the legitimacy of the court, for in neither the court, nor anywhere else, has there been an investigation into the death of the former president. As Bagosora recently told the court, the real culprits were
circulating misleading information so that people should go after the wrong information and so cover up the true information.
A major blow to the credibility of Bruguière – and by extension this book – came at a press conference on 31 November 2006 held at the ICTR when the press spokesman stressed that in all their rulings so far the judges had confirmed the existence of a planned and systematically organised conspiracy to commit genocide. The assassinations and killings could not be considered ‘a spontaneous reaction’ to the assassination of Habyarimana.
This book does not read well. Neither does it effectively argue its case. Some parts of it are a seemingly endless list of names and places, of massacres and killings. None of the information it contains is tried and tested. The book serves only to muddy the waters for those still trying to fathom the 1994 genocide.
Aid and Influence: Do Donors Help or Hinder? by Stephen Browne, London: Earthscan, 2006; pp.172, £17.99 (pb); ISBN: 1844072029. Reviewed by David Williams, City University, London.
The title of this book is somewhat misleading. It suggests that the author is engaged in an orthodox assessment of the extent to which aid actually ‘works’ to achieve its stated objectives. As such, it would fit squarely with the host of other recent studies which take something like this as their starting point. Usually these studies conclude that aid can ‘work’ under some conditions, but that a great deal of it does not ‘work’, and indeed that it is often counter-productive to the stated aims of aid donors. In turn these studies usually end with a series of exhortations to donors and recipients alike to help make aid ‘work’ better. Although Stephen Browne is not immune from this latter tendency, the thrust of his critique of donor policy is much more profound. And it is perhaps particularly powerful coming from someone who has held a variety of senior positions within the donor community (including as a Director within UNDP, and UN Coordinator of Development and Humanitarian Assistance in Rwanda and Ukraine).
Browne's basic argument is that aid and development practice is donor driven. That is, although the provision of aid is justified on developmental grounds, in fact the forms that aid takes, the kinds of policies advocated by donors, and the kinds of development practices used by donors, derive from the domestic institutional and ideological environment that donors inhabit, and from the particular bureaucratic imperatives of donor agencies (aid agencies are organisations, after all). Aid is in these senses profoundly autobiographical. The great merit of this argument is that it helps explain the ‘dysfunctional’ (in a development sense) policies and practices pursued by donors, rather then seeing them as unfortunate deviations from some kind of ‘best practice’.
One implication of this kind of argument, however, is that not much can reasonably be expected to change. Of course aid policies and practices do change (up to a point), but the donor driven nature of much aid provision does not change so there is no very good reason to think that ‘ownership’, ‘participation’, or ‘harmonisation’ (to use just a few recent buzzwords) will make any substantial difference to the aid relationship, as recent critical studies of these issues have begun to show. Indeed, the more ways in which one comes to see that aid is autobiographical, the harder it is to imagine that aid policies and practices will ever come to reflect the real needs and capabilities of aid recipients. Browne wrestles with this problem. Through the book he offers various kinds of recommendations. Many of them are eminently sensible: improved borrower control over the types and forms of aid; better local knowledge on the part of aid donors; better aid coordination and reduced use of conditionality. The trouble with these recommendations is that Browne gives not very good reasons for supposing that donors will really make any of these changes.
In the final chapter of the book, Browne makes some more radical suggestions which involve, among other things, doing away with ‘donor cartelisation’, making international trade rules fairer, and developing a proper market for technical assistance. Again, of course, there are good reasons for thinking that none of these things will come to pass. And this is, finally, the problem, not so much with Browne's book, which is in many ways excellent, but with any critical account of aid: the more we know about why it doesn't work, the harder it is to think it could be any different.
Unfinished Business: Ethiopia and Eritrea at War, by Dominique Jacquin-Berdal & Martin Plaut (eds.), Trenton, NJ: The Red Sea Press, 2005; pp. 294; $29.95 (pb); ISBN: 1569022178. Reviewed by Tanja Müller, University of Manchester.
This edited volume sets out to understand the dynamics behind the Eritrean-Ethiopian (border) war of 1998-2000, a war whose fighting phase ended in June 2000 but for which a lasting settlement has still not been found. The strength of the volume lies in its quite comprehensive coverage of underlying grievances that ultimately led to a full-scale interstate war that neither side desired or had planned for, but that nonetheless both sides engaged in with full strength and vigour once fighting had erupted at a contested geographical location along the common border.
