Steve Sailer calls District 9 Neill Blomkamp’s Malthusian fable of post-Apartheid Johannesburg:
The American press constantly refers to District 9 as an “apartheid allegory,” but the 29-year-old Blomkamp was ten when Nelson Mandela was released. Blomkamp’s press statements can hardly be more explicit that the movie is largely a post-apartheid parable about illegal immigration and Malthusian despair.In fact, Blomkamp is personally a victim of the gradual ethnic cleansing of southern Africa. Rampant crime under the new black government drove his family from Johannesburg to British Columbia in 1997.
But Americans just don’t get it because they haven’t paid attention to South Africa since 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected President and then They All Lived Happily Ever After. Blomkamp told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Everybody in North America thinks of South Africa for white oppression of the black majority.” Yet, 15 years later, “what we’re not familiar with is this screwed-up Johannesburg setting.”
Just as 1981’s Road Warrior, with Mel Gibson as Mad Max, memorably re-imagined the defining Australian experience of living on an empty continent, District 9 symbolizes the lesson of Afrikaans history: on an increasingly full continent, the weak can eventually triumph over the strong by outbreeding them.