Textes originaux utilisés dans l’article Le complexe du Blanc au Mozombique

Later on, there’s a cut-scene of a white blonde woman being dragged off, screaming, by black men. When you attempt to rescue her, she’s been turned and must be killed. If this has any relevance to the story it’s not apparent in the first three chapters, and it plays so blatantly into the old clichés of the dangerous “dark continent” and the primitive lust of its inhabitants that you’d swear the game was written in the 1920s.

Dan Whitehead, Eurogamer.

I looked at the “Resident Evil 5” trailer and I was like, “Wow, clearly no one black worked on this game.” Because I wonder, and I haven’t sort of really dug into it that much, but I wonder what sort of advice Capcom gave them. The point isn’t that you can’t have black zombies. There was a lot of imagery in that trailer that dovetailed with classic racist imagery. What was not funny, but sort of interesting, was that there were so many gamers who could not at all see it. Like literally couldn’t see it. So how could you have a conversation with people who don’t understand what you’re talking about and think that you’re sort of seeing race where nothing exists?

There was stuff like even before the point in the trailer where the crowd turned into zombies. There sort of being, in sort of post-modern parlance, they’re sort of “othered.” They’re hidden in shadows, you can barely see their eyes, and the perspective of the trailer is not even someone who’s coming to help the people. It’s like they’re all dangerous; they all need to be killed. It’s not even like one cute African — or Haitian or Caribbean — child could be saved. They’re all dangerous men, women and children. They all have to be killed. And given the history, given the not so distant post-colonial history, you would say to yourself, why would you uncritically put up those images? It’s not as simple as saying, “Oh, they shot Spanish zombies in ‘Resident Evil 4,’ and now ‘black zombies and that’s why people are getting upset.” The imagery is not the same. It doesn’t carry the same history, it doesn’t carry the same weight. I don’t know how to explain it more clearly than that.

N’Gai Croal, “This imagery has a history”.

[16 décembre 2008] I saw a pretty sweet-looking blonde girl today. It’s like I’ve been wandering through a desert for a year and then someone offered me a glass of cold water (or beer!). We got a lot of foreign workers here like me, so I don’t know what she does - yet. Hell, I don’t even know if she speaks English! (Most do, except for that French guy. I think he does speak English but I can’t understand him for the life of me. He just sounds angry all the time.) […]

[9 janvier 2009] As much as I hate working, Kijuju is the only place that offers work at a decent wage, and because I keep sending money home, my family is able to enjoy a better life than they could normally. Life ain’t easy out here in the sticks. There’s hardly any work to be had here, and what jobs are available don’t even pay half as well as the mine. […]

[16 janvier 2009] I met Allyson at our favorite watering hole for a few drinks. I thought things were going well: She was having a double whiskey and I was drinking the mini-barrel of beer. I was enjoying myself (How could I not?) when some guy I’ve never seen before starts talking really loudly. He was wearing sunglasses, and he kept slamming his beer glass down on the table while he talked. Actually, it was more like shouting. He kept saying things like “Foreigners should be thrown out of our land!” and “We will take back our town!” He was spilling beer all over the place! Allyson kept giving me the eye as if to tell me I should go over and say something to him. I would have, but I didn’t want to leave my beer unattended.

Experience Kijuju.

April 5. A man who said he was the foreman of the oil plant came to visit us today. He said he wants to inoculate everyone living near the oil field against some kind of disease. In my parents’ generation, they tricked out people and stole the land to turn it into their oil field. They must feel guilty about that because they are always trying to help out village now. When we couldn’t get across the swamp, they built a gondola on a rope for us. Sometimes they’ll even give us alcohol from foreign countries. This medicine is probably something like that. Everyone in our village is glad to receive this medicine, but I don’t want it. I don’t have a reason for not getting it, I just didn’t like the way the foreman looks, that’s all.

Journal intime d’un jeune du village, récupérable dans le jeu.

Their existence, far from being the subject of elusive tales from the backwoods, of fantastic fables from the veld, is widely taken for granted: As a simple matte, of fact. In recent times, respectable local newspapers have carried banner headlines like “‘Zombie’ Back From The Dead”, illustrating their stories with conventional, high-realist photographs;” similarly, defence lawyers in provincial courts have sought, by forensic means, to have clients acquitted of murder on grounds of having been driven to their deadly deeds by the zombification of their kin;” and illicit zombie workers have become an issue in large scale labour disputes.”

The Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murders (Ralushai et al. 1996), appointed in 1995 by the Northern Province administration to, investi gate an “epidemic” of occult violence, reported widespread fear of the figure of the zombie. The latter, it notes in a tone of ethnographic neutrality (p.5),

“Is a person who is believed to have died, but because of the power of a witch, he is resurrected…[and] works for the person who has turned him in a zombie. To make it impossible for him to communicate with other people, the front part of his tongue is cut off so that he cannot speak. it is believed that he works at night only…[and] that he can leave his rural area and work in the urban area, often far from his home. Whenever he meets people he knows, he vanishes.”

The fear of being reduced to ghost labour, of being abducted to feed the fortunes of a depraved stranger, occurs alongside another kind of spectre: a growing mass, a shadowy alien-nation, of immigrant black workers from elsewhere on the continent. So overt is the xenophobic sentiment that these workers are disrupting local relations of production and reproduction-that they usurp scarce jobs and resources, foster prostitution, and spread AIDS-chat they have been openly harassed on South African streets. Like zombies, they are nightmare citizens, their rootlessness threatening to siphon off the remaining, rapidly diminishing prosperity of the indigenous population. Interestingly, like zombies too, they are characterized by their impaired speech: the c ommon term for immigrant, makwerekwere a Sesotho word implying limited competence in the vernacular.

Jean & John Comaroff, Alien Nation: Zombies, immigrants and millennial capitalism.