The biggest single focus in untangling those dynamics is on different conceptions of nationhood and identity separating the two protagonists, which are discussed in their various guises. In addition, the volume sheds light on economic ties between the two states and the hidden dynamics behind: on developmental implications of the war with an explicit focus on food security or rather insecurity, and on regional dimensions and implications of the conflict. Last, but not least, the politics of intervention by different actors within the international community, geared at first towards bringing the fighting phase of the war to an end and later to find a lasting long-term solution acceptable to both sides, are discussed. The appendix makes available a number of documents, including maps produced by the United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), the quasi international guardian of the Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities signed by both countries in 2000. The latter are difficult to access to anybody not resident in one of the two countries and connected to any of the parties involved in the implementation process of that agreement. Taken together, the volume is thus a valuable source of information for those interested in past and current relations between the two countries and the wider political and economic dynamics in the Horn of Africa.
The volume has a number of weaknesses, however. It is on the whole highly descriptive and many chapters lack an analytical component. Some of its contributions in the main sum up previously published work, in particular the chapters on the outbreak and conduct of the war, as well as some of the issues discussed in relation to an international response. While it is an innovative idea to have commissioned chapters on the personal views of journalists who followed the war on both sides of the border (of which only a view from the ‘Eritrean side’ materialised, a fact regretted by the editors and not of their making), such a personal account would have benefited from some analytical contextualisation by the editors. This could have shown what such accounts can offer in terms of facilitating an additional level of understanding of the dynamics of that war – or any war indeed. As it stands, Last's journalistic account is left standing alone as the individual account of a ‘personal war’.
Another weakness of the volume is that many of its contributors – a notable exception is the refreshing history chapter written by Reid – are ‘old hands’ who have been writing on the dynamics between Ethiopia and Eritrea for decades. They have, more often than not, a personal involvement with one country or the other, coupled with deeply engrained convictions about the wider rights and wrongs of Eritrean nationhood in the first place. This is in particular a pity as quite a number of young scholars have emerged, both from inside and outside both countries and on both sides of the Atlantic, with a view less tainted by such personal histories.
The book's main weakness, however, is its lack of focus on ways forward to solve a conflict that still seems intractable to many. The volume was published five years after the fighting phase of the war ended. One would thus have wished that the detailed discussions of what has caused the war and how the international response has so far failed to find a lasting solution is complemented by a framework on how such a solution might be achieved. Some of the contributions do at least touch on potential future directions, most notably the chapters by Styan and Cliffe. Styan argues that the thus far dangerously neglected aspect of economic normalisation between the two countries needs to be put high on any agenda when engaging with the future. Cliffe argues in favour of political mobilisation from below and above to arrive at different patterns of regional cooperation, a mobilisation that could start with various forms of civil society dialogue. While even the possibility for such action seems a long way off at present, conflicts in other parts of the world have shown that such initiatives are possible, often against the odds at the outset.
A comparative perspective might have had something to contribute here. As it stands, the volume partly leaves the reader with this all too familiar taste of a war somewhere in ‘Africa’ that is intractable and potentially follows a logic we cannot quite fully understand, however hard we try.
The Political Economy of the Great Lakes Region in Africa. The Pitfalls of Enforced Democracy and Globalization, by Stefaan Marysse & Filip Reyntjens (eds.), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; pp. 243; £60.00 (hb). ISBN: 1403949506. Reviewed by Saskia Van Hoyweghen, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
This volume results from the ongoing work of a group of scholars linked to the Institute of Development Policy and Management of the University of Antwerp. Since 1999 the IDPM has published an annual edited collection on the Great Lakes, but as these excellent volumes are published in French they have a more limited audience. This English edition could be described as a ‘best of’ the French yearbooks, but it is also more than that, since all included chapters have been updated.
The book is in two parts, one on Rwanda and one on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There has always been more interest generally in developments in Rwanda and the DRC then in Burundi. Maybe this is the reason why Burundi has been left out, despite the fact that excellent scholarship is available at the IDPM. The editors have tried to find the middle ground between a volume giving a general overview of the region for readers less familiar with the Great Lakes and a more specialised approach dealing with quite specific topics such as malnutrition in Kinshasa. People who have previous experience with Rwanda and the DRC will therefore have the tendency to flick through certain sections of the book quite quickly. Others who are new to the region, might be a bit lost as an edited volume always contains some overlap and voids. The ‘Political Economy’ in the title of the volume is therefore a bit misleading. It is not a political economy analysis as such and it does not provide us with a comprehensive analysis. It deals with a broad variety of economic and political topics pertaining to the region.
The first part, about Rwanda, contains some of the most critical scholarship on Rwanda that is available in English. Filip Reyntjens starts of with an unsettling analysis of the post-genocide Rwandan government. After being presented with a detailed overview of its policies, one indeed has to agree that the Rwandan government has received too much credit and preferential treatment by the international community. While Rwanda is often praised for its very technocratic approach and much more professional style of government (in contrast to neighbours Burundi and Congo), Ansoms and Marysse conclude in chapter 2 that Rwanda has not made any progress in terms of poverty reduction and that inequality has dangerously risen. Both these chapters send us alarming warning signals that Rwanda is not on the road to recovery (be it socially, politically or economically) and that renewed (ethnic) violence is not unimaginable. Chapters 3 and 4 are more contemplative. Eminence grise, Réné Lemarchand, explains why the Rwandan genocide differs from the holocaust. Vandeginste and Huyse ponder if consociational theory can offer solutions for deeply divided societies such as Rwanda. This is a very interesting chapter in many ways although the remedies they suggest do not address the real problem. Ethnicity is not the source of Rwanda's problem but the outcome.
