The Films of Ousmane Sembène: Discourse, Culture, and Politics 1604978317, 9781604978315

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The Films of Ousmane Sembène

The Films of Ousmane Sembène Discourse, Culture, and Politics

Amadou T. Fofana

Cambria Contemporary Global Performing Arts Series General Editor: John M. Clum

Amherst, New York

Copyright 2012 Cambria Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to: [email protected], or mailed to: Cambria Press University Corporate Center, 100 Corporate Parkway, Suite 128 Amherst, NY 14226 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fofana, Amadou Tidiane, 1965The films of Sembène Ousmane : discourse, culture, and politics / Amadou Fofana p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 978-1-60497-831-5 (alk. paper) 1. Sembène, Ousmane, 1923-2007--Criticism and interpretation. 2.  Sembène, Ousmane, 1923-2007--Political and social views. 3.  Senegal--In motion pictures.  I. Title. PN1998.3.S397F64 2012 791.43092—dc23 2012036774

To my late parents, Khady Soukho and Alassane Fofana

Table of Contents

List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix Chapter 1: Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 2: Contextualizing Ousmane Sembène . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Chapter 3: Ousmane Sembène, A Screen Griot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Chapter 4: Language Matters  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Chapter 5: Sembène on Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Chapter 6: Women in Sembène’s Films . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Chapter 7: Global Issues in Sembène’s Cinema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Appendices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Ousmane Sembène’s Filmography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

List of Figures

Figure 1: Borom Sarret stands by his cart chewing a kola nut. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Figure 2: The griot singing the praises of Borom Sarret’s ancestors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Figure 3: Antagonists and Protagonists. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Figure 4: Appearing here is an oncoming cart with Borom Sarret and two passengers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Figure 5: The Mosque, an imposing structure in its form as well as its stark white color . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Figure 6: Borom Sarret finishes his prayers with a pile of charms on his side . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Figure 7: Borom Sarret’s fist is shown against the policeman’s boot. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Figure 8: Shown is the griot’s face (in Niaye) as his gaze follows Tanor going to stab his father. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Figure 9: Diouana is pictured as she comes across members of parliament in front of the National Assembly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Figure 10: Here is a frontal shot of Madior as he squats and talks to his uncle and his court . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

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Figure 11: Madior comes face to face with the king . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Figure 12: Sembène himself acts as a Ceddo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Figure 13: Aloïse (standing) points at the imam in protest against Baye Ali’s statement that his father, Guelwaar, is better off left in the Muslim cemetery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Figure 14: From left to right are Dibocor, the imam with the white scarf, and Ismaïla behind him. Facing the imam is Goor Mag, and the pastor is to the front right corner with a headband on . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Figure 15: Goor Mag, the imam, and Dibocor are inside the circle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Figure 16: Yamar shows Baye Ali his elbow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Figure 17: A middle-aged Muslim man receiving directions as to where he can pray is distracted by the cross hanging around the pump attendant’s neck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Figure 18: The pump attendant’s pendant catches the attention of the Muslim man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 Figure 19: Faat Kiné’s car is pictured as she stops at a roundabout to let water-carrying women cross in front of her . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Figure 20: Borom Sarret’s wife heads out of the house, leaving baby in the hands of her husband . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 Figure 21: Diouana stares at the mask like her own mirror image. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182

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Figure 22: Collé Ardo and her co-wives face the Salindana. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

Preface [M]an is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. – Clifford Geertz, citing Max Weber, The Interpretation of Cultures On a cold Wisconsin night after watching one of Ousmane Sembène’s most compelling and politicized films with several companions, I became intrigued with the creative mind behind the film’s impassioned social commentary.1 On my walk home in the deep snow that night, I promised to dedicate myself to learning more about the minutiae that inspired the film’s powerful narrative. Soon this became an obsession with meeting Sembène himself. But at that time, I had no idea how challenging it might be to actually meet with the famous filmmaker. When I began to investigate, I learned that Sembène was not often willing to be interviewed, and he rarely agreed to speak about the specifics of his films. This did not deter me from my quest, but I needed a strategy. Having learned that Sembène very much admired the former iconic leader of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, and by extension the people

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of Burkina Faso, I took a detour to that country on my way home to Senegal in the winter of 2004. I also learned that Sembène had good friends at FESPACO in the capital city of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou.2 When I arrived in Ouagadougou, I was introduced to Madame Boli, Soma Ardiouma, Clement Tapsoba, Guy Désiré Yaméogo, and Amadou Sondé, all of whom knew Sembène. They helped me find Sembène’s office telephone number in Dakar, and I called immediately. I briefly introduced myself to Sembène’s secretary, explaining to her that I was calling from Ouagadougou and was on my way to Dakar in the hopes of seeing Sembène. I also told her that I was bringing him a gift. When she then put me on hold to inform Sembène of my request to see him, I held my breath. To my great delight, he agreed to receive me. So now I needed to get him this gift I had promised to bring him. Fortunately, one of Sembène’s friends, Clement Tapsoba, knew precisely what I should buy: locally made special ginger and hibiscus drinks that Sembène enjoyed very much. With two bottles well wrapped in my bag, I left my hotel for the airport the next afternoon. Unfortunately, a luggage carrier who was helping me dropped my bag accidentally, breaking the hibiscus bottle stowed inside. I was crestfallen. The bright-red liquid soaked into all my clothes in the bag. But eventually I, now holding the bag in a tight protective grip, and the remaining bottle arrived safely in Dakar. My appointment with Sembène was scheduled at 11:00 a.m. the following day. I arrived at his downtown Dakar office early, at about 9:00, because I did not want to get caught in the crazy Dakar traffic. I brought with me the precious, now neatly wrapped bottle of special Burkina-produced ginger drink. While sitting awaiting my appointment in the building’s lobby, I eventually spotted an elderly man dressed in light-blue traditional attire walking slowly and heavily up the stairs into the lobby. My heart jumped. It was Sembène! I knew him instantly, and I smiled widely as he came toward me. But he did not even seem to notice my presence.

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At 11:00 a.m. sharp, I walked up the stairs into his office and introduced myself to the secretary. After she announced me, I went into his private office. The first thing I noticed was that the walls were crowded with awards and certificates, and Sembène himself now dressed casually in a t-shirt that said “Screen Griot.” We shook hands and, frankly, Sembène did not seem too inviting. We exchanged obligatory salutations for a while, and then I gave him his gift. He beamed—then everything changed. That gift, the special bottle from Burkina Faso, opened a door for me in a way I still do not quite understand but for which I am eternally grateful. When I told Sembène about the other bottle I had intended to give him, he responded in a way that has become more and more charged with meaning for me in the years since that initial encounter. About the other bottle he said simply, “That one was for the ancestors.” I have thought a lot about this initial encounter and the reasons why Sembène agreed to let me interview him. Was it the fact that I was unthreatening—a young adult scholar and really no more than an admiring consumer of his works? Perhaps it was that we shared similar political views or ideas about the major political issues in Senegal and Africa? Or was it quite simply the magic of the appropriate gift, in this case the ginger drink, brought all the way from a place Sembène admired? Regardless of the reason, I was fortunate to meet Sembène and, after my initial interview with him, was privileged to maintain an e-mail correspondence with him until a few months before he died in 2007. I had been viewing Sembène’s films for several years before I actually met him. Mostly, I was intrigued with the films for their boldness and artistry. But, I must admit, I also viewed the films, in my early years as a Senegalese immigrant in the United States, because they figuratively brought me home when I was missing the warmth and social life of Senegal. In the years after I met Sembène, my screenings of his films became far more intentional. Now I wanted to understand how Sembène —the man and no longer an abstraction—viewed the people of Senegal

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and Africa more generally and how he desired to change them at multiple levels and in quite revolutionary ways. I watched Sembène’s films with American friends and colleagues and prompted them for their impressions. I viewed the films with Senegalese compatriots in Senegal and compatriots living in the United States, with returned Peace Corps volunteers and other Americans who had spent time in Senegal, and I invited their analyses. For the past seven years, as a French and African literature and film studies professor in a college of liberal arts, I have screened the films with dozens of my undergraduate students and have facilitated discussions of Sembène’s films at a number of screenings at the very prominent Cascade Festival of African Films in Portland, Oregon. They too have offered their questions and interpretations. Each time I show a film, a lively discussion ensues. Such are Sembène’s films: thought-provoking, didactic, and peppered with symbolism and disputable meaning. Although Sembène’s career as filmmaker spanned a half century, his films are timeless; they deal with issues that are still relevant today.

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Endnotes 1. Please note the variation in the spelling of the name Sembène. It has an accent in French but none in English. In addition, note the inversion of his first and last name, with the last name, Sembène, generally coming first. This is a legacy of colonialism that Sembène came to accept. For this publication, the correct order of his name (i.e., Ousmane Sembène) is used. 2. FESPACO is the Ouagadougou Pan African Festival of Cinema and Television. Here, I am referring to the site, not the festival itself, which occurs every odd year.

Acknowledgments I cannot say thank you enough for the tremendous support and help of friends, colleagues, students, and family members who were a constant source of motivation and encouragement throughout the research and writing of this book. I would like to begin by expressing my profound gratitude to my colleague and friend, Joyce Millen, who was abundantly helpful and offered invaluable assistance and support throughout the project. Joyce’s constructive criticism and suggestions; her constant advice, support, and friendship have been invaluable on both an academic and a personal level. For all that, I am extremely grateful to her. I take immense pleasure in thanking Margaret DeWind for her priceless and timely assistance throughout the project. Her feedback, comments, and questions helped tremendously in shaping and completing the project. I am indebted to her. Special thanks to Patricia Alley for diligently reading every chapter even when she was much pressed for time. I am most grateful for her valuable suggestions and comments and for her cheering notes.

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To my brother, friend, host and personal assistant in Dakar, Abdou Karim Cissé, I express my warm gratitude. Abdou steadily and enthusiastically accompanied and supported me in my research and actively participated in the interviews I conducted in Senegal, Mali, and Burkina Faso. His help was critical to the successful completion of the book. Many thanks to Moussa Kaba, who helped me enormously in the Paris leg of the research. Moussa hosted me, fed me, helped me to navigate Paris’ complex transportation systems, and he accompanied me to different libraries and the Cinémathèque Française. I also feel indebted to him for the many hours he shared with me personal stories and insights that he had accumulated in the course of his forty years living and working in France. Moussa helped me to understand more fully the sociohistoric context and daily challenges faced by migrant workers torn between the demands of daily life in their host country and the expectations of their folks back home. My profound gratitude to Baba Taliby Diané for making Angers, France, feel like Vélingara (my hometown) on both Tabaski feasts I spent with him at his home in the Maine and Loire region. I remember well his poignant stories and insightful reflections of living as an immigrant in France. I will never forget our excursions to the boulangerie in downtown Saint-Barthélémy-d’Anjou! I am grateful to many people for help, both direct and indirect, in writing this book. This process of preparing this book and the writing of it was very much enhanced with the support and feedback of several stellar scholars: Professors Aliko Songolo, Mbye A. Cham, Françoise Pfaff, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Samba Gadjido, Oumar Ndao, Sada Niang, Tejumola Olaniyan, Linda Hunter, Kelley Conway, Cecilia Ford, Eileen Julien, Sage Goellner, Chérif Ayouba Corréa, Robert Baum, Lifongo Vetinde, Moussa Sow, Michael Dembrow, Dean Makuluni, Christian Flaugh, Sue Crust, Chia-Wen Lee (Blanca), and Lea Millay.

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I take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to the following people who have been instrumental in the successful completion of this project. They have spent a good amount of time talking to me, in some cases, more than once, about Sembène, African cinema, the profession of filmmaking or acting. Being all associated with the profession of filmmaking or with Sembène and African cinema, they provided insightful information that allowed me to better understand Sembène the man and his work: Samba Wane (Goor Mag in Guelwaar and Faat Kine’s father in Faat Kiné), Moussa Barro (personal friend of Sembène and retired employee of Théâtre National Daniel Sorano. He worked with Sembène on his earlier films), Fatoumata Coulibaly (Collé Ardo Gallo Sy in Moolaade), Fatou Kandé (filmmaker who also worked for Sembène on Faat Kiné), Clarence Delgado (Sembène’s long-time assistant and collaborator), Makhète Diallo (film technician who worked with Sembène), Ibrahima Sané (retired journalist, non-professional actor who played Jean in Faat Kiné and Sergeant Diatta in Camp de Thiaroye), Mame Daour Wade (documentary filmmaker and poet who knows Sembène’s cinema), Cheikh Ngaïdo Bâ (filmmaker and one-time president of the Senegalese association of filmmakers), Mbissine Thérèse Diop (personal friend of Sembène who played Diouana in La Noire de…), Thierno Ndiaye Dos (actor, who played Guelwaar in Guelwaar. He passed away in August 2012). Olivier Barlet and Thierno Ibrahima Dia (editors of Africultures. While I did not get to interview Olivier Barlet, he introduced me to Thierno I Dia, a Senegalese lecturer and film critique at a Bordeaux University in France, and Michel Amarger, an RFI journalist who knew Sembène, his work, and African cinema). Soma Ardiouma, Guy Désiré Yaméogo, Clément Tapsoba all FESPACO employees who helped me enormously and kindly accorded me insightful interviews. Diabé Sow (a retired Senegalese migrant who lived in Marseilles and worked at the docks. He was Sembène’s host and mentor when he first arrived in Marseilles). Vieux Cissé and Ismaïla Thiam, both young Senegalese filmmakers who kindly accepted my interview requests and introduced me to many other filmmakers.

