Digitally Indigenous: Images of Late-Stage Colonialism, Imperial Violence, and Metabolic Shift in Neptune Frost
By Micah Slater, Edited by Duncan Geissler
The world of film criticism was both stymied and scintillated with the 2021 release of the musical-surrealist-Afrofuturist Neptune Frost (2021), a film so entirely out of the purview—yet within the release profile and production value—of critics’ standard fare that nearly every review came bundled with synonyms of ‘strange’ (Liz Chan for Make the Switch: “A peculiar yet confusing visual and sonic experience,” A. O. Scott for the New York Times: “Neptune Frost,” a strange and captivating new feature by Saul Williams,” Özgür Çalışkan for SFRA: “an exciting production that defies convention.”). The film is multi-faceted, to be sure, but its narrative, symbolic, and political treatments could not be more clear: set in modern-day Burundi’s mining region, a group of escaped coltan miners, social outcasts, gender rebels, and the assorted detritus of colonial capitalism build an autonomous digital collective in an e-waste dump and begin to plot the downfall of the layered regimes that oppress and exploit their home. Accompanied by technospiritualist diatribes, visions of gods robed in icons of modern waste, diverse musical practices, and metaphysical technological capabilities, Neptune Frost presents a thorough consideration of the conditions created by digital colonialism and labor exploitation in the Global South. Further, in its dialogue of hyper-consciousness and its ambiguous (and distinctly non-Western) treatment of gender and sexual identity, the film positions alternative and expansive modes of being in a digital world as explicit resistance.
The film opens with the death of an enslaved miner, Tekno (Robert Ninteretse), in the desolate gray wasteland of a coltan mine. Bludgeoned to death over a split second of non-productivity, his body is left where he falls. The other miners, one his brother, swarm the body to treat his wound, and upon failing that, mourn him. Armed guards, one of them his murderer, order their immediate continued labor [00:03:30]. This is the familiar image of resource extraction in Africa: land containing lithium, coltan, fuel, and other limited resources is seized and controlled by a foreign power, which then employs violence to maintain an underpaid, overworked, and dangerously exploited class of laborers from the local population. This paradigm resembles Marx’s theory of spatial rift, in that it exemplifies the “process of so-called primitive accumulation” followed by long-distance transport to urban centers, that then do not fulfill the reciprocal relationship that would be requisite to maintain the stability of the human-Earth metabolism (Saito 26). While Marx is speaking of agriculture here (his ‘favorite’ example, according to Saito), the relevance of the comparison becomes apparent when considering the use of extracted coltan: laptops and cell phones.
While these devices do not sustain a population in the same way as agricultural exports, they are functionally equivalent in its necessity to the life of a person in the global North. However, Saito’s mediation of Marx’s ideas of luxury are also relevant here. In his definition, “‘luxury’ – something not ‘naturally necessary’ – becomes ‘necessary’” (Saito 9). Naturally, the extreme and temporally rifted coltan mining is not, in fact, a necessity: it merely seems so, as has been declared requisite for populations in the West to re-produce their ways of life. Neptune Frost is, to a degree, guilty of this misconception as well: while it presents depictions of resistance and reclamation, there is no explicit mandate for limits on technological use, solely the elevation of oppressed peoples to the level of consumption extant in the West. Michael Kwet notes in Digital Degrowth, on his perfect global equity income of $80,000 per year per family of 4, that “we likely need to reduce the present level of material consumption, which would leave us with even less” (Kwet 3). Neptune Frost rebels against this idea, focusing instead on their rights to the digital as tied inextricably to their rights to their own land; and therefore, more privileged to an unlimited consumption, even while performing resistance against the cultures that created this mode of planetary use.
While the premise of Neptune Frost is inextricably linked to traditional and centuries-old practices of colonial capitalism, its novelty and prescience is predicated almost entirely upon its approach to the digital, specifically in terms of access, ownership, and, strangely, spiritualism. The film is not only concerned with the production of material assets used to access the digital space, but the space itself—which is used by its protagonists through meditative and metaphysical practices, directly evocative of their indigenous religious heritage. Early in the film, Neptune (Cheryl Isheja & Elvis Ngabo), an intersex character on the run from the volatility of Burundi’s socioeconomic condition, is visited by a god of the land, digitized and transformed by waste. Broken bicycle wheels spin like parasols on his back, black light paint decorates his clothes and body, wires are woven into his hair. He commands them to hack: “Hack into land rights and ownership. Hack into business law, proprietorship. Hack into the history of the bank. Hack and question the business of slavery, of free labor, of its relation to today’s world” [0:12:10]. Exhibited in this spiritual and extremely explicit verbiage is Neptune Frost’s divine mission: not only does the land from which the material resources of the digital are mined belong to its inhabitants, but so does the digital world created by those resources. It is therefore the goal of the Burundian natives not only to reclaim their land and labor, but to establish themselves as people indigenous to the digital space, and to use it against their oppressors. From Kwet: “We, the common folk, have to liberate ourselves” (9).