The second part on the DR Congo is a bit of a mixed bag. Marysse puts Congo's bleak economic outlook after many years of war into figures and charts. He focuses both on the plunder by neighbouring countries and the Congolese state itself which, it can indeed be argued, has been robbing its own citizens. Erik Kennes' contribution complements this argument, stating that Congo is not really a victim of globalisation (i.e. plunder or unfair deals by foreign companies). The relationship between a corrupt and incapable Congolese state and the international mining industry is, argues Kennes, much more complex. The chapter gives a good insight to people unfamiliar with the mining industry in Congo and has been updated to include the latest developments and some future scenarios. Chapter 7 discusses two of the hot spots in Congo's last war, namely Kivu and Ituri, drawing some comparisons between both regions. A short chapter 8 by De Herdt and Tshimanga discusses how ordinary people in Kinshasa have survived the war economically – mainly by looking at food (in terms of price evolution, consumption patterns, household budgets etc.).
Voices of Protest: Social Movements in Postapartheid South Africa by Richard Ballard, Adam Habib & Imraan Valodia (eds.), Scotsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006; pp. 437; £25.00 (pb). ISBN: 1869140893. Reviewed by David P. Thomas, University of Victoria, Canada.
Voices of Protest brings together a rich collection of empirical studies on social movements in post-apartheid South Africa. An accessible and compelling read, the book covers a remarkable 16 movements in total, with a chapter devoted to each one. From the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) to the Self-Employed Women's Union (SEWU), this book provides an excellent overview of the various social movements currently active within the country. Moreover, the rising influence and importance of these movements in South Africa (and beyond) certainly warrants such a discussion.
The book begins with an introduction by the editors, which includes a survey of social movement theories, and a general description of the post-apartheid political and socio-economic conditions under which the movements emerged. After the ruling African National Congress (ANC) embraced the ‘Washington consensus’ in the immediate aftermath of the transition to democracy, resistance surfaced within marginalised communities across the country. According to the editors, the growth in social movement activism has largely been a reaction to ‘neo-liberal globalisation’ which was embodied by the ANC's implementation of GEAR (Growth, Employment, and Redistribution) in 1996. Rising unemployment, poverty, and inequality in the new South Africa have driven many communities to seek creative ways to sustain themselves. Thus, a diversity of social movements has emerged in a struggle for survival, and in some cases to more directly contest the ANC's neoliberal political project.
Voices of Protest covers an impressive range of social movements that address issues such as privatisation, land reform, women's rights, the environment, homelessness, refugees, and HIV/AIDS. Furthermore, each chapter of the book presents a wealth of empirical data regarding the particular movement under analysis. The book's contributors provide detailed accounts of the origin, structure, leadership, and activities of the movements in question, while also discussing the broader implications of the movement's struggle. The various authors combine a comprehensive knowledge of the post-apartheid political context with valuable primary research, including a plethora of interviews. For example, chapter 2 on the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) draws on 18 interviews, in addition to substantial theoretical literature. Overall, the various movements are documented and discussed thoroughly, resulting in an extremely productive and timely piece of scholarship.
There are, however, a few issues that require further analysis on the important topic of social movements in South Africa. This is not necessarily a criticism of the book, but perhaps a suggestion for further research and debate. First, there is very little discussion in the chapters regarding the existence of, or potential for, cooperation and collaboration between the various social movements. The question remains: to what extent do/can the multiplicity of movements work together, or is this even desirable? Many of the issues addressed by these social movements are inextricably connected to one another (land, housing, water, HIV/ AIDS, etc.). Thus, it would be interesting to assess the degree of collaboration among the movements today, and the potential opportunities or barriers for future cooperation.
My second point of concern involves the connection between social movement theory and the empirical analysis contained in the book. The Conclusion to Voices of Protest brings together many of the themes discussed throughout the book, and also touches on the issues of theory building and the implications of social movement activism on democracy and development. While the editors' analysis is thought-provoking, multiple research questions emerge from this final chapter. For example: to what extent are the social movements capable of creating and implementing an alternative socioeconomic political project in South Africa (or beyond)? Do they need to capture the state, or can a sustainable political project be constructed outside of the state? And what is the relationship between the various social movements and the traditional ‘left’ forces within the Tripartite Alliance? Perhaps the mark of an outstanding book is its ability to stimulate further discussion and research. This collection will almost certainly do just that, as it provides a comprehensive, intelligent, and engaging assessment of social movements in South Africa.