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Many thanks to the following filmmakers whose insightful interviews helped me better understand the challenges facing African filmmakers: Haile Gerima, Gaston Kaboré, John Amponsa, John Kani, Jean-Marie Téno, and Joséphine Ndagnou. Several other friends and colleagues provided encouragement and offered support as I worked on this project. Special thanks to Gaetano and Gina DeLeonibus for their hospitality and generosity. Gaetano’s mentoring and guidance as a colleague and friend since I came to Willamette have been priceless. His flexibility and collaborative spirit allowed me time to focus on this project. My deep gratitude goes to Sammy and Meenal Basu for always welcoming me in their home. Sammy’s insightful advice and friendly jokes are always inspiring. Your collaboration and friendship are much appreciated! I would like to acknowledge the encouragement and extraordinary generosity of Kenneth and Janet Nolley. Throughout my years in Oregon, they have opened their home to me and have welcomed me in as a member of their family. For their unequivocal support and mentoring on this and other projects a mere expression of thanks will never suffice. I would like to acknowledge the enthusiastic support and encouragement of Madame Aminata Boly, Amadou Sondé, Ben Diogoye Bèye, Paul Barlow, Barbara and Mike Kolar, John Steiner, Craig Moro, Ortwin Knorr, Jaya Reddy, Mamadou Thiam, Françoise Goeury-Richardson, and Françoise Courtin-Schreiner. Several of my former students, Caitlin O’Neil, Shannon Satterwhite, Sonia L. Lupher, Kali Boehle-Silva, provided invaluable assistance at times when they too were under much pressure. I am extremely grateful for their help. Many thanks also go to Charles Utting for going beyond the call of duty to help with the stills and index, even during precious weekends. I am blessed to work in a convivial and supportive university environment. At Willamette University I extend my appreciation to my

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colleagues, administrators, and friends, including supportive Deans Carol Long and Marlene Moore, as well as generous and kind Pamela Smith, Natalia Shevchenko, Pam Moro, Fabien Poète, Hannah Harper. My profound gratitude to the Willamette University library staff, particularly to John Repplinger for providing much needed last-minute technical expertise. His enthusiastic assistance was key to the timely submission of the project. A heartfelt thank you also goes to Doreen Simmonsen for the efficient and prompt handling of my interlibrary loan requests and other services while I was working abroad and for always being so attentive to my sometimes rather challenging source finding needs. Many thanks to Melissa Treichel and Shanel Parette for being willing to go the extra mile and to Debra Dancik for her encouraging words and for allowing her staff the flexibility to be able to devote additional time to helping me complete this work. Many thanks to my good friend and former classmate, Imam Mamadou Touré, for the many hours of long and intense conversation about the Koran and Islam in general, and Islam and the role of marabouts in Senegal, in particular. Touré gives most generously of his time and his expertise for which I am a grateful beneficiary. I am deeply appreciative of the many friends and colleagues who have been a source of inspiration and encouragement to me since the initial phases of this project. These friends spent evenings watching and discussing Sembène’s films with me, and several provided feedback on chapters, at one point or another: Antoinette Pressley-Sanon, Kristen Velyvis, Tom Zinnen, Peter Quella, Kimberly Greco, Emmanuel Hernandez, Naomi Ziegler, Shireen Ally, Marie Kruger, Stephen Volz, Andrea Robles, Akosua Darkwah, Julie Kreunen, Steven Thomson, Lisa Heaton, Mary Carbine, Kelly Davis, Scott Barnwell, Diana Toledo, Janet Sausen, Solon Simmons, Rama Diabong, Nancy Podger, Beth Mullen, Nompumelelo Nzimande, Chiara Di Cesare, Birama Dieng, Mor Guèye (Miche), Dior Konaté, Abi Diop, Mamadou and Ndèye Koné, Anoumou Amekudji, Bonaventure Balla Omgba, Olympia Vernon.

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Many thanks to Ami Sullivan, Magteld Venter, Steve Guy, Bob Hunter for helping me to obtain permission to use the film stills in the book. My sincere gratitude to the staff of Cambria Press who provided much help in editing and putting the book in shape, often while under serious time constraints. My profound gratitude to my family, Fatou, Sétou, Vieux, Bouba, Aliou, Ousmane, Yamoussa, and Marie Fofana, for their continual and unwavering support. Special thanks also to Aya, Marie, and Sétou Soukho; Djiby and Mamadou Keïta; Vieux Cissokho (KGB) and Demba Traoré for their decades of teranga and warm support. Finally, yet importantly, I would like to avail myself of this opportunity, to express my heartfelt thanks, gratitude, and love to all my other friends, colleagues, students (current and former) and relatives for their compassion and patience, and their help in getting me to where I am today. To all of you, this book is as much mine as it is yours!

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

Chapter 1

Introduction Ousmane Sembène was the son of a simple fisherman. He was born on January 1, 1923, in the southern Senegalese city of Ziguinchor1, located in the Casamance which lies to the south of The Gambia. Sembène’s father was Lébou, a people organized in fishing communities and known as the original inhabitants of Cap Vert peninsula. His mother was Sereer, one of the last ethnic groups in Senegal to convert from its indigenous religion and belief system to Islam or Christianity. Both the Lébou and the Sereer were known for their public religious festivals, traditional rites of passage and healing rituals. As a child Sembène himself was initiated into a traditional Sereer Tuur and was even assigned a regular role of carrying the weekly milk offerings to the spirits of the family shrines, which, given his independent spirit, did not last very long.2 Although he was known to have rebelled a bit against the indigenous systems as a child, he maintained a strong attachment to and appreciation for preIslamic African social structures and beliefs throughout his adult life. His inclination toward traditional African spirituality is amply discussed in chapter five. Despite his humble roots and relatively little formal education, Sembène went on to become a well-known and influential Senegalese

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film director, producer, and writer. He began his writing career while working in Marseilles, France, publishing poems in a left-wing literary review, Cahiers du sud and in the review Action Poétique. His first significant work was a novel The Black Dockworker, published in 1956. Thereafter, he went on to publish nine other novels and several short stories, the last of which, Guelwaar (1996), was inspired by his 1992 film of the same title. At the age of forty, Sembène became interested in making films. He left France in 1960, moved back to Senegal, and then went to the Soviet Union to be trained as a film director. His first commercialized film, Borom Sarret (1963), followed by Niaye (1964) were both highly influenced by his Moscow training. His third film, La Noire de... (Black Girl) (1966), considered by many to be the first post-colonial feature-length Black African film, became a milestone in his career, winning him the prestigious JeanVigo prize and the title of pioneer of postcolonial Black African film. In all, Sembène produced eleven commercialized films over a forty-year period, with Moolaade (2004) being the last. Sembène passed away on June 9, 2007, at the age of eighty-four. Even while alive, Sembène was considered a legend. The impact of his works lives on. This volume is an effort to share the richness of these years of interpretations, analyses, and critiques with a wider audience.3 It is concerned with analyzing the artistry of the films as well as each film’s signifying elements and all that generates and conveys meaning. Sembène was a postcolonial writer and filmmaker, known for using his talent and creative works to submit his people to a critical self-reflection. This inward gaze he, along with many of his intellectual contemporaries, deemed as a necessary step toward liberation, from colonialism and its offshoots on one hand and from traditional practices that undermine individual freedoms on the other. Sembène tended to view African independence in terms of a necessary understanding and acceptance of indigenous cultural values, beginning with the recognition of the importance of native languages.

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The idea of liberation, very dear to Sembène, is a comprehensive notion that encompasses politics and culture and promotes the eradication of colonial relics from the country. Sembène’s vision of liberation also converges with those of Louis-Jean Calvet, a French linguist who suggested, [I]l n’y a pas et ne peut pas y avoir décolonisation économique et politique sans qu’intervienne aussi, dans le déroulement de ce processus, une décolonisation linguistique…, un peuple ne s’est pratiquement jamais libéré d’une emprise coloniale en conservant la langue du colonisateur.4 (There is not and never will be a political or economic decolonization without a subsequent linguistic decolonization…No people has practically ever freed itself from colonialism while keeping the colonizer’s language.) Although I agree with Calvet that linguistic liberation should come along with political and economic liberation, the sententious tone of the second part of this statement raises doubts. Given the multitude of ethnolinguistic groups in Africa, which is still a source of major divisions and ethnic violence (the example of Rwanda is still fresh in one’s memory, as are the ongoing crisis in Somalia and many others across the continent), colonial languages seem to play a unifying role, for no one ethnic group can claim its propriety. Therefore, linguistic liberation in Africa may not necessarily mean downright abandoning of the colonial language but certainly a promotion of the local languages through literacy programs (see later for extensive discussion of this question). Seen from this angle, Calvet’s theory of liberation supports and justifies Sembène’s determination to promote African languages and cultures through films. Although he did not preach abandoning the colonial language, Sembène was in favor of setting boundaries for its usage and giving the local languages a chance to thrive. By producing his films in indigenous languages, Sembène clearly suggested that the people’s hardwon independence was being appropriated by the bourgeois leaders who

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The Films of Ousmane Sembène

showed no interest in changing the colonial legacy. Thus, to reinstate the people’s victory over colonialism, one must speak to them in the languages they understand. For that reason, like those of many other African directors, Sembène’s films are strongly grounded in and inspired by African oral tradition. As the Burkinabe filmmaker Gaston Kaboré explained, “We have a perception of space, a certain notion of pacing and rhythm, and a narrative tradition that we can invest in our films. We can’t be Africans and make films like Americans.”5 Kaboré pointed to the necessary influence of oral tradition as a characteristic feature of African films. If Hollywood production is, rightly or wrongly, known to be primarily a commercial enterprise, in Africa filmmakers set for themselves the goal of using films as instruments to achieve the mental revolution necessary for the political liberation and the socioeconomic development of their corners of the continent. Given that few people have access to the official languages of education, local languages serve to challenge the long-held colonial and neocolonial prejudice against African languages. This understanding of cinema by individual African filmmakers is in line with the objectives of the Algiers charter of African film written by the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI), which Sembène helped to create in Tunis in October 1970. The primary aim of FEPACI was to promote the creation of national cinemas in all African countries.6 The Algiers charter stipulates, “African film should be a vehicle for education, information and consciousness-raising, and not strictly a vehicle for entertainment.”7 At their second congress of January 1975 in Algiers, they adopted the following charter: Les sociétés africaines contemporaines vivent encore une situation objective de domination qui s’exerce sur plusieurs plans: politique, économique et culturel. La domination culturelle d’autant plus dangereuse qu’elle est insidieuse, impose à nos peuples des modèles de comportement et des systèmes de valeur dont la fonction fondamentale est de renforcer l’emprise idéologique et économique des puissances impérialistes…Aussi, face à cette situ-

Introduction

5

ation de domination et d’extraversion culturelles, il est nécessaire et urgent de reposer en termes libérateurs la problématique interne du développement et du rôle que doit jouer dans cette démarche globale la culture et le cinéma.8 (Contemporary African societies are under an objective situation of domination that manifests itself at the political, economic, and cultural level. The cultural domination is all the more dangerous that it is insidious and imposes on our people behavioral models and value systems the main function of which is to strengthen the ideological and economic influence of imperialist countries…It is, therefore, necessary and urgent to consider in terms of liberation the question of development and the role culture and cinema should play in confronting this situation of cultural domination and extroversion.) The charter declares that African countries are still undergoing the political, economic, and cultural domination of imperialism, which is not only the most pernicious form of cultural domination but which also promotes behavioral patterns that aim to perpetuate the continent as the ideological and economic appendage of Europe. Therefore, culture in general and cinema in particular should be valued in terms of their contributions to liberation and development. As is clearly indicated, FEPACI sets for itself an essentially educational mission, to which Sembène fully adhered. The recurrence of such themes as national liberation, ethnic identity, and pride in Sembène’s film discourse mandated my choice of Frantz Fanon’s 1963 national culture theory as the framework of this analysis. Fanon theorized on such themes and contended that the struggle for national culture should be at the heart of the struggle for liberation. Throughout this project, I approach Sembène’s films as instruments of education intended to raise African people’s consciousness in their daily struggle to find their own voice and their own paths after years of colonial domination and cultural repression. I examine Sembène’s films in light of Fanon’s theory of national culture:

6

The Films of Ousmane Sembène La culture nationale est l’ensemble des efforts faits par un peuple sur le plan de la pensée pour décrire, justifier et chanter l’action à travers laquelle le peuple s’est constitué et s’est maintenu. La culture nationale dans les pays sous-développés doit donc se situer au centre même de la lutte de libération que mènent ces pays.9 (A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence. A national culture in underdeveloped countries should therefore take its place at the very heart of the struggle for freedom, which these countries are carrying on.)

It is critical, however, to note that in Fanon’s view, this “combative” stage is the last of three phases that characterize the evolution of native writers’ literary works. The first phase, assimilation, is when native intellectuals literally imitated works of the colonizing intelligentsia. It occurred during colonial times and predates any of the widely known black literary movements. In her historical account of black literature, Lilyan Kesteloot also strongly argued that the style of this literature was modeled after classics such as Verlaine, Hugo, Shakespeare, Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, and others: Littérature de parfaite correction stylistique qui servait de modèles dans les anthologies et dans les bibliothèques…et que l’on prêtait avec grand soin aux Noirs avides des mystères du savoir blanc.10 (A stylistically faultless literature that was used as model in anthologies and libraries…and that was carefully handed out to black people eager to learn of the mysteries of white wisdom.) A few examples of such works are L’Empire du Mogho Naba (1932) by Din Delobson, Karim (1935) by Ousmane Socé Diop, and Doguicimi (1938) by Paul Hazoumé. The common characteristic of these writers was that

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even though they were all in favor of assimilation and progress as theorized by the colonial discourse of the time, in reality they had very little contact with Europe. In contrast, the second phase, remembrance, was a nostalgic one animated by expatriate black students in Europe. It resulted from an upsurge of consciousness that started taking form in the student journal Légitime Défense (1932) and culminated in negritude animated by Césaire, Senghor, Damas, and others. Although this phase is not chronologically definite, its proponents, according to Fanon, were more nostalgic of their past, and as a result, they strove to revive it using Western aesthetics. Supposedly, this phase of pre-combat ended with the rise of nationalisms and the subsequent struggles for independence. As for the combative phase, it echoes revolutionary ideologies against colonialism and imperialism; it supports independence movements and the struggles for national liberation from internal as well as external forces of oppression. Strongly fueled by nationalist ideologies and cultures, this phase started before independence and still continues today because the struggle against imperialism and for national liberation, national culture, and development is current in most former colonies. As a result, Sembène, who came into filmmaking to educate his people and thus contribute to the struggle for national liberation from the relics of colonialism and the burdensome practices of traditional Africa, fits unquestionably into this phase. Sembène strongly believed that African films should be geared primarily toward educating the masses, as well as making the philosophical quandaries and political issues contested by elites accessible to the poor and those with little to no formal education. In Sembène’s view, African films should tell stories, and African filmmakers are storytellers. In this light, he referred to himself as a modern-day griot, one who is responsible for reconstructing and learning from the past in order to make sense of the present and prepare for the future. He expected African films, akin to morality tales, to spur critical thinking among viewers.

8

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

Sembène’s films offer non-Africans a rich window into another world. They offer Africans an opportunity to reflect on what they take for granted in their day-to-day lives.11 One of the reasons I have long been fascinated by Sembène is his unwavering courage to tackle difficult and controversial subjects head on and in ways that leave audiences contemplative and intellectually stimulated. Examples of the controversial themes he has brought into sharp relief in his films include a critical rereading of Senegalese and African history, contested perceptions of what constitutes indigenous versus foreign political and economic interests, and the ever-changing terrain of religious plurality on the African continent. His films problematize male dominance, gerontocratic rule, polygamous marriage, socioeconomic disparity, and long-honored cultural practices such as female circumcision. Though Sembène was distressed by cultural alienation and implacable in his opposition to abuses of the postcolonial bourgeoisie, he compassionately paid tribute to what he called “the daily heroism of African women.” He tempered his idealism with realism, urging Africans to embrace the inescapable forces of globalization while also preserving fundamentally African social values. Sembène’s films are culturally rich and intellectually thought-provoking, and though he sometimes sparked controversy, he represented African cultures in inspirational and often prophetic ways. Although Sembène’s central aim was to reach African audiences and encourage a dialogue within Senegalese society, his films are also extraordinarily effective in introducing non-African audiences to many of the most intriguing cultural issues and social changes facing African people today. The films are not fast-paced in the manner of many Hollywood films. Rather, they are deliberately unhurried and driven by the narrative. They show actual ways of life, social relations, and patterns of communication and consumption, as well as the joys and tribulations of West African people. For people who have never been to Africa, the films offer an accessible first gaze. For those who have visited or lived in an African culture, the films provide a way to explore African society and culture more profoundly.

