You’re Part of The Big System: Hubert Sauper’s “Darwin’s Nightmare”

Lates niloticus, the Nile Perch, is an invasive species of freshwater fish native to Sub-Saharan Africa’s river basins. Though not native to Lake Victoria, since its introduction in the 1950s the fish has come to dominate the lake’s ecology such that Tanzanians now refer to the perch as ‘Vic Fish’. Perch populations have devoured all other fish species in Lake Victoria. Since their appearance, at least 210 species of cichlids have vanished. (Vic Fish often cannibalize their young as well.)

“The Perch,” we are told in Hubert Sauper’s 2004 documentary “Darwin’s Nightmare”, “is eliminating all hope for the future.” Sauper offers the Nile Perch as the point at...

which ecological disaster interfaces with the global economy and armed conflict through the town of Mwanza, Tanzania. Mwanza, the southern port of Lake Victoria, is the point where Lake Victoria’s fishermen export Perch via aircraft to Europe – even as a famine rages across Tanzania. While Europeans eat perch fillets, Mwanzans subsist on “fish frames”: Vic Fish carcasses stripped nearly to the bone, discarded and covered in flies on the rubbish heap, retaining only that which can’t be made into fillets.

In one striking scene, the camera comes to rest on a calendar inside the fillet factory. The calendar’s slogan insists on the crossing point between human beings’everyday lives and the global economy as a whole: “You’re part of the big system.”

Sauper’s film documents the horror of the daily lives of those at the bottom of this system even as it implicates the developed world in wanton human and environmental destruction. Indeed, the same planes which carry perch fillets to Europe return bearing weapons to arm African wars. In the “Big System,” then, even something as banal as fish fillets can lead to horrific ecological and geopolitical destruction

By Kelly Innes