‘Darwin's Nightmare’: A Critical Assessment
Thomas Molony, Lisa Ann Richey & Stefano Ponte 1
Introduction: Sauper's ‘Heart of Darkness’
‘Darwin's Nightmare’ (Hubert Sauper; 2004, France/Austria/Belgium,107 min) is a documentary film about the Nile perch fishing industry around Lake Victoria in Tanzania. Since its release in 2004, it continues to generate accolades and criticisms that fall outside of conventional ideological boundaries favoured by globalisation's fans and its discontents. The film's director, Hubert Sauper has been embraced and rebuked by those claiming to promote the interests of the film's subjects. Yet the film has not yet been taken seriously as a discursive construction of particular ideologies of development, nor has it been subjected to the scrutiny necessary in order to understand the film's power to confirm, for a popular audience, much of what they think they know is ‘true’ about Africa and how such a representation can be both problematic and dangerous.
In the film, lawless ‘fish cities’ have mushroomed around the filleting factories, peopled by fishermen, prostitutes and feral, glue-sniffing children. Factory owners have grown relatively rich on the proceeds of a thriving export industry, while the locals eat the dried leftovers. AIDS ravages the fishing settlements and, when the dying fishermen limp home to be comforted by their relatives, AIDS destroys the inland villages as well. Fish are responsible for all of modernity's ills, including the crashing of cargo planes around Mwanza airport because they are too heavily laden with Nile perch fillets for the European dinner table.
While we are not averse to relevant criticisms of globalisation, international trade, African gender relations, geopolitics and biopolitics, we argue here that such a totalising vision of Tanzania, Africa and international development reduces gender relations, sexuality, socioeconomic change, homelessness, poverty and complicated vectors of disease transmission into stale tropes associated with Afro-pessimism. We contend that ‘Darwin's Nightmare’ is an ethically dubious piece of journalism that exploits the power imbalances it claims to critique.
Social Darwinism
The film harks back to the late nineteenth century sweep of ‘social Darwinism’ – a popular corruption of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Some whites predicted on this basis that the ‘Negro’ race (the term used at the time) would be extinct by 1900. Their idea was that Darwin's ‘survival of the fittest’ implied a competition between races that the ‘Negroes’ would lose. (It is worth noting that ‘survival of the fittest’ was first used by a philosopher, Herbert Spencer; and it bears repeating that ‘social Darwinism’ is a misconception and misapplication of Darwin's actual theory). This popular belief was shared by some white physicians, who thought that it was confirmed by ‘defects’ in black peoples' anatomy, and therefore became obsessed with the details of such presumed imperfections. Although comparable defects in white patients went unreported, those in black patients were described in great detail in medical journals and became the basis for sweeping conclusions, for example, that genital and brain development were said to vary inversely. Social competition was assumed to be the essential characteristic of human nature understood through biological reality.2 ‘Darwin's Nightmare’ is meant to refer to the pariah Nile perch fish (Lates niloticus) that feeds on the very social fabric of Mwanza, Tanza-nia's most populated region. It can also refer to the nightmare perpetuated by this film of social Darwinism, where nature and global trade relations are portrayed as red in tooth and claw. This is not a new perspective on African development issues but a reiteration of nineteenth century pseudo-science. The implication seems to be that Africans will annihilate themselves because they are not fit enough to negotiate in the European's modern world.
As we all know, ‘globalisation’ and ‘modernisation’ are contentious, jagged amalgamations of contradictory components. Some of the forces that perpetuate the spread of HIV are the same ones responsible for ‘empowerment’ of women within families, families within communities and communities as part of a global vision of ‘development’. More money can indeed mean more prostitution, family disintegration and disease spread as implied in this film, but less money can also mean the same.3 This film perpetuates a common patronising belief among the elite that when the poor get money they will spend it on the wrong things, like the Mwanza fishermen indulging themselves in purchases of beer and sex.
Representation, Sources & Credibility
Indian feminist Uma Narayan argues that representation of ‘other’ cultures in the mainstream Western media is not a problem of omission, but instead that Western representations have been deeply involved in perpetuating negative stereotypes and imputations of cultural inferiority (Narayan, 1997).4 Hubert Sauper's film, produced under the guise of a documentary (and categorised as such, and not ‘fiction’), uses the Tanzania subject as a reflecting pool for a meditation on the big, bad West. This is executed in such a way that viewers are blinded by the incredible whiteness of being, under the guise of ‘progressive politics’ à la Michael Moore.5 In spite of the fact that the authors of this article and the maker of the film are all Europebased white people speaking about Africa, this does not imply that we have one voice or that we speak with the same credibility, accountability or bias. Such issues are frequently raised in internet discussions about the film, where vituperative remarks are regularly exchanged between those who laud the director for exposing the evils of a ‘system’ largely supported by outsiders, and those who contest Sauper's evidence and question his methods.6
The film exploits the perception that ‘Africans know everything about Africa’ in ways that pervert notions of perspective or authenticity. For example, the film relies on Raphael (whose surname is variously reported as Luchikio or Tukiko), the night watchman of the Fisheries Research Institute in Mwanza, to provide the appropriate assessment and analysis of the impact of international trade and fishing on Tanzania's local communities. Instead of speaking for his own condition, perhaps noting that he himself earns a salary, meagre as it is, from the fishing industry, he is cajoled into playing amateur social scientist for a filmmaker eager to ‘indigenise’ his own voice. Staged in darkened footage as the ‘savage’, the night watchman is armed with only a bow and poisoned arrows and describes how he does not fear war and must be ‘ready for fights’.7 Yet his arsenal is clearly not depicted as prepared for ‘modern’ battles. As a performance of ‘local knowledge’, he is hired to read aloud from an article in The East African newspaper.