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Sembène was an independent filmmaker, solely and totally responsible for the content of his films, which were inspired by the realities of daily life.12 This focus on microcosmic social relations and day-today politics is so central to Sembène’s art that his films breed provocative commentary on social, historical, political, economic, linguistic, religious, and gender issues relevant to Senegalese society. Because of his concern with daily Senegalese life, Sembène targeted the common people whose voices are seldom or never heard. In fact, depicting the struggles and concerns of average Senegalese people was a central preoccupation of his films, as he himself articulated: Ce que j’ai à dire, je le dirai. Je montrerai comment vivent les Africains…L’artiste exprime les préoccupations de son peuple et de son temps. Plus qu’un simple témoin, moi, j’entends être et demeurer un artiste partisan…Passez dans les rues de Dakar, vous verrez les gens que je dépeins dans mes œuvres.13 (What I have to say, I will say. I will show the way Africans live… An artist expresses the preoccupations of his or her people and time. As for me, more than just being a witness, I want to be and remain a partisan artist. Walk along the streets of Dakar and you will see the people I depict in my work.) Consistent with his focus on the daily preoccupations of his people and the disenfranchised in general, Sembène declared in several interviews that he made films for a purpose. In his view, he, like the cobbler or the tailor, contributed to the development of society through his work. Unlike the cobbler and the tailor, however, whose contributions are material, Sembène made himself useful (utile) to his community by seeking to awaken its critical sensibility.14 Through his films, Sembène aimed to spur critical thinking in his audience. Reflecting on his role as a filmmaker, Sembène argued, J’ai conscience de faire quelque chose d’utile, ne serait-ce que pour les deux heures pendant lesquelles les gens s’enferment dans un

10

The Films of Ousmane Sembène cinéma pour voir mes films. Quand je les vois, je suis content pour l’Afrique.15 (I feel that I am doing something useful, even if only for the two hours during which people lock themselves in a theatre to watch my films. Seeing them [the people] makes me happy for Africa.)

Thus, Sembène felt a sense of accomplishment when people watched his films because the movies offered a forum for meaningful exchange between him and his audiences. His films gave him the opportunity to talk directly to his people, an opportunity his writings failed to provide on a larger scale because much of the population in Senegal remained illiterate in French. Because his films interpret and make provocative commentaries on the world of the audience, he was sure to capture viewers’ attention and goad them, if not into action at least into critical self-reflection. Sembène manipulated his audience with the power of his film language. He did not seek to please his African audiences, nor did he try to discourage them. Rather he endeavored to surprise or to shock them and violate their expectations by projecting onto the screen a distorted—yet not false—image of themselves. As a result, he left them struggling with the feeling that their privacy, their most intimate thoughts and relations, was exposed by the intrusion of the camera into the unfathomed and unexpressed depths of their psyches. Sembène’s determination to encourage meaningful exchanges among his audiences found an echo in the aesthetic guidelines of FEPACI. This organization believed cinema was the most effective instrument of mutual communication among African peoples. Its founders saw the potential for film to advance the political and economic integration of the continent. After its creation, FEPACI adopted a charter that outlined the ethics of African filmmakers. Sembène’s vision of cinema fully met the goals stated by FEPACI. He considered himself and his peer African filmmakers to be educators:

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La plupart des cinéastes africains abordent le cinéma en termes d’éducation et de formation. Nous ne pouvons pas nous permettre de faire du cinéma comme en Occident…Avant d’utiliser chaque image, je suis obligé de calculer, d’imaginer l’impact et la force de cette image sur les spectateurs.16 (Most African filmmakers approach cinema in terms of education and training. We cannot afford to make films like Westerners. Before using an image, I must calculate its potential impact and the power it may have on the audience.) Sembène’s meticulous selection of images and his awareness of their power make the analysis and interpretation of his films a complex, challenging, and yet richly rewarding enterprise. In addition to provocative images, he uses cunning and sharp narratives, which he hoped would linger in film viewers’ minds to provoke reflection and dialogue long after the films ended. It is for this reason that the majority of his films are purposely open-ended, with well-placed silences and suspenseful moments that defy audience members’ expectations of closure. Sembène hoped the discussions arising from the open-ended narrative of each film would offer a forum in which viewers could critically engage in the film’s meaning. Moreover, he hoped that his films, as African works of art, would give local viewers opportunities to see themselves portrayed as others might see them, which would in turn inspire critical self-reflection. This study examines the artistry of Sembène’s films as well as the multitude of signifying elements Sembène uses in them to communicate in less direct ways with his audience. The book interprets the meaning conveyed by images through their placement and function within the films, and it contributes new insights into Sembène’s interpretations of cultural practices and the meanings he ascribes to social behaviors. It examines how Sembène uses language, mise-en-scène, cinematography, and creative editing to evoke the emotions of his targeted audience. Several chapters in the volume also demonstrate how the many ironies

12

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

and political economic tensions that are so characteristic of Sembène’s work are best understood within the sociocultural context of each film’s production. Hence, to make sense of Sembène’s cinema, one must be willing to read beyond the denoted meaning of the storyline and to dig into the cultural significance of the carefully selected and manipulated codes and images. Lastly, Sembène advocated for a pragmatic African cinema, as clearly articulated by the Sembène scholar Sheila Petty: “Sembène himself has declared that African cinema is a useful instrument for change born out of social necessity [which] is in the process of becoming the most important tool for the fertilization of a new African culture.”17 Here, the ideas behind “social necessity” and “African culture” suggest that African cinema in general, and Sembène’s in particular, serves as an instrument for instigating social change. As an instrument for change, African film is tied to a given social and historical context that frames its meaning and validates its existence.

What Distinguishes This Volume There is no dearth of published writing about Sembène. In fact, his name and references to his works recur in almost every publication on the history of African cinema. It simply is not possible to survey African literature and cinema from its beginnings without seeing mention of Sembène’s works. This is due to his prominence and status as one of the first African authors and film directors as well as the fact that he had so many “firsts” to his credit: La Noire de… (1966) was the first featurelength postcolonial Black African film, and Manda bi (1968) was the first postcolonial Black African film in color and the first postcolonial Black African film in a national language. Sembène was also among the first and most prolific West Africans to write in French. Yet despite the fact that so many articles, book chapters, and PhD dissertations have been

Introduction

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written about Sembène’s novels and films, very few are devoted exclusively to the study of his films. To explain how this volume is situated within the wider literature on African cinema and on Sembène more specifically, I devote the remainder of the chapter to a review of the major works of relevance. In 1996, after Sembène had completed eleven of his thirteen films, three important edited volumes were published: Imruh Bakari and Mbye Cham’s African Experiences of Cinema, Sada Niang’s Littérature et cinéma en Afrique francophone: Ousmane Sembène et Assia Djebar, and Sheila Petty’s A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembene (discussed later).18 Bakari and Cham’s African Experiences of Cinema (1996) is a comprehensive study of the history and trajectory of African cinema. Although it is concerned with African cinema in general, it includes a number of chapters focusing primarily on aspects of Sembène’s films, such as the chapter that looks at history by Mamadou Diouf, who “trace[d] the vicissitudes of the imagination and the production of a historical memory” in his reading of Ousmane Sembène’s Ceddo and Djibril Diop Mamberty’s Hyenas; other chapters discuss the representation of women (Sheila Petty) and, to a lesser extent, eroticism in sub-Saharan African films (Francoise Pfaff). Niang’s edited volume comprises chapters that focus on central themes in the cinema and literature of Sembène and Assia Djebar. Bernard Moitt explored race and resistance in Camp de Thiaroye as well as archival documentation of the story. Frederick Ivor Case examined aesthetics by focusing on the ideological use of language in Sembene and Djebar’s written works. As for Anne Dominique Curtius and Joseph Paré, they examined the film and novel versions of Manda bi. Samba Gadjigo’s discussion revolves around Sembène’s take on both cinema and literature, two art forms in which his name came to be deeply associated with Africa. Alioune Tine’s article examines diglossia in Sembène’s written works, whereas Sada Niang compared and contrasted literary and cinema productions of Sembène and Djebar.

14

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

Written in French (1996) and translated into English in 2000, Olivier Barlet’s African Cinemas: Decolonizing the Gaze is a historical review of African cinema. Although it does not focus extensively on any one film or filmmaker, it provides an overview of many African films and references all of Sembène’s films up to and including Camp de Thiaroye (1988). This three-part volume first outlines the history of African cinema since colonial times and explores such themes as decolonization of the imagination and Afrocentrism. The second part of the volume discusses the narrative of selected films, including some of Sembène’s work. In the last part of the volume, Barlet examined the socioeconomic contexts and the many hurdles African filmmakers face as they seek to secure funding for their films. In his volume, African Film: Re-Imagining a Continent (2003), Joseph Gugler undertook a historical and thematic examination of African cinema. Of the seventeen African films he examined, Sembène’s Xala (1974) figures prominently. By showing how Xala satirically illustrates the illusion of independence and the betrayal of the African elite, Gugler illustrated why the films are best viewed with an appreciation of the historical, social, political, and cultural context in which they were produced. Melissa Thackway’s Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film (2003) is particularly geared toward film theory, analysis, and classification of Francophone African films. One of the book’s most significant chapters examines the relationship between indigenous oral literature (orature) and African film. It also provides a rich account of the many kinds of traditional story structure that can be seen in contemporary African film. In Thackway’s chapter on films that deal with the experience of African immigrants in Europe, she compared and contrasted Sembène’s La Noire de… and Le Cri du Cœur by Idrissa Ouédraogo. Although these two films are many years apart (1966 and 1994), Thackway brought to life the discussion of migration in African films, a topic particularly underexplored.

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In his Modernity and African Cinema: A Study in Colonialist Discourse, Postcoloniality, and Modern African Identity (2004), Femi Okiremuete Shaka recognized Sembène’s anticolonialist discourse in his films and analyzed Manda bi, Borom Sarret, and Camp de Thiaroye as Sembène’s unromanticized reading of modernity in Africa. The issues discussed in the volume include colonialist representations of Africa in film and African theories of cinema. Shaka reproached African film critics for not providing a framework of analysis for African films and suggested such concepts as Africanness, modernity, and subjectivity as potential frameworks. Roy Armes, who traced the history of filmmaking in Africa since its beginnings in African Filmmaking: North and South of the Sahara (2006), recognized the pioneering role of Sembène in the birth and evolution of filmmaking in Africa south of the Sahara. His book highlights the historic evolution of the themes and aesthetics of African cinema and stresses the stylistic break of the younger generation of African filmmakers from the didactic films of the older generation. Kenneth Harrow’s Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism (2007) is a call to rethink African film criticism. In this volume, Harrow invited African film scholars to move away from the old models of criticism that have remained unchanged since the early days of cinema practice in Africa and to explore new avenues, a new paradigm of criticism of African films. He offered a range of theoretical readings of African film aesthetics, including Sembène’s, and suggested new insights for theoretical explorations of film praxis and cultural production in general in Africa. Sembène’s films are referenced throughout the book, but Xala and, to a lesser extent, Faat Kiné receive the most critical attention. Although six of the ten filmmakers featured are from Francophone West Africa, Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors (2007) by David Murphy and Patrick Williams discusses the many issues facing filmmakers in Africa, including North Africa and Lusophone Africa. Each

16

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

chapter provides an overview of a specific director’s production and background education to make sense of the films. Chapter 2, which is devoted to Sembène, examines his films’ social, political, and cultural context as well as the themes of resistance and representation. In his 2010 publication, African Cinema: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics, Manthia Diawara surveyed African film history beginning with the pioneering role of Sembène. In the volume, Diawara focused on the new developments of African cinema and underscored the tendency of the new generation of filmmakers to break away from nationalism and social realism to explore new forms of aesthetics. Although he seemed favorable to the need for departure from the old ways, he concluded his section on Sembène by appealing to the younger generation of African filmmakers not to ignore Sembène’s legacy. The few notable book-length works that focus exclusively on Sembène or on his cinema and literature include early volumes by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1972), Carrie Dailey Moore (her 1973 PhD dissertation), Françoise Pfaff (1984), Daniel Serceau (1985), Samba Gadjigo et al. (1993), Sheila Petty (1996), Anthère Nzabatsinda (1996), David Murphy (2001), Samba Gadjigo (2007), Annett Busch and Max Annas (2008), Thierno Dia and Olivier Barlet (2009), and Samba Gadjigo and Sada Niang (2010). I address each one in the pages that follow, though not necessarily in this order. An increasing number of edited volumes on Sembène’s oeuvre have come out in recent years, and a few are currently under way. Volumes with multiple authors, though generally brilliant and valuable pieces of critical work that afford a multifaceted approach and perspective on the works of one particular author and writer (Sembène in this case), have the disadvantage of missing the organizational and theoretical cohesiveness of a full-length book conceived and written by one author. Although all the chapters may be well-documented critical examinations of different aspects of Sembène’s films or writings, the authors have different mindsets, different backgrounds and educations, and most

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certainly different areas of interest, all of which is reflected in their individual chapters and does not necessarily make for a smooth articulation of the different parts of an edited volume. One publication devoted to Sembène’s work that stands out for its multifaceted approach and for how it incorporates Sembène, the man himself, into the analysis of his films is a special edition of a wellrespected French review of cinema and television, CinémAction.19 This special edition of CinémAction, Sembène Ousmane (1985), edited by Daniel Serceau, examines aspects of the films from Borom Sarret (1962) to Ceddo (1976) and provides a compelling and well-thought-out collection of articles that analyzes the themes, style, and narrative techniques in Sembène’s cinema. This special issue of CinémAction designated Sembène as the father of African cinema, the one who had laid the foundation for a true African film language. In the same way, Samba Gadjigo, Ralph H. Faulkingham, Thomas Cassirer, and Reinhard Sander edited Ousmane Sembène: Dialogues with Critics and Writers (1993), which emphasizes different aspects of Sembène’s films and writings, including politics and ideology (Frederick Ivor Case), aesthetics (Francoise Pfaff), and history (Mbye Cham). Petty edited A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembène (1996), a collection of articles written by several scholars. All the authors deal with specific aspects of Sembène’s films, such as the trajectory of African cinema (Roy Armes), Sembène as a militant artist (Philip Rosen), orality (Sada Niang), culture (Frederick Ivor Case), film language (Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike), and language use in Sembène’s cinema (Ann Elizabeth Willey). Willey explains Sembène’s turn to film as an alternative medium of communication in his endeavor to reach the majority of the Senegalese and African audiences. In 2009, two years after Sembène’s death, Thierno Ibrahima Dia and Olivier Barlet—with the collaboration of Boniface Mongo-Mboussa and under the auspices of the journal Africultures—put together a compilation of articles as a tribute to Sembène: “Sembène Ousmane (1923–2007).”

