The world of film lost a beacon of social justice when Ousmane Sembene, the eloquent Senegalese novelist and filmmaker, died Sunday at his home in Dakar at the age of 84.
The film career of the man celebrated as the father of African cinema was bracketed by Black Girl (1965), depicting the racist treatment of a Senegalese nanny by her French employers, and Mooladé (2004), the commanding portrait of a tribeswoman who protects girls from the ritual of female cicumcision.
The theme of many Sembene movies is that it takes a village to raise a consciousness. He personally fought colonialism and government censorship to get many of his films made. In cofounding the Panafrican Festival of Film and Television, Sembene was instrumental in bringing to light the works of other struggling artists.
Son of a fisherman, the self-educated Sembene worked on the docks, on the railways and was conscripted into the French Army during World War II. For almost a decade he worked on the assemblyline at a Citroen plant in France.
Prompted both by his horror at the racism in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, with its fetishized images of black athletes, and by the experiences of colonialism, Sembene pledged to “Africanize” cinema.
Drawn from his own life on the waterfront in Marseilles, The Black Docker, his first novel, was published in 1956. He wrote five other novels and five collections of short stories.
Sembene was well into his forties when he became a filmmaker, growing more poetic and pointed with each succeeding film. He won top honors at the Venice Film Festival for Mandabi in 1968. But his greatest films are Xala (1974), a comedy about sexual and social impotence, Ceddo (1976), a parable about an 18th-century tribe that resists conversion by Catholics and Moslems, and Mooladé, his final film, which won a prize at Cannes.
Comments (2)
Ousmane Sembene has been a driving force and inspiration not only for African filmmakers and audiences, but for a global independent film movement. It was Sembene who clearly articulated to us that cinema is THE literary form of the modern age, a method of narrative engagement for communities whose primary communication is not text based. The moving image has become the vessel in which the mores and history of a people are shared.
I met Sembene in 1986. Arriving at his compound in Dakar uninvited, he graciously welcomed me and asked me about me my work and also shared drawings and storyboards from what would become Camp de Thiaroye, his powerful film about West African soldiers from World War II cheated by the French of their pay.
In addition to his filmworks, I had been a fan of Sembene's writing, in particular God's Bits of Wood, the story of a strike on the rail line between Dakar and Bamako. I even dared to take the train ride, imaging I was scouting the route as a first step towards making a film from Sembene's novel.
Interestingly, when Sembene was in Philadlphia at International House in 2005 at the invitation of Oliver Franklin for the presentation of Moolade, I asked him if would ever consider releasing the film rights to God's Bits of Wood. He said he had resisted it for years, because "a book is a book and not a movie," but lately had been in conversation with Danny Glover about making a film from the text.
Fespaco, the biennial gathering of African and African diaspora filmmakers, is another great gift that Sembene has left for us. This gathering in Burkina Faso which takes place every other February, has been a way for filmmakers to learn from each other and to see the genius of so many cultures. It’s also been an important venue for distributors to see extraordinary work and share it with audiences around the world.
Sembene stays with us.
Posted by Louis Massiah | June 13, 2007 5:25 PM
Posted on June 13, 2007 17:25
Although I am Senegalese, I only saw two of Ousmane Sembene's movies: le Mandat and Xala, both highly artistic and higly political as social satires of the senegalese economy and society.
I have leaving in the USA for many years now and was not aware that he passed away.
Thank you for your blog.
Posted by Hamdu Rabbi | February 13, 2008 3:16 PM
Posted on February 13, 2008 15:16