Similarly, the impact of HIV/AIDS on a local fishing community is assessed by the village pastor, his subjective demography of slightly confusing statistics (‘45 to 50 fishermen dead in the lake’, and ‘10 to 15 dead every month in his area’) is followed by questioning in the film that makes him appear, at best, impractical in his solutions to HIV/AIDS devastation. Yet why should a documentary ask a pastor if he teaches about condom usage? This makes no more sense than asking the local clinic staff if they prescribe prayer as the medical cure for sin. What it does achieve is to privilege his perspective on how AIDS is affecting his village and then invalidate his own beliefs about his religious interpretation of the disease. Jonathan, supposedly ‘the only painter in town’ is given a similar role to play, assessing the realities of street children and abuse.
Local voices that could be in contrast to the film's ideological path are consistently absent. Where are the interviews with the men and women who work in the fish factory? How can the selection of three sex workers (who appear intoxicated as they are questioned over drinks at the New Mwanza Hotel) and five street children (shown high on glue) be considered representative of the local ‘stakeholders’ in the international fishing industry? And of the other destitute children shown cooking and fighting over food, Richard Mgamba (the journalist who helped Sauper after being told the film planned ‘to market Lake Victoria and the fishing industry to the rest of the globe’), reports that they
were paid between Tshs 1,000/- and Tshs 5,000/- by the producers of the film and the[n] directed [to] do what they are doing, paving the way for my guest to film what they termed ‘striking images’. 8
This account is supported by the painter Jonathan and others such as Mangeu and Matekere who recall that, in exchange for cash, they were directed by Sauper on how he wanted them to act.9 Sauper's claim that he and his crew ‘had to be very close to our “characters“ and follow their lives over long periods’10 should therefore be interrogated. Yet, glowing reviews in the popular press praise the director's ‘admirable facility for getting close enough to his remarkably unguarded subjects’ in a film ‘enriched by the candor and dignity of its shockingly deprived interview subjects.’11
Not that Sauper demonstrated a penchant for getting his facts right. His depiction of hapless ‘scientists’ discussing resource management issues in a local workshop was fairly indicative. But this time, the ‘other’ talked back. The Lake Victoria Fisheries Organisation and IUCN, The World Conservation Union, replied to Sauper in their poignant public letter, dated 8 December 2005:
What you have titled as the ‘IUCN Ecological Congress’ was in fact the ‘International Workshop on Community Participation in Fisheries Management on Lake Victoria’, organised jointly by the Lake Victoria Fisheries Organization and The World Conservation Union (IUCN). Had you stayed in the workshop for more than 15 minutes, you would have realised that the workshop was in fact defining ways to devolve some of the responsibilities and rewards of fisheries management to local communities. While community empowerment does not translate into poverty alleviation overnight, it is a critical initial step to improve the lives of communities. The government ministers, scientists, industry and community representatives at that meeting would have gladly informed you about the purpose of the workshop, and their view of the impact of the Lake Victoria fisheries on fishing communities in Tanzania, had you asked. 12
Fish Exports Hurt Local Economies?
One of the main claims that the film makes is that Nile perch exports are ‘bad’ for Tanzania. This comes through most forcefully when images of packed fish fillets are loaded on Ilyushin cargo planes, while news of food scarcity in the country, due to drought, is broadcast on the radio.