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The Films of Ousmane Sembène

These articles, most of which were authored by former collaborators of Sembène—journalists, film scholars and professionals, and other artists —provide a wide range of perspectives and testimonies as well as an extensive overview of Sembène’s life and works. Whereas the chapters are by no means connected in a linear fashion, they are filled with anecdotal stories from personal interactions or interviews with Sembène that make for a better understanding of both the man and his work. “Letter to Ousmane Sembène,” by Clarence Delgado, Sembène’s longtime personal assistant, movingly and eloquently summarizes the uncompromising spirit of the artist. Similarly, Samba Gadjigo and Sada Niang edited a volume in Sembène’s memory, Un viatique pour l’éternité: Hommage à Ousmane Sembène (2010). Composed of twenty-four chapters written by individuals including Sembène’s former collaborators, film technicians, film scholars, and literary critics, this volume offers a multilayered perspective on Sembène’s life and work and provides the reader with a variety of angles from which to start making sense of Sembène’s impressive legacy. Although there is no clear thematic linkage between the chapters, they all reveal in some way the authors’ personal affinity with Sembène or his work. A few single-author books examine Sembène’s work, focusing either on his novels exclusively, on his written works and films, or on just his films. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s Sembène Ousmane Cinéaste (1972) is a good example. Given that Vieyra was himself a film professional, a personal friend of Sembène’s, and a production manager for three of Sembène’s films, Vieyra’s book contains insider information and stands as an example that inspires scholars of Sembène. Vieyra is regarded as the first Senegalese film critic and “L’âme pensante du cinéma africain” (the thinking soul of African cinema),20 and although dated, his work on Sembène and African cinema still resonates among African film scholars. His book is composed of two parts uneven in length, which complement each other quite well in their attempt to contextu-

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alize and explicate Sembène’s life and cinema. In the first part, entitled “La première période 1962–1971,” Vieyra combines testimonies, critical analyses, and technical descriptions of the films. The second part of the book is a compilation of research data about Sembène’s written texts, interviews he granted, and critical reviews of his work. Carrie Dailey Moore was the first doctoral candidate in North America to write a dissertation on Sembène’s life and work, which partially explains why I have chosen to reference it. To date, according to the MLA International Bibliography, twenty-two PhD dissertations focus on or include Sembène’s works. Moore’s dissertation is also significant because she worked with and for Sembène while conducting her PhD fieldwork. Even more significantly, the two were married for a few years, during which time they traveled together. Moore took on the role of translator for Sembène when they toured North America. Sembène accorded Moore his longest and most revealing interview. Whereas with most others he refused to discuss particularities of his films, with Moore, Sembène spoke openly and with enthusiasm. Moore’s inspiring dissertation on Sembène’s artistic trajectory is titled “Evolution of an African Artist: Social Realism in the Works of Ousmane Sembène” (1973). The dissertation, which focuses largely on Sembène’s literature and films, is informed by Moore’s personal relationship with the writer and film director and is enriched with quotations from Sembène and people from his immediate social and professional circle. Moore declared from the outset, however, that “Sembène’s films are devoid of intricate symbolism, elaborate camera shots, and sumptuous decors,”21 an interpretation that deprived her work of a dimension that became increasingly appealing to Sembène and intriguing to film critics. Perhaps Moore should have pushed her analysis of the films beyond the narrative to allow her readers to see the intricacy and meaning-laden cultural symbols that Sembène used in his films. Her statement underrates the significant camera work and point-of-view shots in Borom Sarret as well as the intriguing symbolism of, for example, the mask in La Noire de …. In Sembène’s later films, although natural lighting and decor were still

20

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

used, mise-en-scène and cinematography play a very significant role in constructing meaning. The current study fills that gap. Françoise Pfaff undertook a film-by-film analysis of Sembène’s filmography in the book The Cinema of Ousmane Sembène: A Pioneer of African Film (1984), which analyzed eight of Sembène’s films, from Borom Sarret (1963) to Ceddo (1976). Part I of this book presents background information on Africa and cinema, African oral tradition, and the role of the director as modern griot. In addition to language, Pfaff dealt with such features as space and time, actors, objects and their symbolism, soundtrack, lyricism and epic, and comedy and satire. The last section of the book comprises an extensive bibliography of research conducted on African cinema and literature, a Sembène filmography up to 1976, and statements by numerous scholars about Sembène as the leading African filmmaker. In the third chapter, “The Africanness of Sembène’s Film Language,” Pfaff dealt with the issue of language in Sembène’s films. She started by quoting Sembène: “We have had enough of feathers and tom-toms.” In response to this quote, Pfaff stated, “[Sembène is] alluding to the way in which Africa has been described by many non-African directors who would rather show cheap exoticism than tackle themes of Africa’s historical and social reality.” Pfaff’s observation illustrates how Sembène’s films are informed by the sociocultural context of Senegal and Africa. She went on to remark that in addition to directing, Sembène also served as “scriptwriter, producer, and editor, the dominant creative force of his films.”22 David Murphy’s Sembène, Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction (2001) is an analysis of both Sembène’s films and literary works. In it, Murphy strove to explain Sembène’s re-reading of Africa’s past, his critical gaze into African culture, and his unique interpretation of modernity in Senegal. Sembène’s political discourse, his representation of women, and his attacks on colonialism and neocolonialism in Emitaï, Ceddo, and Camp de Thiaroye feature prominently in the book. Of the book’s seven chapters, four focus exclusively on films and two discuss Sembène’s

Introduction

21

fictional novels. In a chapter focused on a critical analysis of Manda bi, Murphy began with an overview of what motivated Sembène, an already established author at that point, to make films. Murphy continued with a well-documented reading of Manda bi, very much defending Sembène’s views against those of Senghor and his negritude cohorts (including Bara Diouf and Cheikh Hamidou Kane), for whom Manda bi was but an overly pessimistic and false representation of Senegal. This chapter is followed by an analysis of Sembène’s most studied film, Xala, a biting satire of the nascent postcolonial Senegalese bourgeoisie. In a latter chapter, Murphy surveyed Sembène’s representation of women as mothers, daughters, and prostitutes, not only in his films but also in his novels. The three history-inspired films that Sembène made, Emitaï, Ceddo, and Camp de Thiaroye, are the focus of his chapter on empire and resistance. The last chapter—a contrastive analysis of The Last of the Empire (novel) and Guelwaar (film), two scathing attacks on the politics of neocolonialism and the dependency mentality in postcolonial Africa—is a well-crafted piece that underscores the political deadlock that Sembène began to denounce in Borom Sarret. Whereas The Last of the Empire examines the ongoing control and exploitation, via technical assistance, of the former colony by the former colonizer, Guelwaar disparages the political elite and sneers at their trading foreign aid against the people’s dignity. Other scholars have focused more exclusively on Sembène the man, the artist, and the social critic. The most comprehensive of these is by Samba Gadjigo, whose biography of Sembène, Ousmane Sembène, une Conscience Africaine (2007), offers vital information for making sense of Sembène’s work. This biography weaves together Sembène’s personal notes with testimonial accounts from Sembène’s immediate family and other relatives and friends. It also includes astute observations of scholars commenting on and responding to certain prose from the fictional characters of Sembène’s novels. In it, Gadjigo presented readers with a variety of lenses through which to examine Sembène’s work, and he demonstrated with ample evidence that Sembène’s novels

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and his cinematic works were grounded in and driven by his own life experiences.23 Lastly, Annett Busch and Max Annas compiled a series of interviews conducted with Sembène by journalists, scholars, film critics, and others from different areas of the world over a fifty-year period. This book, Ousmane Sembène: Interviews (2008), provides English-language translations of twenty-five of his interviews, demonstrating the wide global appeal of his films as well as the universal nature of many of the themes he tackled in his literature and cinema.

Contribution of This Study A chief aim of this study is to expand upon the works of Vieyra, Moore, Pfaff, Murphy, and all the others who have focused intellectual attention on analyzing Sembène’s cinema. Vieyra closely examined Sembène’s first six films. Moore undervalued and paid hardly any attention to cinematography in the films that she examined. Pfaff, who did the most extensive work in this area, did not cover the films that came out after 1976, namely Camp de Thiaroye (1988), Guelwaar (1992), Faat Kiné (2000), and Moolaade (2004). In addition to the fact that several films have yet to be fully analyzed, much remains to be said as well about cinematography, mise-en-scène, and symbolism. Murphy, whose book came out before Sembène’s last movie, devoted part of his volume to the analysis of Sembène’s literary texts, making it less feasible for him to thoroughly cover Sembène’s filmography. As a result, films such as Manda bi, Xala, Emitaï, Ceddo, Camp de Thiaroye, and La Noire de… have received considerable attention in the literature, whereas the latter films have thus far received much less attention. This is also the place to stress that though Manda bi and Xala in particular have inspired much attention among critics, Sembène’s later films have comparatively not been adequately examined.

Introduction

23

My volume is devoted to the study of Sembène’s readily accessible films: Borom Sarret, Niaye, La Noire de…, Manda bi, Emitaï, Xala, Ceddo, Camp de Thiaroye, Guelwaar, Faat Kiné, and Moolaade. The study seeks to answer the following series of questions: Who was Sembène? What were the sociopolitical circumstances surrounding his birth and upbringing? What specific events and social movements most influenced his life? How and why did Sembène come to filmmaking? What is the oral tradition, and how did it inspire Sembène’s filmmaking style? How did Sembène compare to the modern griot? How did Sembène perceive his role as filmmaker? How did Sembène manipulate language (verbal and nonverbal) to evoke the emotions of his audience? How did he manipulate language and images to comment on reality? Where did Sembène situate himself regarding the legacy of the oral tradition? Why did language matter so much for Sembène? What determined the choice of national language over French and vice versa in his films? How effective was Sembène’s use of the national languages in his films given that he wrote all his novels in French? How did Sembène’s personal inclination to challenge preconceived notions spill into his filmmaking? How did Sembène portray religion in his films? What was Sembène’s perception of the coexistence of Islam, Christianity, and the traditional African forms of worship? How are women represented in Sembène’s films? How did Sembène represent globalization and what was his take on it? How did Sembène perceive Africa and its place within the overall context of globalization? I have long been fascinated with Ousmane Sembène, the artist and agent of social change, and my involvement in interpreting his films has a ten-year history. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, I had the good fortune of interviewing Sembène on two separate occasions in his downtown Dakar office, and we communicated regularly thereafter via e-mail until his death in 2007. I began my in-depth analysis of Sembène’s films for my doctoral thesis in African languages and literature, which I completed in 2005, and I have been teaching Sembène’s cinema at the college level ever since. In 2007, I cofounded with several colleagues the

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The Films of Ousmane Sembène

Society for the Study of Sembène Ousmane, which has, every year since its inception, organized a panel on Sembène’s works that is presented at the annual meeting of the African Literature Association.24 For the preparation of this volume, I conducted extensive archival research on Sembène’s works and audience reactions to them in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, the United States, and France (Paris, Marseilles, Angers, and Bordeaux). My articles about his films have appeared in Literature and Film Quarterly, West Africa Review, Equinoxes, and African Affairs. Perhaps of most importance for the preparation of this volume, I conducted key interviews with twenty different individuals who worked closely with Sembène, including his longtime assistant, Clarence Delgado; several of his film technicians; actors; actresses; journalists; university professors; professional associates; old friends; and his biographer, Samba Gadjigo. To place Sembène in the context and history of African cinema more generally, I also interviewed other African directors from Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Senegal. This volume is composed of seven chapters, including this first chapter that is the introduction. Chapter 2 examines the sociopolitical context in which Sembène grew up, highlighting aspects of his formative years and the major events that influenced his life and inspired his artistic works. Chapter 3 discusses the African oral tradition, especially the role of the traditional storyteller, and its influence on Sembène. Chapter 4 examines the psychological impact of language on the colonized subject and then investigates how, through his cinema, Sembène promotes African languages. Chapter 5 focuses on Sembène’s cinematic portrayal of the tense coexistence within Senegal of Islam and Christianity and his appeal to Senegalese people for greater religious tolerance. Chapter 6 examines what Sembène considered hurdles to the liberation of African women. It also discusses how women from different socioeconomic classes are depicted. Chapter 7 examines Sembène’s understanding of global political and economic forces and how they play out on the lived experiences

Introduction

25

of ordinary Senegalese people. It examines how Sembène addressed the growing influence of globalization on African societies and how they cope with the changing forces brought about by international migration and mass media. Themes such as globalization, African food crises, structural adjustment programs, and international migration addressed in this volume are introductory in nature. Further reading will be needed for a better grasp of these complex notions. This volume includes a complete synopsis of each film followed by a list of the film’s most important characters. The synopses are provided in an appendix in the following order: appendix A (Borom Sarret, 1963); appendix B (Niaye, 1964); appendix C (La Noire de…, 1966); appendix D (Manda bi, 1968); appendix E (Emitaï, 1971); appendix F (Xala, 1974); appendix G (Ceddo, 1976); appendix H (Camp de Thiaroye, 1988); appendix I (Guelwaar, 1992); appendix J (Faat Kiné, 2000); and appendix K (Moolaade, 2004). The synopses are meant to be used as a reference for readers. For those who have already seen the films, the summaries and character lists are an easily accessible reminder; for those who have not seen the films, reading the synopses before reading the various chapters will make the chapters easier to understand. In addition, I have written ten questions for each chapter. Although the answers to the questions are not necessarily in the chapter, the questions are intended to encourage reflection and lead to discussion or further investigation. These questions can be found at the book’s webpage at http:// www.cambriapress.com/books/9781604978315.cfm.

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Endnotes 1. According to the people of Ziguinchor, the town’s name was derived from the Portuguese phrase “I came and they cry.” When the local inhabitants of the area first encountered Portuguese traders in the mid 17th century, they broke down and cried, certain they were going to be enslaved. Ziguinchor did, in fact, go on to become a slave port. 2. For a more detailed description of Sembène’s involvement with the Sereer Tuurs, please see Gadjigo’s biography of Sembène (2007) 3. I so wish Sembène himself could have seen the fruits of so much discussion about his films! 4. Louis-Jean Calvet, Linguistique et Colonialisme; Petit Traité de Glottophagie (Paris: Payot, 1974), 151–152. 5. Sheila Petty, A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembène (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 6. 6. “Vingt ans de cinema africain,” Jeune Afrique Plus no.6, Avril 1984, 40– 51. 7. Petty, Call to Action, 6. 8. Hennebelle Guy et Catherine Ruelle. “Sembène Ousmane.” FESPACOCinemAction 3 (1987): 111-126 9. Frantz Fanon, (1963), 233. 10. Lilyan Kesteloot, Aimé Césaire (Paris: Editions Pierre Seghers, 1962), 15. 11. Africa is an extremely diverse continent. Therefore, generalizing about Africa or about Africans is not advisable. I do so here only to differentiate Africans from non-Africans. 12. Sembène, interviews with author, Senegal, March 2004. 13. Siradiou Diallo, “Le cinéma Africain n’est pas un cinéma de folklore,” Jeune Afrique 629, no. 62 (1973): 45–48. 14. The UNESCO Courier, “Interview with Ousmane Sembène. Poet of the African cinema.” The UNESCO Courier. Jan 1990, 4–7. 15. Françoise Prelle, “Ousmane Sembène à bâtons rompus,” Bingo 222 (July 1971): 56–60. 16. Diallo, “Le cinéma Africain,” 44–45. 17. Petty, Call to Action, 6. 18. Although my focus is on film, I did not want to neglect mentioning Anthère Nzabatsinda’s compelling work on Sembène’s literature, Normes linguistiques et écriture africaine chez Ousmane Sembène (1996).

