A recent story, that appears to have originated on Chinese news radio and picked up by Xinhuanet, suggests that thousands of dolphins helped protect a Chinese ship from attacking Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. Best line in the whole thing:
The suspected pirates ships stopped and then turned away. The pirates could only lament their littleness befor [sic] the vast number of dolphins. The spectacular scene continued for a while.
While the story is, at the very least, over-exaggerated, and likely completely made-up, it’s interesting that this narrative has caught peoples’ attention (as of April 17th, it had been bookmarked 55 times on Delicious and had been dugg 43 times). My simple question is: why?
Certainly, Somali pirates have become the story-du-jour. A quick look at the search term in Google trends shows no news coverage to speak of until November 2008 when a Saudi supertanker was taken and held for ransom. Coverage has expanded with the hijacking of the American-registered and crewed ship, the Maersk Alabama. Pirates certainly make for a sensational story and the Somali pirate story, writ large, has certainly has captured the attention of Western media.
There has been some news coverage that shows that the piracy around the Horn of Africa may have more systemic origins than simply a bunch of Somali dudes getting hold of AK-47s and buzzing ships with the intention of hijacking them for profit. I would suggest, however, that the idea of Somali pirates fits pretty well into our Western vision of what it is to be African: impoverished, desperate and dangerous. So this story just fits within our culturally-established understanding of what we expect from the Horn of Africa.
The dolphins connection is a bit more interesting. Again, we, in the West, have a long-established narrative of wild dolphins: playful and engaging, we identify with them so much that they’re a marine mammals that we have to see up-close. Hence the proliferation of swim-with-the-dolphins1 programs. Stories of wild dolphins as human helpers already exist in our collective memory: friendly dolphins helping mariners floundering at sea and our mutual dislike of sharks gets re-branded as news when dolphins save surfer from becoming shark’s bait.
But it’s an easy fit. And in this news piece, wild dolphins come to our rescue again. This time, they’re not protecting us from sharks. Rather, they appear to be protecting us from another menace: Somali pirates. So the same trope is re-hashed in a new way. Does it go beyond that, though? The intriguing question that comes out of this is are we de-humanizing the Somali? Certainly there’s an argument that a “Somali pirate as shark” metaphor is a plausible one–we can see similar predatory behaviours in both.
People are intrigued by this story because it appeals to our interest in bizzare news (you can see this in the tags applied in Delicious: “WTF”, “bizzaro” & “batshit crazy” appear) but more subtly, this narrative re-inforces an underlying assumption that we in the West have about the whole situation: these pirates are unpredicatble hunters preying on the merchant traffic travelling through the Indian Ocean. In being thwarted by dolphins, the news story also acts to cast the pirates to some space that’s not quite human. A place, arguably, that most of those living in the Horn of Africa might already occupy in Western minds.
- Don’t get me started on the fact that the Discovery Cove website has an Ovenbird–a warbler of the deep forest–calling. Here is just another example of generic “nature sounds” being used for the express purpose of creating a false sense of the natural; these kind of programs project a kind of human-animal relationship where it’s perfectly normal to swim with captive dolphins, and in so doing, you’re actually getting closer to nature. [↩]