The view that the multiplier effect of exporting Nile perch13 is what could be actually needed in such a situation is never entertained. Food emergency systems in case of shortages are based on dry grains, in Tanzania, mostly maize. These grains are easy to store and transport, readily available in the global market, relatively cheap, and a preferred food staple in Tanzania (although rice would be a locally-preferred food around Lake Victoria). The oily sangala/sangara (as Nile perch is known in Tanzania)14 is not a locally-preferred food; it is an exotic species that was introduced in the lake by British colonial officers in the 1950s. It is also very difficult to handle for local food distribution – to be eaten fresh, it needs a cold chain that would make it unaffordable to most Tanzanians who may be in need of food supplies; it is a large fish, difficult and expensive to dry, smoke and/or fry, the only forms it can be traded without a cold chain.15 In other words, despite what Sauper implies, it can not be used to alleviate food shortages in Tanzania. Not catching and exporting it would likely mean more households without income who would add to the count of the food deficient population. The film fosters a view of hunger as lack of food, as opposed to lack of access to food – pace Amartya Sen.16
A second misrepresentation that the documentary carries out is that the coastline is totally dependent on fish exports. First, there is a substantial fishing industry that caters for local and regional markets; this handles tilapia and dagaa, a dry or fried sardine-type fish that constitutes the bulk of regional fish trade.17 The local market for Nile perch heads and bones is actually quite small in comparison to these other markets. It is also decreasing in importance, as some fish factories have been making more use of left-overs on the frame to manufacture fish fillets and burgers and for animal feed,18 and others have been exporting the fish products to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Malawi and Zambia.19 Second, the fish export industry in Tanzania is not a ‘multibillion dollar’ industry as the documentary claims; Nile perch exports from Tanzania amount to less than $100 million annually. Third, the regions that surround Lake Victoria in Tanzania are not ‘totally dependent on fish’ as is claimed in the film. Such an assertion is incorrect and has led a respected BBC film reviewer to tell his audience that
the inhabitants of the lake [presumably local Mwanzans, and not the fish] are now impoverished, and the only industry left to them consists of processing the Nile perch and selling it off to Europe. 20
There is substantial rice and cotton cultivation and large mining investments, not to speak of commercial and service activities in Mwanza. Yet it would appear from this film that prostitution services is all that Tanzania's fastest growing city has to offer. The documentary also claims two plane-loads a day (between 90 and 130 tons of fish fillets altogether, depending on the type of aircraft) translate into ‘2 million white people eat[ing] Victoria-fish every day.’ That would mean a fish portion of 4 grams per ‘white person’ per day. The preferred fish fillet size in European supermarkets is somewhere between 200 and 500 grams, for preparations for 2 to 4 people.
A third twist that the documentary does is to forcefully link fishing to all things that are wrong with Tanzanian society. One of the film's opening scenes is of a sex worker singing ‘Tanzania, Tanzania, nakupenda kwa moyo wote …’ (Tanzania, I love you with all of my heart) while a rude European pilot mocks her. This is not translated, and so to a foreign audience means nothing. To a Swahili speaker, on the other hand, the scene also shows a powerful portrait of a woman whose pride of place and identity remain intact, even under the assaults of the brutish ‘johns’.21 Her words appear to be lost on Sauper, or at least are left untranslated so to depersonalise the sex worker and reveal yet another heart of darkness.
Further, while we do not want to make light of the conditions of street children in Mwanza, their plight is not fundamentally different to that of those in other cities, where the fishing industry is not operating. Subtle omissions are replaced by a blatantly skewed translation in one of the film's rare daylight scenes when a Tanzanian working for the film interviews a group of street children by the lake. He asks one of the street children in clearly audible Swahili, Baba yako, anafanya kazi gani? (‘What work does your father do?’), to which the child says Wanalima (‘They farm’) – translated with the subtitle ‘He is on the water.’ The child repeats, Wanalima. A second child is then asked, ‘Is your dad also a fisherman?’ The child says, ‘My dad is dead.’ Then the interviewer returns to the first child (whose father is not a fisherman, but was misleadingly translated into saying that he was) and asks: ‘Do you want to be a fisherman like your dad?’ and the child says, Sitaki (‘I don't want to’). Such clear manipulation of the subtitles to make this appear to be a group of street children abandoned by their parents at the will of the global fish industry is the epitome of poor journalism. That it presumably comes from ‘good’ or ‘progressive’ intentions does nothing for the cause of any genuine anti-capitalist critique.
Research-based evidence shows that fishing households have on average higher incomes than purely farming households on Lake Victoria.22 Fishing can help raise cash to get access to agricultural inputs and hired labour (i.e., for cotton cultivation in the hinterlands of Mwanza) and is thus likely to increase productivity and income in farms. We are not arguing here that higher incomes necessarily entail better welfare of households and communities. However, we take stance against the documentary when it portrays how fishermen with cash ‘squander’ their money on drink and prostitutes. The equation for Sauper is: no cash = poverty; cash = perdition.
Mwanza, Famous or Infamous for Street Children & HIV/AIDS?
Mwanza is in fact well-known among researchers on issues of both HIV/AIDS and street children for two reasons, neither of which is acknowledged in the film. Mwanza is home to one of the oldest and most successful grassroots NGOs dealing with problems of street children in Africa. Named from a Swahili word meaning ‘to nurture one another’, Kuleana has been a Tanzanian-led centre for housing street children and for advocating for the rights of all children since 1992. The problem of homeless children is severe in Mwanza town, but if the film had explored the actual problem, instead of its archetype as globalisation's repugnance, Kuleana could have provided some perspective.