Introduction

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

27

In his book, Nzabatsinda analyzed such concepts as norms, language, and diglossia and how these concepts apply to Francophone African literary production, using examples from Sembène’s prose. Nzabatsinda, who focused on Sembène’s written works, examined the democratization of language, expression of a plural diglossia, and indication of a double target audience in Sembène’s novel, God’s Bits of Wood. CinémAction is a quarterly French review with a focus on cinema and television. It provides a rich database with insightful analyses of films and cultural productions from around the world. Carrie Dailey Moore, “Evolution of an African Artist: Social Realism in the Works of Ousmane Sembène” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1973), 119. Ibid., 123. Françoise Pfaff, The Cinema of Ousmane Sembène, a Pioneer of African Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 43, 45. Amadou T. Fofana, “Book Review,” African Affairs 110, no. 441 (2011): 669–670. Professors Samba Gadjigo, Lifongo Vetinde, Moussa Sow, Ayo Coly, Andre Nzunguta Siamundele, and Peter Vakunta are the other cofounders and members.

Chapter 2

Contextualizing Ousmane Sembène On peut pardonner, mais on ne peut pas oublier. Nous avons un devoir de mémoire, nous devons rappeler ces faits que l’histoire coloniale et néo-coloniale a toujours tenté de gommer.1 (One can forgive, but one cannot forget. We have a duty to memory; we must bring back to life those facts that colonial and neo-colonial history have always attempted to erase.) This chapter examines the sociopolitical context in which Sembène grew up by investigating his formative years and the major events that influenced his life and inspired his artistic works.2 Understanding this context is crucial to making sense of Sembène’s films, given that his films are largely his reactions and responses to the sociopolitical events and intellectual climate of his time. Imperfect as his accounts may seem, most of Sembène’s films can be traced to moments in his life that he elected to reconstruct and display for his people to reflect upon. If Sembène’s life, literature, and films have one thing in common, it is that they are all governed by a strong inclination to refuse to compro-

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mise and to persist in that refusal. This inclination to say “no” is rooted in the circumstances surrounding Sembène’s upbringing during a time in which his country was under French colonial rule. The intellectual energy of educated Senegalese during his youth was focused on questions of liberation and self-determination. Thus this chapter begins with an introduction to the colonial agenda in Africa. The remainder of the chapter then analyzes how Sembène articulated specific life experiences in his films.

Alienating the Colonial Subject In his influential and heavily cited essay in postcolonial studies, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon explored the psychological impact of colonialism on colonized subjects and established that the colonial enterprise was based on premises of the total negation of traditional African values: Pour le colonialisme, ce vaste continent était un repère de sauvages, un pays infesté de superstitions et de fanatisme, voué au mépris, lourd de la malédiction de Dieu, pays d’anthropophages, pays de nègres.3 (For colonialism, this vast continent was a den of savages, infested with superstitions and fanaticism, destined to be despised, cursed by God, a land of cannibals, a land of negroes.) What Fanon meant is that the ideological foundation of colonialism consisted of prejudices that fueled the colonizers’ resolution to destroy the cultural heritage of indigenous peoples. Deceptively referred to as a “civilizing mission” by Europeans, colonialism in Africa was based on the presumption that there was nothing of historical, intellectual, or cultural significance to build upon, that the “barbaric” practices of Africans should be wiped out. The continent demanded a European civilizing presence. Thus, through the successive modes of “destruction and construction,” colonialists established themselves on the continent. With

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their machine guns, they subdued local resistance; with their science, they imposed a new social order.4 To maintain their control and protect their economic advantages, the colonialists established churches and schools to indoctrinate the indigenous people.5 Consequently, in the French colonies, those who learned to speak, read, and write in French (regardless of their traditional rank in society) won new privileges and ultimately rose in status. These newly imposed hierarchies eventually destroyed the indigenous political patterns and social structures that had held many societies together. The historian Amadou Hampaté Bâ explained how African customs were undermined, trod upon, and ridiculed while Western values were elevated and forced upon the indigenous people: Jadis, cette connaissance se transmettait régulièrement de génération en génération, par les rites d’initiation et par les différentes formes d’éducation traditionnelle. Cette transmission régulière s’est trouvée interrompue du fait d’une action extérieure, extraafricaine: l’impact de la colonisation. Celle-ci, venant avec sa supériorité technologique, avec ses méthodes et son idéal de vie propres, a tout fait pour substituer sa propre façon de vivre à celle des Africains. Comme on ne sème jamais dans la jachère, les puissances coloniales étaient obligées de “défricher” la tradition africaine pour pouvoir y planter leur propre tradition. L’école occidentale a donc d’abord commencé par combattre l’école traditionnelle africaine et à pourchasser les détenteurs des connaissances traditionnelles.6 (Traditionally, this knowledge was regularly transmitted from generation to generation by initiation rites and other forms of traditional education. This transmission was interrupted by an external, extra-African phenomenon known as colonialism, which, with its technological superiority, methods, and ideals, did everything to substitute its ways for those of the Africans. Given the context, colonialists had to clear away African traditions in order to impose themselves. Thus, the Western school system

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The Films of Ousmane Sembène first started by fighting the traditional African school and hunting down the repositories of the traditional knowledge.)

Along with many scholars before him, Bâ posited that French colonialism destroyed traditional African ways of transmitting knowledge and imposed in their place Western styles of learning. With their selfproclaimed technological superiority, Europeans fought their way into the continent and hunted down, with the aim of eliminating, all the means by which traditional values were transmitted. Bâ used the word défricher (to clear) to describe the brutality with which the French, like farmers clearing a forest for cultivation, destroyed and set on fire every symbol of African tradition. Fanon also described the brutality with which colonialism established itself in the colonized countries: Le colonialisme ne se satisfait pas d’enserrer le peuple dans ses mailles, de vider le cerveau colonisé de toute forme et de tout contenu. Par une sorte de perversion de la logique, il s’oriente vers le passé du peuple opprimé, le distord, le défigure, l’anéantit.7 (Colonialism is not satisfied with snaring the people in its net or of draining the colonized brain of any form of substance. With a kind of perverted logic, it turns its attention to the past of the colonized people and distorts it, disfigures it, and destroys it.) It is clear Fanon believed that the colonialists indeed had a plan to reconfigure the indigenous peoples’ mental processes and annihilate their precolonial history in order to replace that history with the colonizers’ invention. Thus, undermining or declining to recognize the existing precolonial civilizations of the colonized people was a strategic calculation in the colonizing process. It was not enough to make the colonized feel badly about themselves and their cultures by debasing them; the surer way for the colonizers to secure faithful converts to their ways was by burning, looting, and burying the historical landmarks and records of the colonized people. Colonial occupation started from ground zero and built upon itself.

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As Fanon and Bâ explained, the destruction of the past—its erasure, so to speak—was a common colonialist practice. After establishing themselves with their churches and schools, the French implemented a strict language policy to effect radical transformation of beliefs and attitudes, starting with young children at European-style schools. Consequently, indigenous tongues were demonized by the colonizers, and the colonial language became an instrument of exclusion, utilized to bar those who did not use it from certain spheres of socioeconomic life. The French linguist Louis-Jean Calvet explained, Au plan linguistique, le colonialisme institue donc un champ d’exclusion linguistique à double détente: exclusion d’une langue (la langue dominée) des sphères du pouvoir, exclusion des locuteurs de cette langue (de ceux qui n’ont pas appris la langue dominante) de ces mêmes sphères.8 (From a linguistic perspective, colonialism institutes a two-dimensional field of exclusion: exclusion of one language (the dominated one) from the spheres of power, and exclusion of its speakers (those who did not learn the dominating language) from the same spheres.) By systematically excluding indigenous languages and their speakers from the spheres of power, colonialism provided opportunity only to those people who were educated in French—that is, the elite. In Senegal, the colonizers instituted a policy of assimilation, or, more precisely, “frenchization” (turning into French), by establishing colonial schools. This process of systematic indoctrination of schoolchildren through selfnegation was implemented throughout the colonial era and during the first decade or so after independence. Kane captured the tension and disorientation created by this transition in his classic novel, L’aventure ambiguë. In it he vividly described a debate among the Diallobé people over whether they should send their children to French school. Having determined that it would be self-defeating to resist the waves of change sweeping through the continent and defeating the indigenous traditions,

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La Grande Royale, an aristocratic character and influential force in the novel, concluded that the Diallobé people should send their children to school despite the well-founded fears of the people: L’école où je pousse nos enfants tuera en eux ce que nous aimons et conservons avec soin…ce que je propose c’est que nous acceptions de mourir en nos enfants et que les étrangers qui nous ont défaits prennent en eux toute la place que nous aurons laissée libre.9 (The school into which I would force our children will kill in them what today we love and rightly conserve with care…What I am proposing is that we should agree to die in our children’s hearts and that the foreigners who have defeated us should fill the place, wholly, which we shall have left free.) By sending their children to French schools, the Diallobé people were certain to lose them. In other words, they knew that in the French schools, the children would learn not only a new language; they would also learn entirely different customs that would likely contradict and discredit their own cultural beliefs and practices. Such processes would alienate their children from them. La Grande Royale perceived French schooling as a necessary evil, an education that would allow the children to learn “the science of the invaders and the art of winning without being right.”10 Because acquiring this “art of winning without being right” had French as a prerequisite, it is no surprise that the colonialists’ language became the language of knowledge and socioeconomic promotion as well as the primary language of governance and literary expression. This argument is echoed by the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji in his article “Charabia et Mauvaise Conscience,” in which he wrote, [P]our l’Africain, être cultivé c’est d’abord comprendre le français: être un intellectuel valable c’est savoir manier la belle langue de Victor Hugo. Le drame pour l’Africain est qu’il n’a pas d’autre langue de culture que cette langue étrangère, parce qu’ayant été instruit dans cette dernière. Il n’a eu ni le temps,

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ni les moyens de cultiver son idiome maternel, qui se trouve ainsi relégué, dans son existence quotidienne, au rang de simple dialecte tout juste bon pour exprimer les banalités de la vie matérielle.11 (For an African, to be educated means first to understand French: to be a legitimate intellectual is to be able to manipulate Victor Hugo’s beautiful language. The drama for the African intellectual is that he has no other language of education but this foreign language, because that’s the one he was educated in. He neither had time nor the means to develop his maternal tongue, which, in his daily usage, is reduced to a simple dialect only good enough to express ordinary material trivialities.) It is important to stress that Hountondji’s point is very specifically about the degree of alienation of French-speaking African intellectuals.

Sembène and Colonialism Sembène was born on January 1, 1923, during the peak of Senegal’s colonial occupation by the French. He grew up under colonialism, went to a French-language school, served in the French military, and then moved to France in 1946, at the age of twenty-three. Although he lived to be eighty-four—he passed away in June 2007—the first decades and most formative years of his life were spent under colonial domination. He was both an eyewitness to colonial rule and a subject of its domination. He also lived through the tumultuous period during which Africans struggled to liberate themselves from the grip of foreign subjugation. In other words, Sembène’s life bridged three of the most significant eras of recent African history: colonialism, the years of struggle for liberation, and the first half-century of independence. He was a living chronicler of Senegal’s history, an itinerant library, and a griot in the traditional West African sense.12 As such, Sembène was driven to reconstruct and disseminate the silenced history of his people that would otherwise remain invisible to future generations. He felt a duty to reveal the evils

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The Films of Ousmane Sembène

of colonialism, including the racism that so characterized it, and he was compelled to denounce neocolonial Africa and its bourgeoisies. All this he did while also encouraging his audiences to scrutinize certain indigenous or traditional ways. To his credit, Sembène did not idealize Africa’s past or its indigenous systems; they too were analyzed and critiqued. The Casamance, Senegal’s southern region and Sembène’s birthplace, has a long-held reputation for resisting foreign domination. The Diola, the majority ethnic group in the area, fought colonial rule longer and harder than the other ethnic groups of the region.13 In his biography of Sembène, Gadjigo aptly summarized the spirit of resistance distinctive of the Casamance: La tradition casamançaise du refus à laquelle il s’est abreuvé, ne date pas d’hier. De 1645, début de l’installation de l’administration portugaise à Ziguinchor, à nos jours, la Casamance a connu trois siècles de résistance active (1645–1952).14 (The Casamançais tradition of refusal to which he was nurtured started way back in the past. From 1645 when the Portuguese colonial administration first established itself to now, the Casamance has experienced three centuries of active resistance (1645–1952).) This Casamançais tradition of defiance and unwillingness to cooperate with colonizers was embodied in an otherwise ordinary woman, Aline Sitoë Diatta (sometimes spelled AnSitoë), who became a national heroine after leading the resistance of her fellow Diola women against the exactions of the French. Even today, most Senegalese people tend to associate the rebellious spirit of the Casamançais with the Diola ethnic group to which Aline Sitoë belonged. Aline Sitoë has been immortalized throughout the country. For instance, an all-girls Cheikh Anta Diop University campus in Dakar bears her name. The first commuter boat between Dakar and Ziguinchor, as well as several streets, colleges, high schools, and youth associations are named after her, especially in the southern region. Sembène, three years her junior, was very much inspired by her story when he made his film Emitaï. Although the 1971

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film does not refer directly to Aline Sitoë, it explicitly echoes the spirit of resistance she displayed in 1942 when she organized her fellow Diola women to refuse to yield to the pressures and intimidations of French soldiers, who had come to requisition the women’s rice harvest for the war. Robert Baum suggested that although the film focuses on a single village and its struggles against a French commandant, Emitaï is actually based on revolts that took place in a number of southern Diola villages. He also noted that Sembène wrote and produced the film before any historians had published scholarly work on Diola history.15 When in a 1972 interview Gerald Peary and Patrick McGilligan asked Sembène about the historical background of Emitaï, it became very clear that his goal was to portray a historical moment he himself had experienced: I came myself from this rural region and these true events of the Diolla people inspired me to present an image of French conduct in my home territory during my early manhood. During the last World War, those of my age, eighteen, were forced to join the French army. Without knowing why, we were hired for the liberation of Europe. Then when we returned home, the colonialists began to kill us, whether we were in Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Algeria, or Madagascar.16 Indeed, in all the countries he listed as well as in Indochina, the French massacred massive numbers of soldiers who had fought for them during the war.17 In Emitaï, in order to draft unwilling young Diola men into their army, French soldiers hunt them down in their hiding places in forests and swamps. When the soldiers fail to capture all the young men of a village, they resort to public threats and humiliation aimed at the parents of the young men who had escaped capture. In the first scenes of Emitaï, for example, the grown son of Kabebe, an elderly man of the village of Effok, flees into the woods to avoid conscription. To coerce the son to surrender, the French soldiers tie up Kabebe and force him to sit for hours under the broiling sun in the middle of the village for all to

