Battleangel

I picked up this excellent documentary a while back and finally had the opportunity, or should I say I brought myself, to watch it. Because the topic is neither pleasant nor easy. It is not often one is so deeply touched and struck down with the utter hopelessness of the conditions under which people live and labour in Tanzania on the shores of Lake Victoria.

The film centers on the ongoing ecological disaster that is the Nile Perch (Lates niloticus). Since its introduction in the 1950s, the fish has taken over the food chain in the lake and is slowly eating other species as well as its own young, turning the once magnificent lake ecosystem into an oxygen deprived sludge. But that is just one of the many problems that haunt the struggling nations in the region. While perch is being filleted and packed in ice and flown to Europe and Japan, the local people, then in the middle of a famine, are offered the decaying by-products. The maggot-ridden scraps, as it were, are dumped in local villages. And even those scraps are tightly regulated and fought over.
Additional social problems include HIV/AIDS, prostitution, a complete lack of medical care and a deafening Christian fervor that does little to make the daily lives of people any easier. Orphaned children fight over breadcrumbs and sniff glue (which is ironically one thing that the fishing industry actually contributes to the community) to be able to sleep in the street. And as if all that weren’t bad enough, many of the cargo transports that take the filleted fish to be sold abroad also bring weapons back for various armed struggles in the region.
Tanzania is in a sorry state of post-colonial, semi-industrialized development. Sure, we had poverty too in Europe as we once underwent a similar process but we did not have a pandemic like HIV nor did we have a distinct international exploitative relationship.

A must see. An invaluable primer and insight into life in contemporary Tanzania as well the impact that WE as consumers or silent bystanders have on the region. A chilling account of globalization, which for all its fancy claims, lacks any sort of ethic dimension.