Mwanza is also the site of the first definitive medical research linking treatment of sexually-transmitted diseases with prevention of HIV transmission. In the late 1990s, the now famous ‘Mwanza study’ conducted by an international team of public health experts showed that treating sexually-transmitted diseases could reduce rates of HIV trans-mission.23 This study has provided useful data for advocates of better primary health care provision and increased attention to sexual and reproductive health as a matter of life and death. While the level of health care provision in Mwanza remains in need of improvement, there are anti-retroviral drugs for the treatment of AIDS at the regional hospital, funds from the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and mobile health clinics funded by the Clinton Foundation. AIDS clearly is a devastating disease in the Lake Victoria communities as the film depicts. Nevertheless, this should be placed in the perspective that the area is better-equipped than most of sub-Saharan Africa to deal with the situation.
Fish for Arms?
Could ‘awakening’ the European consumers of Nile perch to the negative externalities of the industry stop them from consuming the fish? This may already have started if the BBC's Nick Fraser is correct; that Darwin's Nightmare – ‘one of the most shocking films made in recent years’ – has ensured that Nile perch has been removed from French supermarkets.24 If so, would this possibly make the lives any better for the fishing communities in Mwanza?
Perhaps a focus on the fishing industry is missing the point of the film. The trailer to the film (in French) concentrates exclusively on what could only be described as his fish-for-arms ‘speculation’, where Nile perch is flown to the West in huge cargo planes that apparently return to Tanzania with weapons to fuel Africa's conflicts.25 This idea was born during Sauper's ‘research’ on another of his documentaries, Kisangani Diary, that follows Rwandese refugees of the Congolese rebellion. He recalls on the official ‘Darwin's Nightmare’ website that,
… it turned out that the rescue planes with yellow peas also carried arms to the same destinations, so that the same refugees that were benefiting from the yellow peas could be shot at later during the nights … First hand knowledge of the story of such a cynical reality became the trigger for ‘Darwin's Nightmare’.
Sauper's use of the word ‘trigger’ is no accident. The French-language advertising poster for Le Cauchemar de Darwin (and the cover of the DVD in widest circulation in Tanzania) is of three white images against a black background: the first, a sketch of a fish.
The second, the skeleton of a fish with the anal fins replaced by the trigger and magazine of an assault rifle; the third, an assault rifle. The implication is that the film will show how fish somehow turn in to, or are exchanged for, weapons. If there is any doubt, then the Spanishlanguage poster for ‘La Pesa-dilla de Darwin’ is more striking still, with the black background contrasting against the blood-red stencil of a fish that has the butt of an assault rifle for a tail.26 Reviewers have taken the bait, and have provided prospective film viewers with predictably Afro-pessimistic appraisals:
To make the journey profitable, the planes that collect the fish now come filled up with arms. In addition to destroying the environment, the West has also increased the likelihood of conflict in Africa,
This has irked the Government of Tanzania, a country that has welcomed refugees from neighbouring countries and for many years worked hard to negotiate peace in the Great Lakes region. President Julius Nyerere, known as ‘the father of the nation’, gained the reputation as an international statesman in part for his efforts to these ends. His successors, particularly the current president, Jakaya Kikwete, have taken a key role in these negotiations. In a televised address from the Bank of Tanzania Institute in Mwanza on 31 July 2006, a visibly angry Mr. Kikwete argued that the film had failed to provide specific evidence linking fish exports to the arms trade: ‘One of
the biggest lies in the film is that the planes that are coming to pick fish from Mwanza bring weapons that are used to destabilise the Great Lakes region. 29
President Kikwete asked Sauper to provide evidence linking fish exports to the arms trade, because there is none in the film.30 Several times in the film, Sauper asks his informants, ‘What do the aircraft bring into Tanzania? Do they come empty?’ No evidence is provided and at times the director is laughed at by those he asks. Still, he continues throughout the film, persistently quizzing pilots and also grilling, as James Christopher of the New York Times puts it, ‘the factory managers, the fishermen, the urchins and the prostitutes.’31 Nobody entertains Sauper's hypothesis until finally an airman confesses to having had ‘two flights from Europe to Angola with big machines like tanks’. Yet the airman makes no mention of having stopped in Mwanza or anywhere else in Tanzania.