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see. Fearful for Kabebe’s life, village members run to inform the son, who rushes back to the village to free his father. He then has no choice but to join the group of new soldiers who have been forcibly conscripted. Traditional Diola society is considered acephalous in the sense that it is ruled by councils of elders rather than chiefs or kings. In Emitaï, the elders meet at the village shrine with the “senior priest,” as Baum called him, to discuss their precarious situation vis-à-vis the French soldiers in their village.18 The overwhelming majority of the council favors patience and a consultation with the spirits before taking any action. But, feeling the urgency of the moment, the senior priest and some younger members of the community are impatient and wish to retaliate without delay. Before there is time to consult the spirits, they take up their bows and arrows to fight the French invaders, who defeat them in no time and gravely injure the senior priest. The young men carry the injured priest back to the council of elders, who remains at the shrine. In the meantime the soldiers occupy the deserted village, where all the women are hiding. Soon, the soldiers round them up by breaking into their homes and forcing them out to the center of the village. The French commander instructs that the women be held hostage until each has produced thirty kilos of rice. The following scene reveals one of the elders chanting and sacrificing a chicken while masked figures appear dancing on the screen. The wounded senior priest, who is leaning on one of the elders, is helped to sit up. Then the senior priest confronts the spirits at the shrine in an animated dialogue about the predicament that has befallen the village: the young men of the village are forced into the army; rice, a sacred Diola staple, is requisitioned; the peoples’ lives are in danger; and the spirits are not doing anything to stop the invaders. Because the exchange does not yield any results, the priest, before he falls back and dies, warns the spirits that they, too, will die with him. In keeping with the dictates of Diola tradition, the elders try to bury him soon thereafter. But the French refuse to let them do so, telling the villagers that they will only

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be permitted to bury their senior priest after they have been given the much-coveted rice that the women have hidden. Not wanting to further aggravate the spirits of the ancestors by neglecting to bury their senior priest, the men head out of the village in search of the hidden rice. Meanwhile, the French soldiers have assembled the women of the village who had banded together to hide the rice and are holding them at gunpoint in the blazing sun in the center of the village. To terrorize, dominate, and overpower the women, the French soldiers shoot and kill one of the two young boys who serve as liaisons between the women and their men who are hiding in the forest and swamps to avoid the draft. The women pick up the boy’s body and place it next to the body of the senior priest, now abandoned by the men. In order to be allowed to bury the senior priest, the men have left the body and gone to the place where the women have hidden the rice (this scene is only suggested). In an act of defiance against gender norms and in their determination to resist the French, the women then begin to chant and dance the funerary ritual, which typically is done by men. In the following scene, viewers see the village men in a long queue returning to the village with baskets of rice on their heads. They hear the funeral song being performed by the women. The women’s bravery and act of defiance embolden the men, who put down the baskets of rice in defiance of the French and back away, only to be faced with armed soldiers in shooting positions, who are awaiting the signal to fire from their commanders. The film ends in a suggested massacre. The screen goes black, and viewers hear gunshots. One such massacre became the subject of Sembène’s 1988 film, Camp de Thiaroye, named after the historic district of Dakar where hundreds of African soldiers were slain by the French in 1944. Like Emitaï, which illustrates colonial brutality and enforced conscription into the French army, Camp de Thiaroye, more or less its thematic sequel, builds on the subject of exploitative colonial wartime practices. In the film, Master Sergeant Diatta, a Diola man from Effok—the village where Emtaï was shot—is serving in the French military along with several other African

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soldiers. They are back from serving in the war in Europe and are temporarily placed in a transit camp, Thiaroye, while they wait to be discharged and sent home to their respective countries. In the opening scenes of Camp de Thiaroye, Master Sergeant Diatta receives a visit from his uncle and his family (his uncle, his aunt, and their two children). When he asks about the well-being of his parents back home, he learns that they were murdered by French soldiers in the Effok massacre—the very massacre suggested at the conclusion of Emtaï. Camp de Thiaroye is a tribute to the French African soldiers known as Tirailleurs Sénégalais, who fought alongside the French and who, after the war, were massacred in Thiaroye for demanding their fair compensation for services rendered to France. In the film, as tension starts to mount between the returned African soldiers and their French commanding officers, Master Sergeant Diatta leaves the camp to have a drink in a local bar, Coq Hardy, where he is denied service and booted out for being a black African. The bar services only whites and presumably African Americans. When Master Sergeant Diatta orders un Perno, the bartender acts surprised and repeats the order. When Master Sergeant Diatta confirms his order, the bartender realizes then that he is not American. “You’re not American,” she says and calls over her boss, who pushes Master Sergeant Diatta out the door, insisting that a bu ñuul (derogatory name for black Africans) is not welcome in Coq Hardy.19 This incident occurs in Senegal, Master Sergeant Diatta’s own country. Racial conflicts were not unusual within the colonial forces. In fact, they occurred frequently, and Sembène went so far as to write a letter to Lamine Guèye, the Senegalese representative to the French Parliament, complaining about the poor treatment to which black soldiers were subjected: Quand j’étais dans l’armée, il y avait toujours des problèmes avec les Blancs: je protestais et je me rappelle même avoir écrit une lettre à Lamine Guèye.20

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(When I was in the military, there were always problems with the whites: I protested and I remember even writing Lamine Guèye a letter.) History suggests that Lamine Guèye did not help much, because the returned Tirailleurs’ time in Thiaroye was marred with racial tensions and ended in heavy shelling of the camp. Having served in the French army, Sembène had a deeply personal connection with the Thiaroye slaughter. He realized that he could easily have been a victim of the same event: Si je parle encore de Thiaroye, c’est sans haine; je ne nourris de haine contre aucun individu ni contre aucun peuple; mais je dois faire connaître mon histoire…Ces soldats revenaient de la guerre…Ils avaient donné leur sang pour la France et les Français n’avaient pas hésité à les tuer.21 (When I speak of Thiaroye, it’s without grudge. I hold no grudge against anybody or any people; but I must educate about my history…Those soldiers were coming from the battleground…they had given their blood for France, and the French did not hesitate to kill them.) Emitaï and Camp de Thiaroye, featuring real events that occurred during Sembène’s early adult life, were written as reactions in response to his own experiences of colonial violence and racism. The next section focuses on the intellectual movements that Sembène vigorously opposed and relentlessly denigrated throughout his artistic career.

Negritude Coined in the 1930s by the Martinican writer Aimé Césaire in the journal L’étudiant noir (The Black Student), the term negritude was a neologism and a movement that he defined as the simple recognition of the fact that one is black and the acceptance of this fact and of one’s black destiny,

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history, and culture.22 Césaire emphasized the particularities of black people and cultures and their differences from European peoples and cultures. In addition, he consistently stood firm in his condemnation of imperialism, which he saw as absolutely evil. For the movement’s other cofounder, the Senegalese Leopold Sédar Senghor, however, the concept of negritude was different and became more fluid and controversial. Senghor saw in negritude an instrument of cultural affirmation and selfdistinction from an identity constructed by colonialism. Consequently, Senghor’s negritude was rather essentialist and metaphysical: La Négritude, c’est une certaine manière d’être homme, surtout de vivre en homme. C’est la sensibilité et, partant, l’âme plus que la pensée. Caractéristiques sont, à cet égard, telles expressions africaines, comme, “je veux que tu me sentes” et non “je veux que tu me comprennes.” Rien ne traduit mieux cette façon de sentir que la nouvelle poésie nègre, qu’elle soit africaine ou américaine, de langue française ou de langue anglaise.23 (Negritude is a certain way of being, mainly of being human. It is a sensibility, and as such, it appeals more to the emotions, the soul, than the thought. For that matter, it is characterized by such expressions as “I want you to feel me” and not “I want you to understand me.” Nothing better translates this way of feeling than the new black poetry, whether from Africa or America, in French or in English.) For Senghor, negritude was characterized by an emotional, nonrational approach to reality focusing primarily on the senses and the soul. This emphasis on a dialectic of categorization resulted in Senghor being seen by many African intellectuals as akin to a white supremacist who corroborated the racist views of the philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel and others by denying blacks the faculty to reason. Marcien Towa (1973), an African philosopher from Cameroon, demonized Senghor in his “Essai sur la problématique philosophique de l’Afrique actuelle”:

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Senghor…fait du nègre un être si complètement dominé par l’émotion et l’instinct et reconnaît si volontiers l’européanité exclusive de la raison, que l’on peut se demander si son dessein réel est de nier ou de servir l’impérialisme européen.24 (Senghor…presents Negroes as completely dominated by emotion and instinct, and he so willingly admits the exclusive Europeanity of reason that it makes one wonder if his real motivation is to deny or to serve European imperialism.) Although Towa’s castigation of Senghor was echoed by several other prominent African thinkers, including Wole Soyinka and Senghor’s compatriot Cheikh Anta Diop, it is likely that a conscious effort to distort Senghor’s meaning arose from their disillusionment. By stressing the emotionality of black people, Senghor was by no means denying them the faculty to reason. How could he, as a scholar and black person? His point was to draw attention to the more complex relationship that Africans, in comparison to Europeans, have with their past and with their immediate environment. His ideas are well supported by the prominent Malian writer A. Hampaté Bâ in his Aspects de la Civilization Africaine, in which he wrote, L’homme noir africain est un croyant né…Entouré d’un univers de choses tangibles et visibles: l’homme, les animaux, les végétaux, les astres, etc., l’homme noir, de tout temps, a perçu qu’au plus profond de ces êtres et de ces choses résidait quelque chose de puissant qu’il ne pouvait décrire, et qui les animait.25 (Black Africans are born believers…Surrounded by a universe of tangible and visible objects: humans, animals, the sun and the moon, and plants, etc., blacks have always perceived that deep down within these beings and things something powerful resided that they could not describe, and that gave them life.) The belief that everything has within it a life of sorts adds a unique spiritual dimension to the interaction between black people and their

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surroundings. Although with time these beliefs, often referred to as animism, have become irrelevant and even obsolete in some places, they are still prevalent in many parts of Africa, especially where traditional religions are practiced. Senghor used poetry as his medium to emphasize the specialness of this relationship. According to Senghor, black poetry, whether in English or French, from Africa or America, strongly carries this emotional, spiritual power. It is ironic that negritude’s language of communication was primarily French, and mastery of the intricacies of French was a major concern for the proponents of negritude who used poetry as their main means of expressing blackness. Senghor associated negritude with enracinement, that is, the process of plunging roots deep into black culture, down to its very essence, as a necessary stepping stone toward knowing oneself before opening up (ouverture) to the rest of the world. In a speech that he delivered at a colloquium on la Francophonie in 1986, Senghor, while commenting on de Gaulle’s phrase le métissage, voilà l’avenir (the melding of people, this is the future), declared the following: Il s’agit donc de nous enraciner mais de nous ouvrir en même temps à cette civilisation de symbiose, cette civilisation de l’universel qu’est la Francophonie.26 (It is about plunging our roots and at the same time opening up to this civilization of symbiosis, this universal civilization known as “la Francophonie.”) Senghor stressed that knowing oneself through enracinement and at the same time opening up to the rest of the world through la Francophonie as ouverture were essential to taking part in the universal civilization. Enracinement and ouverture were key words and principles in Senghor’s political action. Whereas it is true that, as Senegal’s first president, Senghor did not do as much as he could have to develop instruction in the country’s national languages, he did strongly support a range of cultural activi-

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ties in the country and internationally, which contributed enormously to promoting a positive image of Senegal to the world. For instance, during his presidency, Senegal hosted the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts, which brought together the best and brightest artists from all over the world. The festival is still remembered today as emblematic of Senghor’s commitment to the arts. In addition, Senghor helped showcase and promote Senegalese art and culture outside of Senegal. For example, Samba Wane, a retired actor from the Théâtre National Daniel Sorano, fondly remembered when the drama troupe and other artists traveled to introduce host countries to Senegalese arts and culture in preparation for Senghor’s official visits.27 Senghor was a patron of the arts, and during his presidency, Senegalese artists felt respected and supported, owing largely to Senghor’s profound belief in the place and function of the arts both in the development of Senegal and in expressing negritude. When viewed as a reaction to notions of tabula rasa, the colonialist negation of African civilizations and cultures, negritude was without a doubt a relevant counter-ideology during the colonial era. Fanon supported this argument when he wrote, Le concept de négritude par exemple était l’antithèse affective sinon logique de cette insulte que l’homme blanc faisait à l’humanité. Cette négritude ruée contre le mépris du blanc s’est révélée dans certains secteurs seule capable de lever interdictions et malédictions.28 (The concept of negritude, for example, was the affective if not the logical antithesis of that insult which the white man had leveled at the rest of humanity. This negritude, hurled against the contempt of the white man, has alone proved capable in some sectors of lifting taboos and maledictions.) Although Fanon toned down the effectiveness of the emotional response of negritude, he clearly agreed with its relevance under certain circumstances. If today those circumstances are no longer governed by the same ideological motives, negritude should be reoriented so as to address the

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current needs of black people. Fanon rightly observed, “Si sur le plan poétique cette démarche atteint des hauteurs inaccoutumées, il demeure que sur le plan de l’existence l’intellectuel débouche fréquemment sur une impasse.”29 (This historical obligation to racialize their claims, to emphasize an African culture rather than a national culture, leads the African intellectuals into a dead end.) Negritude must overcome the mystification of the continent and take more action. Failure to tailor the movement to the needs of the moment resulted in questions about its relevance. Much as he believed in validating Senegal as a nation, Sembène was a staunch opponent of Senghor’s ideas regarding negritude and la Francophonie. Sembène blatantly debunked negritude’s strong idealizing of soul and emotions, which in his view distracted from reality, and he condemned its preoccupation with abstract poetry rather than physical responses to the challenges of daily life. According to Sembène, negritude was a vain movement that persisted in magnifying an irrelevant African past during a time when the harsh realities of the present desperately called for action. Sembène decried negritude because of certain tendencies that he considered distracting and evasive. In his view, Senghor’s negritude never went beyond theoretical musings at a moment when Africans were under colonial domination and needed to take action for their liberation. He contended that negritude did not help free Africa from colonialism and the ongoing abuses of neocolonialism. In stark terms, he blamed negritude and its proponents for being essentially too preoccupied with their own self-centered needs to be recognized by the Europeans with whom they studied: Parce que la Négritude n’est d’autre chose qu’en 1933 la justification de certains nègres qui étaient en Europe comme étudiants qui étaient broyés, qui étaient à un certain moment même vis-à-vis de la culture occidentale complexés. Ils avaient besoin de se justifier,