A hut made of televisions and wires. (Williams and Uzeyman [1:07:42])
Characters throughout exhibit extreme proclivities for technology, going so far as making tech objects begin to work in their sleep [01:06:19]. Others become functionally analogous to holy people, building huts out of televisions and wires in which they meditate to commune with the spiritual-technological realm [01:07:42]. As their powers and numbers grow, however, intervention is inevitable: after spotting a soldier on the outskirts of their camp, Elohel (Rebecca Musyo) declares to the people of the camp: “The Authority is working with European and US intelligence to avoid suspicion.” [1:33:37]. The Authority, ostensibly, is the company for which the coltan miners worked. This explicit conflation of the power of governments and corporations further demonstrates the film’s anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist perspective. This is followed by the appearance of drones, the most evocative symbol of militaristic technological surveillance—-the explicitly weaponized, mobilized sibling of CCTV. Kwet’s note of the overwhelming dominance of the United States aligns perfectly with Elohel’s declaration: he writes “US corporations dominate the world’s social media networks, search engines, semiconductors, cloud computing systems, operating systems, business networking, office productivity software, and more… the US plunders [the South], doing everything it can to [...] sustain its global power and benefit from cheap labor and raw materials” (Kwet 5-6). The collective—nicknamed Matalusa Kingdom, after “martyr-loser”—is clearly a threat to these ideals, both in its anti-capitalist non-productivity and supernatural propensity for technology. And indeed, the film ends the way one would expect: bombs rain down on Matalusa, killing everyone but Neptune. As drones hum overhead, one declares, through a speaker in a female American-accented voice, “I’m sorry. I thought we received confirmation that the target was destroyed” [01:38:10]. As Neptune stares at the drones, their body begins to glitch, and a male voice responds over a different speaker: “confirmed, the target was destroyed” [1:38:20]. In this last moment of digital connectivity, Neptune Frost dismisses and undermines the oppressive presence of the digital West: through their birthright to the technologies used against them, the Burundian people will never be completely annihilated.
Neptune Frost is a completely singular film. Its conscious and explicit treatment of labor exploitation, digital colonialism, and imperial violence creates a distinct image of the digital space as disputed land and physical resource as rights to its ownership. The film is deeply rooted in the indigenous history of Burundi without neglecting the country’s modern condition, aware of extant rampant corruption and its roots in the powers of foreign governments and corporations. Its treatment of digital colonialism—including metabolic spatial rift, disproportionate access, and the leverage of military technology—is made further distinct by its spiritual assertions, aligning workers’ rights to the products produced by their labor with indigenous rights to the fruits of the land. What Neptune Frost does not consider, however, is degrowth: in its furious holy mission of reclamation, there seems to be no space for global considerations other than destroying the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and elevating the Burundi people to their righteous level of power and wealth. Nonetheless, the film presents an extraordinary and thorough vision of the conditions that plague resource-rich areas of the global South, particularly those exploited for the materials requisite in the production of technological components. Neptune Frost is a surrealist film, certainly, but the conditions it depicts are far from unreal.
Works Cited
Çalışkan, and Özgür. "Review of Neptune Frost." Science Fiction Research Association, vol. 53, no. 3, 2023, https://sfrareview.org/vol-53-no-3-summer-2023/.
Chan, Liz. "NEPTUNE FROST
A PECULIAR YET CONFUSING VISUAL AND SONIC EXPERIENCE." Make The Switch, December 4, 2022, https://www.maketheswitch.com.au/article/review-neptune-frost-a-peculiar-yet-confusing-visual-and-sonic-experience.
Kwet, Michael. Digital Degrowth. Pluto Press, 2024.
Saito, Kohei. Marx in the Anthropocene. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Scott, A. O. "‘Neptune Frost’ Review: Unanimous Gold Mine." The New York Times, June 2, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/movies/neptune-frost-review.html.
"Neptune Frost." , directed by Saul Williams, and Anisia Uzeyman. , Kino Lorber, 2022.