The omission of a date line for these events is also significant. Angola's bloody civil war ran for 27 years from 1975, and of course weapons were delivered to Angola because government troops and UNITA rebel forces were fighting each other and needed arms and ammunition to do so. While there is no direct suggestion in the film that Tanzania assisted in the supply of weapons for the Angola conflict, this does seem to be implied. This is most obvious in references to the article by Richard Mgamba which suggests that Mwanza has been used for the delivery of arms en route to other countries.32 Since Mgamba wrote his report there have been allegations linking Tanzania to illegal arms trafficking, the most forceful being a report by Mwanakijiji that uses evidence from United States intelligence, among other sources.33 The article also refers to a UN report on arms smuggling and trafficking with the Democratic Republic of Congo which reveals that Mwanza airport allows flights that do not comply with international civil aviation rules, and provides photographs of ‘suspicious airplanes sighted by the Group of Experts on 16 November 2005 at Mwanza airport.’34 The film fails to comment on any such evidence, nor is Sauper able to provide any evidence of his own.
The Embassy of the United Republic of Tanzania in France concluded that Sauper stumbled upon the perch theme because of his lack evidence about weapons being flown into Mwanza.35 On the official website's page entitled ‘Filming in the Heart of Darkness’, and with remarkable similarities to Conrad's work, Sauper describes:
Forced idleness became a dull routine. We would sit in the merciless equatorial sun surrounded by a million Nile Perch skeletons, the local's food, trying not to go mad. 36
Under such conditions one might speculate that Sauper was tempted to look even harder for the weapons he had heard about years ago when working in another country on ‘Kisangani Diary’. The outcome is a film that, as the New York Times film reviewer A. O. Scott puts it, ‘turns the fugitive, mundane facts that are any documentary's raw materials into the stuff of tragedy and prophecy.’37
Tanzania's Nightmare, Sauper's Dream
Undoubtedly Sauper and his promoters' sensationalisation of the ‘fish-for-arms’ boosted sales and has helped advertise their film. President Kikwete, by devoting his entire nationwide month-end address to ‘Darwin's Nightmare’, unwittingly handed Sauper the best publicity he could have hoped for. While few Tanzanians still appear to have watched the film, the national media discussed it at length. The Daily News supported the government (predictably, some might say),38 while Uwazi, a Swahili-language tabloid, was forced to make an unconditional public apology to the National Assembly for publishing a cartoon that allegedly belittled a Member of Parlia-ment's condemnation of the film.39 Counterfeit DVDs of the Filamu ya Mapanki, as it became known, began to be sold on the streets, presumably to make a profit from those who might want to see for themselves what all the fuss was about.40 Internationally ‘Darwin's Nightmare’ had become more than Sauper could have dreamt of in terms of publicity. Domestically it had turned into what one commentator has termed ‘a parliamentary nightmare’.41 The nightmare perpetuated when the Government of Tanzania apparently reacted with what Sauper described as a ‘campaign of intimidation’ against people who spoke out against the film.42 According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, the government threatened to deport some of the journalists who were interviewed in the film:
Richard Mgamba of The Citizen newspaper was apparently harassed by the authorities and threatened with deportation to Kenya, even though he is a Tanzanian citizen. He fled Mwanza, owing to fears that a demonstration against the film – organised by the local authorities and held in early August [2006] – would spiral out of control. 43
A website entitled ‘The Otherside of this Documentary: Know the truth about this documentary film’44 has appeared in a bid to defend ‘Brand Tanzania’ on the international stage. There are no formal acknowledgements that the site is supported by the government, but it is likely that it is the product of a resolution passed by Parliament that, ‘[t]o cleanse the country's name … recommended the production of a documentary that will counter the allegations by giving a true picture of Nile Perch business in Lake Victoria’.45 It offers a gallery of photos (mostly fish, but a couple of doctored images of Sauper posing with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden) and an opportunity to send articles to the webmaster. As with visitors' comments in the discussion pages, all the articles are unified in their condemnation of the film. One article by the Ministry of Natural Resources systematically attacks the film with clarifications pointing out, for example, that the aircraft used to transport the fish are contracted by companies in Europe, not the Tanzanian processors.46 Another official statement, from the Embassy of the United Republic of Tanzania in France, contests the film's assertion that globalisation has forced Tanzania to ‘condemn the majority of its population to … slavery, prostitution, and drug addiction.’47
The site's pièce de résistance are video clips of interviews with people working in the fish industry and with some of the young ‘actors’ featured in the film. Accounts of the events leading up to the ‘Otherside’ interviews are anecdotal, and it is not difficult to identify who commissioned them, given the Parliamentary resolution mentioned earlier. Yet it is unclear what pressure, if any, the interviewees who had featured in the film were under to speak out about how the film research and filming took place. Speaking from the safety of Europe, Sauper expressed his concern that,
By the time the ‘Otherside’ interviews took place the young men who feature in the film would have quickly realised how Sauper manipulated their words and deeds to fit his own agenda. Under questioning, they tell viewers the ‘truth’ about this documentary film and the actions of the director who shunned his responsibilities to vulnerable people. One of Sauper's comments during an interview on the ethics of free trade and filmmaking is more accurate, and pertinent, than the director intended and provides a fitting coda to this review: ‘There isn't anything new in my movie. It's all known.’48