New Orleans At the last minute we grabbed the loose ends and headed to the no-man’s land of Jefferson Parish to see a movie that was an off-beat choice for us, but whatever, seemed the best of the bunch: District 9. This was sci-fi. We don’t do sci-fi. My son kept smiling and saying, “This is a surprising choice, very surprising!” Maybe so, but the one sentence blurb said it might “refine” sci-fi and was a different type of sci-fi. What moved me to make the choice was the fact that it said it was shot in the slums of Johannesburg. OK. Been there, done that, and would love to see it through their eyes, so away we all went.

We loved this wildly political movie. I guess it was sci-fi, because there were these tall, skinny aliens and some kind of huge space vehicle hovering over Johannesburg, but whatever, this was a movie about the ravishing impact of apartheid in South Africa (and elsewhere) told in the simple black-and-white allegory of the them-and-us world all around us. The aliens (called prawns here because of some shrimp like features) seemed more human than most of the humans, while many of the humans seemed inhuman, though given how common they are I can’t bring myself to call them aliens.

The megaslums of District 9 where the aliens are cordoned off were filed in the shanty shacks of Soweto outside of Johannesburg. One of the film’s website shows a Google Earth style view of D9 which simply is a satellite picture of Soweto. A quick look at South Africa websites places the District 9 as a thin satirical jump from Cape Town’s District Six where the apartheid government forcibly “removed” over 60,000 black and “coloured,” as they were classified then, inhabitants during the 1970’s. They were all transplanted to the Cape Flats 25 kilometers away from Cape Town.

In the movie the manager of the “UN” type slum removal has an accident and begins to genetically change into a man-prawn. He finally tells someone he was removing that the new site is not better, but a kind of concentration camp. The numbers of aliens are also exploding to millions. There are lots of these kinds of cuts and jabs. One of the more interesting looks at Nigerians running businesses in District 9 to exploit the prawns with the passive consent of the MNU and host country. This piece was on the edge of being over the edge, but the point was made with a blunt hammer and we were all nails.

As an organizer familiar with the megaslums where Community Organizations International / ACORN International works, we have seen way too closely how forced slum removal by governments in Africa, India, and Latin America looks like. The farce of 24 hour notices being given to the aliens where they were asked to sign their marks whether or not they had a clue of what was happening to their shacks was powerful and could be used as an “organizer’s guide.”

I’m not saying this is Norma Rae. There are no real heroes here, so it’s a lot like life where District 9’s, 9th Wards, La Matanzas, Korogochu’s, and Dharavi’s are still everywhere.

Thanks to director and writer Neill Blomkamp of South Africa and more recently Vancouver, British Columbia for finding a new way to tell and old story that continues to play on an unending feedback loop screening all over the world today.