On a January night 11 years ago I sat in the back of a wheezing Mamba — an armoured defence vehicle — alongside members of the local police commando in the South African province of Mpumalanga. I had joined these men to report on a top-secret mission to intercept a refugee-laden train travelling from the Mozambican capital Maputo to its neighbouring counterpart, Pretoria.
Although South Africa was still radiant in the afterglow of its miraculous transition to democracy, the throngs of Mozambicans fleeing poverty and the aftermath of a protracted civil war were not accorded the politically benign and compassionate label 'refugee'. Instead, they were classified by the government and disgruntled citizens alike as illegal immigrants — or, to use the legal term applied to them, aliens.
So it was with some wry appreciation of the ironic and the allegorical that I watched a similar scene unfold on a cinema screen last week. Bureaucrats and law enforcement officers rumbled along in dust-churning Caspers, headed for a refugee camp where they would serve eviction notices on the camp's inhabitants. Aliens in the literal sense, these unwanted residents had arrived in their spaceship above Africa's thumping heart, Johannesburg.
'If they were from another country we might understand, but they're not even from this planet,' remarked a bystander as the convoy of Caspers streamed into the filthy, overrun alien camp, District 9.
The observation was deliberately ironic, given the xenophobia-fuelled violence that has succeeded the racial hatred of apartheid-era South Africa.
It reminds those of us who grew up under apartheid of long-forgotten human rights injustices, such as mid-winter evictions of squatters or the forced removal of Cape Coloureds from District 6 in Cape Town — abuses which have somehow managed to reconfigure themselves and find expression in new and unexpected ways in this apparently rainbow-hued country.
While District 9 is ostensibly an entertaining and technically sophisticated sci-fi movie, it also prompts the viewer to reflect on the ongoing maltreatment not only of the estimated 270,000 registered asylum seekers longing to assimilate into South Africa, but also the 42 million people worldwide who are currently displaced.
If we are incapable of treating our earthly fellows humanely, the director seems to be asking, how can we ever hope to function as morally robust beings in a universe whose boundaries we cannot begin to comprehend?
It's a debate