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de se fortifier en disant nous avons des berceuses, nous avons des contes, nous avons de grands hommes.30 (Negritude is nothing else but the justification of some black people who were students in Europe in 1933. Ground by loneliness, these students eventually developed an inferiority complex vis-à-vis European culture and felt the need to justify themselves and make themselves look good by saying, we have lullabies, we have tales, we have great men.) This obsession of the colonized intellectual to be recognized by the colonizer was Fanon’s concern, too, when he warned, “On ne fera jamais honte au colonialisme en déployant devant son regard des trésors culturels méconnus.”31 (Colonialism will never be put to shame by exhibiting unknown cultural treasures under its nose.) Nonetheless, the proponents of negritude continued to glorify an idyllic and fictional African past and praise its gods, who, according to Sembène, impotently witnessed the abuse of the continent and exploitation of its resources by outside forces: They always wanted to mystify us. We were always hung up on this notion of gods, on negritude, and a lot of other stuff. And throughout this period, we were colonized…The gods never prevented colonialism from establishing itself…When the enemy is right there, he has to be fought with weapons…The gods are a subsidiary, but inessential element.32 Sembène’s Emitaï (1971) powerfully illustrates this mystification and impotence of African gods in the face of external aggressions. While the Diola village of Effok is besieged, with its youth forced into the military and its women held hostage, the patriarchs of the village retire under the palaver tree to decide whether to take action against the invaders or keep consulting their “indifferent” gods. Among the male elders, only the village’s senior priest feels an urgent need to take action. As a result, much to the chagrin of his companions, he breaks away from the illusions of an intervening and protective god, takes up his sword, and, along

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with the youth, confronts the invaders. In a long shot, Sembène used parallel editing to show the sequence of the young men of the village being forcefully conscripted in the colonial army and the sequence of Kabebe tied and sitting in the sun. In a mise-en-scène of the debate among the patriarchs of the village that lasts almost five minutes with minimal editing, the camera barely moves except for a few medium close-ups, pans, or reversed shots to show the different speakers. The minimal editing guarantees the unity of time and space of the scene, and the long takes allow detailed viewing of actors’ individual performances as well as their interactions with their surroundings. Consequently, emotion in the film mounts almost without interruption in the build-up to the fight scene. As a matter of fact, the majority of shots were taken in the last minute of the scene: twentynine shots only in the last 1.2 minutes of the debate scene. The rapid cuts indicate the growing tension as divisions become clearer and consensus impossible to reach among the patriarchs. Sembène suggested that the elders of the village cling to a nostalgic and irrelevant past when instead they should have taken action against the invaders. Kabebe, one of the protagonists, declares, “We can’t do anything without consulting the gods. Let us give a sacrifice to get their protection before any action.” The patriarchs are content to sing the praises of the gods and to offer sacrifice after sacrifice, hoping for the gods to take action so that they will not have to. Just as negritude should have been an instrument of liberation from colonial domination, these patriarchs should have taken action; and, like the proponents of negritude, they persistently and passively cling to the past when circumstances call for action. Baum eloquently summarized this noncombative attitude of the patriarch’s: “In Emitaï, Sembène provides an admiring glance at the quiet power of Diola traditions of independence and solidarity, while portraying the elders of the spirit shrines (ukine) as paralyzed by their dependence on spirits who cannot help them.”33 Only the senior priest of the village questions the patriarchs’ passivity:

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I believe in our gods…, but where were the gods when the Whites razed the village? When the Whites took our sons to their war? Remember, Kabebe, you remained all day tied in the sun, where were our gods? We all suffered the same humiliation, where were our gods? Where are they now? Relevant as they are, these questions do not bring home to the patriarchs the urgency of the situation. Clearly, the patriarchs have profound conviction and blind faith in the power of their shrines. One of the patriarchs yells out, “The Diola will never abandon his fetishes,” and indeed, they never did. In Sembène’s view, the proponents of negritude did the same thing as the Diola in the film. Instead of physically fighting colonialism and neocolonialism, scholars of negritude chose poetry and metaphysics, which were easy escapes from the practical demands of the moment. Sembène had a positive regard neither for Senghor’s negritude (enracinement) nor for his Francophonie (ouverture). For Senghor, these meant reaching out to a hybrid space, a space of synthesis located at the crossroads of several cultures and a space of dialogue made up of the contribution of all Francophone peoples who see in it a fruitful forum of linguistic and cultural exchange.

La Francophonie This section discusses Sembène’s views on the significance and broader implications of la Francophonie to its member countries. The term francophonie with a small “f” refers to the people or groups using French as their main or secondary means of communication, whereas la Francophonie with a capital “F” refers to the official organization associated with francophonie, l’Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF). The OIF is an intergovernmental organization of French-speaking countries that promotes the education and culture of French speakers. It also promotes other aspects such as development including peace, democ-

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racy, economic cooperation among the French-speaking countries. The OIF brings together bi-annually all the heads of states and governments of the member countries in a summit called “Le Sommet de la Francophonie” where they discuss and strategize about the major political, linguistic, and economic challenges facing the member countries. The central argument is that la francophonie, which is believed to be about culture, has larger political implications and therefore should not be dismissed as easily as Sembène insisted. La Francophonie, which comes from the word francophone (the fact of speaking French), refers to the French-speaking world community. For the founders of la francophonie, it was essentially geared toward the promotion of the French language and culture; as Senghor put it, “La culture reste le problème essentiel de la Francophonie.”34 (Culture is the main preoccupation of la Francophonie.) Hamani Diori, president of Niger (1960–1974); Habib Bourguiba, president of Tunisia (1957–1987); and Senghor, president of Senegal (1960–1981), were instrumental in the creation of la Francophonie, which they thought of as “une communauté culturelle des peuples francophones” (a cultural community of French-speaking peoples). At the first summit of the French-speaking countries, Senghor explained, “Ainsi, au sein de la communauté francophone, la rencontre des divers patrimoines culturels qui s’expriment à travers la même langue contribue au rapprochement des intelligences.”35 (Thus, within the Francophone community, the coming together of diverse cultural backgrounds that express themselves using the same language contributes to unifying them.) Senghor implied here that la francophonie brings together a rich diversity of cultures using French as the medium of expression. Senghor’s motivation was first and foremost linguistic and cultural and was consistent with his desire for and efforts toward a cultural blending (métissage culturel) of all French-speaking peoples of the world. To be sure, la Francophonie was also in tune with Senghor’s personal fascination with the French language, to which he attributed unique, almost magical, expressive powers. To him, more than to any other Francophone intellectual,

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the acquisition of French came as a blessing, for which he was vocally thankful throughout his life. For example, when asked, “Pourquoi, dès lors, écrivez-vous en français?” (Why then do you write in French?), he replied, Parce que nous sommes des métis culturels, parce que, si nous sentons en nègres, nous nous exprimons en français, parce que le français est une langue à vocation universelle, que notre message s’adresse aussi aux Français de France et aux autres hommes, parce que le français est une langue de gentillesse et d’honnêteté… Le français, ce sont les grandes orgues qui se prêtent à tous les timbres, à tous les effets, des douceurs les plus suaves aux fulgurances de l’orage, Il est, tour à tour ou en même temps, flûte, hautbois, trompette, tamtam et même canon. Et puis le français nous a fait don de ses mots abstraits—si rares dans nos langues maternelles—, où les larmes se font pierres précieuses. Chez nous, les mots sont naturellement nimbés d’un halo de sève et de sang; les mots du français rayonnent de mille feux, comme des diamants. Des fusées qui éclairent nos nuits.36 (Because we are culturally mixed, and although we feel things as black people, we express ourselves in French since French has a universal vocation and since our message is also addressed to the people of France and others; because French is a language of kindness and honesty…French is like a big organ that can yield all sounds, produce all effects, from the utmost sweetness to the searing intensity of the rainstorm. It is, one after the other or at the same time, flute, oboe, trumpet, drum, and even cannon. French has also made available to us its abstract words—words so rare in our mother tongues—, where tears turn into precious stones. In our maternal languages the halo that surrounds the words is by nature merely that of sap and blood; French words send out thousands of rays like diamonds; rockets that brighten our nights.) This long and colorful appraisal tells us how profoundly Senghor was in love with French for its expressive powers, but it also seems to belittle and undermine the expressive capabilities of African languages. According to Guy Ossito Midiohouan, author and literary critic,

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The Films of Ousmane Sembène Contrairement à ce qu’affirme l’idéologie dominante, le fondement de la francophonie n’est pas culturel. Elle répond à des intérêts politiques dont “les liens culturels tissés par la langue française” ne sont que l’alibi.37 (Contrary to what the dominant ideology asserts, the basis of Francophonie is not cultural. It serves a political agenda “using the cultural bond of the French language” as an alibi.)

This observation makes one wary of the purported linguistic and cultural orientation of la Francophonie as indicated by Senghor. The suspicion raised by Midiohouan is supported by a number of facts that do not leave observers indifferent. For example, today la Francophonie is an association of some fifty countries, some of which are not only not French-speaking but also economically, politically, culturally, and geographically so diverse that bringing them all under the umbrella of la Francophonie can only connote other political motives. For that reason, it is critical to be mindful of the plasticity of la Francophonie and envision it in a much broader perspective than the narrow linguistic one. Midiohouan rightly suggested that in addition to the basic linguistic meaning of the word Francophone, one should be aware of its extended meaning. For him, Francophone applies not only to all the countries where French is commonly, or casually, spoken but also to the collectivity that Francophone peoples constitute and the implication that particular interests and unique relationships exist or should exist between these peoples.38 La Francophonie, with its political and economic undertones, is perhaps a newer, more humanely disguised face of the colonial empire. Its member countries, for example, are a curious mix. For instance, in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, Portuguese is the official language; in Romania, Romanian; in the Dominican Republic, Spanish. If la Francophonie is an organization of countries sharing the use of French, one might wonder why non-French-speaking countries are involved even as observers or associate members. If the French language were, as it

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was supposed to be, the initial criterion for membership in la Francophonie, the opening up of the organization’s membership to non-Frenchspeaking nations casts doubts on its motives and makes it resemble a disguised and more sophisticated instrument of neocolonial expansion. In this era of globalization and geopolitical posturing among the most powerful nations, it is not naive to wonder whether an organization of such diverse countries can be formed solely around and geared exclusively toward language and cultural issues. In addition, with the growing worldwide influence of the United States of America, even in former French colonies, which signifies France’s progressive loss of prestige and ground to America, France is perhaps pressured to secure wider alliances. This idea was clearly echoed by Abdou Diouf, current general secretary of la Francophonie: La francophonie ce n’est pas seulement le combat pour la langue, pour sa promotion dans le monde. C’est le combat aussi pour les valeurs, en particulier la valeur de diversité. On est dans un combat contre l’hégémonisme. On est dans un combat contre la pensée unique, contre le monolithisme qu’on veut nous imposer dans le monde.39 (La Francophonie is not only a fight for the French language, for its promotion in the world. It is a fight for values, in particular the value of diversity. We are fighting against hegemony. We are fighting against single thought, against the monolithism they want to impose on us in the world.) Consequently, la Francophonie seems to be a pernicious instrument for France to assert its hegemony in the former colonies and to counter a growing U.S. influence around the world. Midiohouan concluded, without ambiguity, L’idée et le mot ont été lancés dans le cadre d’une stratégie politique conçue et menée par la France dans le but de préserver son hégémonie en Afrique…Pour masquer ses visées néo-colonialistes, la France s’est cachée derrière certains hommes politiques

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The Films of Ousmane Sembène africains, Senghor, Houphouët-Boigny, Bourguiba et Hamani Diori notamment.40 (The idea and the word came as part of a political strategy conceived and directed by France in order to preserve its hegemony in Africa…To disguise its neocolonialist ambitions, France used political figures from Africa, namely Senghor, Houphouët Boigny, Bourguiba, and Hamani Diori.)

It becomes clear that the proponents of la Francophonie were motivated by other factors in addition to the cultural ones. According to Midiohouan, la Francophonie was born at approximately the same time as the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and survived thanks to the many organizations that were competing against African federalism.41 In short, Midiohouan suggested, la Francophonie was created to sabotage and counter the federation of African states. It was created to stand in the way of Pan-African activists such as Kwame N’krumah and Sékou Touré, who were in favor of politically integrated African states. In contrast, the proponents of la Francophonie aimed to keep Africa divided, which they succeeded in doing. For that reason alone, the significance of la Francophonie should not be dismissed as Sembène tended to do. Manthia Diawara, who viewed Sembène’s first film in Wolof, Manda bi (1968), as an attack on the French-inspired political and cultural institutions of Senegal, concluded his analysis of the film in saying that Sembène used Mandabi to push not only at the limits of francophonie in Africa, but also at the notion that only European languages are universal and capable of a story across frontiers, ethnic and cultural boundaries…The film positions itself philosophically, culturally and politically in opposition to the notion of universal languages…Sembène’s use of the Wolof language also constitutes an attack on the Francophone institutions that are represented in the film.42 Although Sembène makes a strong case for his stance as a modern griot and a social critic as well as for his positions on the role of national

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languages in Senegal, his arguments against negritude and la francophonie lack convincing evidence. As conceptual entities, negritude and la francophonie remain problematic, but they are not without value. Sembène made it clear in an interview with Sada Niang that he did not believe in la Francophonie any more than he believed in negritude: I do not know what “francophonie” is. What is it exactly? Is it the French language? Anyone may speak French, English, Japanese, Wolof. These are tools for communicating with each other. Never will you pass for French in the midst of French people. The fact that I drive a Ford or a Toyota car will not get me into the Ford family, nor will it make a Japanese out of me, for that matter. For me “francophonie” is an artificial concept which will disappear just as negritude did.43 According to Sembène, la francophonie is like a fashion that people embrace for the moment, which will soon be outdated. For him, la francophonie was stillborn; as such, it was a vacuous concept that deserved no particular attention. Even more so than negritude, which Sembène proclaimed dead, la Francophonie is an organized institution, an intergovernmental organization, with a formal administration, headquarters, and a clearly defined agenda. Sembène underrated la Francophonie; he even trivialized it. Senghor’s promotion of la Francophonie naturally implied a disincentive for the teaching and learning of African languages, especially among the elite. In addition, the great multiplicity of African languages favors the unifying success of la francophonie. La francophonie thus poses a real threat to the survival of African languages; it was described by Calvet as “le fer de lance du neo-colonialisme” (the spearhead of neocolonialism).44 In other words, by undermining native African languages, and by extension African beliefs and ideas, la Francophonie succeeds in maintaining and perpetuating French hegemony. For these reasons, those who are swift to condemn and to declare dead la francophonie, as did Sembène, lose sight of the fact that, like

