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District 9
Chesire Cat:
As if you couldnt find 10 examples of 'evil nigerian' exploitation in Africa within the last 50 years. As bad as the rest of the world is at exploiting Africa, its pretty damn good at exploiting itself too.
supersheep:
Right. Go. Find me ten examples of "evil Nigerian" exploitation, please. Whatever the hell that's supposed to mean.
It's one thing to make the point that some Africans exploit other Africans. Fair enough. That's not the issue at hand, though. My point was that the Nigerian gang in the film would not have been out of place in a 60s Bond film. It struck me as being quite a racist protrayal, to be honest - "Look at these unsophisticated fools with their eating of body parts and what not, silly backward Nigerians."
Alex C:
--- Quote from: supersheep on 12 Sep 2009, 20:56 ---Right. Go. Find me ten examples of "evil Nigerian" exploitation, please. Whatever the hell that's supposed to mean.
--- End quote ---
Well, the Niger Delta does actually have a pretty damn high violence rate because it's an area with corrupt local governments trying to control a ton of oil revenue. The New York Times likes to blame gangs, but these "gangs" aren't the quite the same animal that North Americans or Brits are likely to think of when we hear the term "gang" tossed about. Basically, the good ol' capitalists come in offering to buy resources and then the Nigerians get to fight over who can provide them (or who gets to keep the money for the job, at any rate). If you want to hire security to protect your operations in Nigeria, you have to make a deal with the locals and a lot of these locals are quite happy to fight over who gets the contract. So, really, the only part that hit me as over the top was the part about wanting to eat the dude's hand; a simple mercenary attitude would have been enough to get the point across.
supersheep:
Oh yeah, I wouldn't for a second deny that there's a metric shit-ton of violence in Nigeria for economic reasons and so on, and in large parts of the rest of Africa as well. The "evil Nigerians" thing, though, is a bit more along the lines of the 'eating body parts' and generally being dicks for little reason (eg killing the prawn for body parts after they buy the deathsuit). The gang seemed to be fairly one-dimensional evil rather than having the slightly more believable motivations of most of the other actors in the story (nasty soldier-man who likes watching prawns die being the exception.)
Chesire Cat:
Im more referring to warlords and tribes and such. A couple examples, Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, the Hutu in Rwanda, pretty much every faction in DRC. and Somalia etc etc.
I didn't even really consider the whole eating alien flesh thing as being evil. I thought it was more an insane feeb wanting to walk. But lets face it, alot of the forces I mentioned arent strictly political, alot of them are clans and tribes who are lead by the tribal leader, as well as spiritual leaders hence the witchdoctor as the tribes are very often supersticious. This kind of thing (assuming we are going to follow the allegory and call eating aliens 'cannibalism') *does* happen.
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