It’s a true statement. Nigeria hates Sony. I’ll give you two recent news stories to prove it.

Incident the first – Sony recently started airing some new advertisements (I said that in the British way in my head) where they claim the PS3 can do just about anything. As part of one of the commercials touting the price drop, some referred to ‘not being able to believe everything you see on the internet.’ And if you did believe everything you read on the internet, ‘you’d be a Nigerian millionaire’ by now. This is clearly poking fun at the nefarious behavior of the (largely Nigerian) 419 scammers. To me it all seems like fair play but apparently the government of Nigeria went so far as to release the following

Nigeria also demands an unconditional apology from Sony Corporation for this deliberate negative campaign against the country’s image and reputation.

“The apology must be given the same measure of publicity by Sony Corporation in all channels where the unfortunate adverts were aired.

You can read more about the whole thing here.

Incident the second – And now comes the backlash to the (Sony distributed) movie District 9 which the Nigerian government feels portrays Nigerians in a poor light. The movie has been banned in Nigeria and the country has demanded a second apology from Sony.

While it is true that there are Nigerians doing bad things in the movie, I didn’t take the idea that Nigerian women were sleeping with aliens out of the movie theater. It was just a movie, not a grand documentary on Nigerian lifestyle. The movie isn’t even set in Nigeria. And while I can’t confirm this, there have to be other movies set in Nigeria that don’t shed a flattering light on the country. I tried to do a quick search to find something, but I just kept finding stuff about the Nigerian film industry (I think they already corrupted the internet…). I get that you don’t want people to think Nigerians are some evil, blood-thirsty people, I really do. But it’s a movie, not an educational film. I’d say you don’t see other groups complaining, but you do. I heard Al Sharpton say once that he wanted to sue ‘Hollywood’ because of the way African-Americans are portrayed in films. Maybe the Irish government is upset about how the Irish always seem to be terrorists. Or maybe the German government is really against the stereotype that Nazis have German accents. If we’re looking for movies to be our tools of education, we’re in trouble. But go ahead and gripe I guess.

You can see more about the complaint here.

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