The Real District 9: Cape Town's District Six

Science fiction has always provided the best metaphors for isolation and anomie, and District 9--the two-week-old box-office hit from South African director Neill Blomkamp about a population of alien "workers" from another planet whose ship crash-lands in Johannesburg--is no exception. The government confines the aliens to a quarantined neighborhood called District 9 for several years until, one day, there are too many of them and too little space; they have to be moved. Most of all, though, the film is a morality play: segregation hurts its architects as well as its victims. And, without giving anything away, the most salient fact about aliens isn't their difference, but their likeness. Yet District 9 isn't necessarily the metaphor everyone thinks it is. Of course it's about apartheid and segregation, but to South Africans it's also about Cape Town's now-defunct District Six, and the real-life slums that rose up when it was dismantled.

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