Sembene Remembered
On Tuesday, May 27, 2008, AFF co-produced a very special evening at the French institute Alliance Français, titled “Homage To Ousmane Sembène.” The evening began with a screening of a short documentary directed by Mamadou Niang on the life of Sembène. Fadhima Thiam, actress and personal friend of Sembène, read excerpts from one of Sembène’s novels, God’s Bits of Wood. After the reading, audiences were treated to a very special presentation of Sembène’s first film, Borom Sarret, with an original sound score performed by DJ Spooky (aka The Subliminal Kid). Mamadou Diouf, Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University, served as the evening’s master of ceremonies.
Ousmane Sembène’s films age well. The Senegalese filmmaker passed in 2006 at 84 years. His features, which include Mandabe, Xala (it charts the travails of postcolonial elites) and Mooladé (a polemic against female genital mutilation) can compare with any of the great masters of twentieth century film.
However, it is his first film, Borom Sarret, that best represents, for me, his oeuvre as well as his politics (which he lived through his films). Borom Sarret seems quaint by today’s standards. It is shot with a 16mm camera in black and white and is only 20 minutes long, but a lot is packed into that twenty minutes.
Before he made films, the Dakar native had already worked as a fisherman, bricklayer, dockworker and labor organizer in Marseille, France, written a novel, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu (God’s Bits of Wood), and studied cinema in Moscow, and those experiences are well reflected in his work.
The story of Borom Sarret is straightforward. It revolves around the day in the life of a poor cart driver. He gets taken in by a host of people that he encounters who either want a ride for free or exploit his good nature. The cart driver eventually gets ticketed by a policeman when he ventures into the former European quarter of the city, where his cart gets confiscated. That night he returns home to his wife and child sans cart and no money. The film ends with her handing him the child and leaving, presumably to make money.
I’ve seen the film at least a dozen times, and every time I see something different. I also use it in classes on modern African politics to illustrate the transition from colonialism to independence. But it often leads to discussions of working class life and the role of the state, the market, the police, poverty and decency outside Africa among my students. It is not surprising that a number of contemporary filmmakers—and critics—honor him as the father of African cinema.
Featured Director
Ousmane Sembène
Ousmane Sembène was born in 1923 in southern Senegal. He chose not to follow the profession of his father, who was a fisherman and instead became a mechanic, then a mason, joined the French Army in 1942, and later became an active militant in the labor movement. In 1948, he left for France, where he worked as a longshoreman and helped to organize the African dock workers in Marseille. He published his first novel in 1956, Le Docker Noir, based on these experiences. Realizing that much of his target audience was illiterate, he decided to become a filmmaker and went to study in Moscow. Upon his return to Africa, Sembène began a long and illustrious career as a filmmaker. He is often regarded as the “Father of African Cinema,” a title befitting the first African to make a fiction film distributed outside Africa, Borom Sarret (1963). His novels and films examine the many faces of a continent emerging from the colonial era, at grips with the tensions of independence and modernity. His work is an impassioned history of Africa’s political and social transformation throughout the 20th century. Ousmane Sembène passed away in 2007 in Dakar, Senegal. After two short films, he wrote and directed his first feature, La Noire de… (1966)(Black Girl). Received with great enthusiasm at a number of international film festivals, it also won the prestigious Jean Vigo Prize for its director. Shot in a simple, quasi-documentary style probably influenced by the French New Wave, Black Girl tells the tragic story of a young Senegalese woman working as a maid for an affluent French family on the Riviera, focusing on her sense of isolation and growing despair. Her country may have been “decolonized,” but she is still a colonial — a non-person in the colonizers’ world. Sembene’s next film, Mandabi (1968) (The Money Order), marked a sharp departure. Based on his novel of the same name and shot in color in two language versions – French and Wolof, the main language of Senegal – The Money Order is a trenchant and often delightfully witty satire of the new bourgeoisie, torn between outmoded patriarchal traditions and an uncaring, rapacious and inefficient bureaucracy. Emitaï (1971) records the struggle of the Diola people of the Casamance region of Senegal (where Sembène grew up) against the French authorities during WWII. Shot in Diola and French from an original script, Emitaï offers a respectful and unromanticized depiction of an old culture, while highlighting the role of women in the struggle against colonialist oppression. In Xala (1975), Sembène again takes on the native bourgeoisie, this time in the person of a rich, partially Westernized Muslim businessman afflicted by “xala” (impotence) on the night of his wedding to a much younger third wife. Ceddo (1977), considered by many to be Sembène’s masterpiece, departs from the director’s customary realist approach, documenting the struggle over the last centuries of an unspecified African society against the incursions of Islam and European colonialism. Featuring a strong female central character, Ceddo is a powerful evocation of the African experience. Many of Sembène’s other films deal with the themes explored in the aforementioned films and have inspired generations of African and diaspora filmmakers. Ousmane Sembène passed away in June 2007 at the age of 84 in Dakar, Senegal. Learn More
About the Author
Sean Jacobs
Sean Jacobs teaches in the media concentration of the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School in New York City. He was born and grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. He has also worked as a journalist and as a political researcher. He lives Brooklyn and blogs as Africa is a Country. Learn More