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colonialism, la Francophonie is an unavoidable aspect of postcolonial Africa and therefore should not be ignored. Even though la Francophonie appears to involve the political elite more so than the common peoples of the Francophone world, its political and economic ramifications have an impact on everyone and ultimately pose a threat to the political autonomy of member countries. Senghor, who was president of Senegal from 1960 to 1981, played a central role in perpetuating the primacy of the French language in education and in the official spheres of government in the country. Yet there is a tension pervasive in Senghor’s work: his poetic and nostalgic attachment to negritude, his claim of dual racial origin (he called himself a Latino African), his dreams for “la civilisation de l’universel” where all humans would blend motivated him to spend part of his lifetime battling for the creation of an accredited third space, la francophonie, a cultural matrix and hybrid space, a constructed and neutral milieu of dialogue where his internal conflict could be legitimately expressed and understood. Because of his inclination toward poetry, literature, and the arts in general, Senegal’s language policy under Senghor was merely a continuation of the colonial heritage. Unlike Senghor, Sembène had neither a solid nor a long record of schooling in French. Sembène’s formal education, begun under colonial rule, was short-lived as a result of his unruly behavior in school. Instead, this free spirit learned about life while roaming the streets of Dakar, practicing and abandoning one trade after another, serving in the French military, and then living in France, where his backbreaking experience as a dockworker motivated him to engage in social activism. This is when he joined the French Communist Party. These formative and enlightening experiences led him to a heightened political consciousness and a practical understanding of nationalism, which made his biographer draw the following conclusion about him: La vie lui a aussi appris que pour tout Africain colonisé, la priorité doit être la libération de son pays. Ce qui signifie dans son esprit,

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participer au combat de son peuple pour l’indépendance nationale et la révolution sociale.45 (Life also taught him that for every colonized African, the priority should be the liberation of his/her country, which, according to Sembène, meant to participate in his people’s fight for national independence and social revolution.) If indeed Sembène’s life experiences taught him that decolonizing one’s country by becoming actively involved in the struggle should be a priority for Africans, he also knew that not every African possessed his level of political consciousness. Therefore, to promote his views on nationalism, liberation, and social justice, he began writing about and publishing his personal experiences, thus using literature as an instrument of social analysis and consciousness-raising. His career as a writer started with the publication of a groundbreaking novel, Le docker noir (The Black Dockworker) (1956), which examines black/white relations and decries the miserable conditions of black laborers in France. The Black Dockworker set the tone for a new generation of writers inclined to break away from the ethnographic literary production of a pre-independence Senegalese elite who felt indebted to France. His second novel, Ô pays, mon beau peuple (O Country, My Beautiful People) (1957), deals with race issues and the tragedy of colonization. Sembène’s participation in the 1947 Dakar–Bamako railroad workers’ strike for better working conditions inspired one of his most famous literary works, Les bouts de bois de Dieu (God’s Bits of Wood) (1960), which won him applause from French Communist writers who saw in him an outspoken comrade. Despite his growing fame as a writer in French, Sembène bemoaned the fact that he was not reaching his compatriots because of the high illiteracy rate in Senegal. Thus, to bypass this language obstacle and reach out to a wider audience, he turned to cinema. In the early 1960s, his interest in cinema led him to the Gorki Studios in Moscow, where, by studying the philosophies and techniques of social-realist cinema, he laid the foundation for his career in filmmaking. Sembène’s active

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involvement with leftist labor unions in Marseilles, coupled with his lifelong membership in the French Communist Party and his collaboration with African and European leftist intellectuals, politicians, and artists, strongly influenced his filmmaking and literary styles. In fact, the Marxist ideology pervasive in his films and writings was subject to analysis by many scholars of Sembène’s literature and cinema including David Murphy (2000). When asked why he turned to cinema, Sembène responded, “Dans la situation actuelle d’analphabétisme en Afrique, le cinéma est plus pratique que le roman.”46 (Given the current state of illiteracy in Africa, cinema is more practical than the novel.) In a 1976 interview with N. Ghali, Sembène declared that he chose cinema as a medium because it goes farther than the book, farther than poetry, farther than theatre.47 In his opinion, cinema is an “evening class,” a sort of “continuing education,” and the filmmaker, using images to make his point, is a modern counterpart of the griot, a master speaker.48 Because of Sembène’s critical representation of Senegalese society and his determination to combat the relics and offshoots of colonialism, the Senegalese government has, more than once, censored his films and even banned one of them. In her compelling analysis of Sembène’s early works, Carrie Dailey Moore very aptly remarked that Sembène was propelled by these unfailing political forces (colonialism, neocolonialism, racism, nationalism, independence), which is why he felt that he could not help being political given the threats to the sociocultural stability of the African population.49 Sembène’s resort to cinema to address his people in their mother tongues positioned at the epicenter of his cinematic agenda the issue of national liberation from colonialism and its offshoots. His resolve to use local languages underscored his awareness of the discursive power of language, which Trinh Minh-Ha perceived as not only a communicative act but also an act of compulsion.50 Like Ngũgĩ, who believed that writing in the Gĩkũyũ language was an integral part of the

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anti-imperialist struggle of Kenyans,51 Sembène chose to make films in Senegalese languages as a way of contesting the ever-growing influence of the French language and of reclaiming linguistic as well as political freedom. Sembène called himself a “screen griot,”52 a filmmaker committed to denouncing injustice, giving voice to the voiceless, and “calling to action.”53 For this reason, his decision to make his films in the languages of the people made perfect sense. Sembène’s films are documentary-like, not because they do not use sophisticated techniques or are typically shot on limited budget, but because the stories they tell are inspired by reallife experiences. They are delivered almost entirely in African languages because, unlike his intellectual contemporaries, Sembène was not in the business of abstracting, idealizing, sugarcoating, or rendering poetic the real struggles of his people. The sociopolitical context in which he grew up and lived was his primary source of inspiration. Sembène understood very early on in his life the value of freedom and self-determination. In an attitude that went back to childhood, he could not stand to be told what to do or not to do. Like Ngũgĩ, Sembène perceived strong links between dependence on the French language and the continuation of colonial domination. He was overtly hypersensitive to the alienating and excluding forces of language, which he made a point of illustrating in many of his films.

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Endnotes 1. Sembène quoted in Samba Gadjigo, Ousmane Sembène: Une Conscience Africaine (Paris: Homnisphères, 2007), 95. 2. 1923: Born January 1, 1927: Falsely accused of cannibalism, the colonial administrator, Maubert, ordered the shooting of Casamançais resisters in Ziguinchor. 1931: Sembène starts primary school in Ziguinchor. 1938: Kicked out of school in sixth grade. Starts fishing with his father and then is sent to Dakar. 1939: Starts learning masonry under his uncle Baye Wélé. September 1, World War II begins. October 15, the Senegalese parliamentarian Galandou Diouf appeals to black soldiers in the journal Paris-Dakar. 1940: September 23–25, Sembène in Dakar as it was being bombarded by the Allied Forces. He becomes a member of the Layène brotherhood. May, the occupation of France by Germany begins. June 18, de Gaulle calls for resistance. July 13, the Vichy state governor, Pierre Boisson, arrives in Dakar. September 25, the Allied Forces withdraw from Dakar. Aline Sitoë Diatta organizes the first resistance of the Diola against French authority. 1942: The Diola refuse to pay taxes in the form of rice. 1943: Aline Sitoë Diatta is arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison and exile. 1944: February 1, Sembène is drafted into the French military. April, Sembène is deployed in the Niger desert. August 25, liberation of Paris. December 1, Thiaroye massacre. 1945: Ho Chi Minh declares independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. May 8, bloody repression of uprising in Setif, Algeria. 1946: End of Sembène’s eighteen-month military service. Returns to Dakar. For a complete biography of Sembène, see Samba Gadjigo, Ousmane Sembène: The Making of a Militant Artist, trans. Moustapha Diop (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 3. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 150. 4. Cheikh Hamidou Kane, L’Aventure Ambiguë (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1962), 65. 5. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1993); Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la Terre (New York: Grove Press, 1961); P. R. McKenzie and Marcien Towa, “Essai sur la Problématique Philosophique dans l’Afrique Actuelle,” Journal of Religion in Africa 5, no. 2 (1973): 150–227.

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6. Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Aspects de la Civilisation Africaine (Personne, Culture, Religion) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1972), 26–27. 7. F. Fanon, 149. Les damnés de la terre. Paris : Editions François Maspero, 1961. Trans. Charles L. Markmann. 8. Calvet, Linguistique et Colonialisme, 64. 9. Kane, L’Aventure Ambiguë, 62. 10. Ibid., 52. 11. Paulin Hountondji, “Charabia et Mauvaise Conscience (Psychologie du Langage Chez les Intellectuels Colonisés),” Présence Africaine: Revue Culturelle du Monde Noir 61 (1967): 24–25. 12. Loosely translated, a griot is a storyteller. See chapter 2 for further details on griots. 13. Diola is the name of the ethnic group featured in Emitaï and the main language in the film. The word Diola, or sometimes Joola, is spelled “Jola” in English. 14. Gadjigo, Conscience Africaine, 64–65. 15. Robert Baum, “Tradition and Resistance in Ousmane Sembène’s Films Emitaï and Ceddo,” in Black and White in Color: African History on Screen, ed. James Currey (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 43, 49. 16. G. M. Perry and Patrick McGilligan, “Ousmane Sembène: An Interview,” in Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, ed. Annett Busch and Max Annas (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 49. 17. Guy Hennebelle, “Ousmane Sembène: ‘En Afrique Noire, Nous Sommes Gouvernés par des Enfants Mongoliens du Colonialism,’” Les Lettres Françaises, October 6–12, 1971, 16. 18. Baum, “Tradition and Resistance.” 19. “Bu ñuul” is a Wolof expression used in a derogatory sense to refer to black Africans in the film. 20. Gadjigo, Conscience Africaine, 122. 21. Ibid., 115. 22. Kesteloot, Aimé Césaire, 62. 23. Leopold Senghor, Ce que je Crois: Négritude, Francité et Civilisation de l’Universel (Mesnil-sur-l’estrée, France: Editions Grasset, 1988), 139. 24. McKenzie and Towa, “Essai sur la Problématique Philosophique,” 24. 25. Bâ, Aspects de la Civilisation Africaine, 199. 26. Michel Tétu, La Francophonie: Histoire, Problématique et Perspectives (Montreal: Guérin Universitaire, 1987), 68.

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27. Samba Wane, interview with author. July 12, 2011. Théâtre National Daniel Sorano is the name of the national theater located in downtown Dakar and also the name of the drama troupe it sponsors. 28. F. Fanon, The wretched of the Earth, 150. 29. Ibid., 152. 30. Moore, “Evolution of an African Artist,” 238. 31. F. Fanon, Les damnés de la terre ,159. 32. Nourredine Ghali, “Interview with Ousmane Sembène,” in Film and Politics in the Third World, ed. John Downing (New York: Praeger, 1986), 48. 33. Baum, “Tradition and Resistance,” 44. 34. Senghor, Ce que je Crois, 160. 35. Hamidou Ouédraogo, Naissance et Evolution du FESPACO de 1969 à 1973: Les Palmarès de 1976 à 1993 (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso: Editions La Mante, 1988), 101–102. The first summit of French-speaking African countries took place in Niamey (Niger) in 1969. 36. Léopold Senghor, Éthiopiques (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1956), 27–35. 37. Guy Ossito Midiohouan, Du Bon Usage de la Francophonie: Essai sur l’Idéologie Francophone (Porto-Novo, Benin: Editions CNPMS, 1994), 49. 38. Ibid., 24. 39. Abdou Diouf, Abdou Diouf: Un Destin Francophone, aired May 2010 (Paris: Adamis Production), television broadcast. 40. Midiohouan, Du Bon Usage de la Francophonie, 49. 41. Ibid., 49. 42. Manthia Diawara, African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics (Munich and New York: Prestel, 2010), 42–43. 43. Sada Niang, “An Interview with Ousmane Sembène,” in Ousmane Sembène: Dialogue with Critics and Writers, ed. Samba Gadjigo, Ralph H. Faulkingham, Thomas Cassirer, and Reinhard Sander (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 94. 44. Calvet, Linguistique et Colonialisme, 83. 45. Gadjigo, Une Conscience Africaine, 219. 46. Ibid., 204. 47. Ghali, “Interview with Ousmane Sembène,” 46. 48. Ibid., 47. 49. Moore, “Evolution of an African Artist,” 201. 50. Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 52.

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51. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: J. Currey; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986), 28. 52. When I visited him in his office in 2004, he had on a t-shirt that said “Screen Griot,” which sparked our conversation. 53. Part of the title of a collective volume on Sembène’s work edited by Sheila Petty, A Call to Action.

Chapter 3

Ousmane Sembène, A Screen Griot Tu es griot, pas pour toi, mais pour nous, la communauté. Un griot dit haut ce qu’on murmure, ce qu’on n’ose pas dire, nous.1 (You are a griot, not for yourself, but for us, the community. A griot says out loud what we whisper, what we don’t have the courage to say.) The written text in Western languages came to Africa along with the colonial powers, and in modern Africa, the written text is still tinged with the marks of that colonial past. Although forces of modernization, expressed through efforts to expand literacy, have worked to validate the written text in many ways, traditional values are still mainly expressed through the medium of orality. Film has grown up in modern Africa, then, in a setting in which the relationship between orality and the written text is still conflicted and troubled. As a consequence, the relationship between literature and film in Africa is more complex in certain ways than, say, in the United States and Europe, where the existence of literature has inevitably implied the existence of a written literary

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text. That already troubled relationship is further complicated by the fact that all emerging cinemas worldwide, African cinema included, exist within the shadow of Hollywood film, both because American films are so visible on African screens and because African directors are so often trained in the United States or Europe. In addition, Europe and the United States are not only home to the major African film distributors but are also the focus of marketing, given the paucity of appropriate distribution channels in Africa, especially in recent years, and the financial hardships facing filmmakers in most of Africa. Because it does not produce written text, orality as the traditional source of knowledge has been dismissed in the European tradition and is often derided even by some “narrow-minded African intellectuals” who think of it as an unfounded and therefore unreliable source of historic knowledge.2 For that reason, the griot3 in Djibril Tamsir Niane’s Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali tries to persuade his incredulous audience of the trustworthiness of his story. He makes it clear that he derives his knowledge from his father, who in turn had received the knowledge from his father. The griot declares the purity of his word and its truthfulness before vowing to transmit it exactly the way he received it. Even though he cannot provide specific dates, the griot firmly trusts the ancient origin of his art and contends that since time immemorial, the Kouyatés (a hereditary griot family) have been in the service of the Keïta princes of Mali.4 In his translation of tales by the South African storyteller Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, Harold Scheub argued that the art of composing imaginative narratives was undertaken by “the first people,” that is, the founding members of the social group in question, their ancestors. According to Scheub, Zenani maintained that the art of storytelling was ancient even to their fathers: “[I]t was ancient to their grandmothers, who said that the tales had been created years before by their grandmothers.”5 Zenani’s point is that the birth of storytelling can be traced to the beginning of social life, at a time that no memory recalls. In other

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words, storytelling is as old as society itself, and its origin is impossible to know with precision. Zenani and Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté, although from two very different corners of the continent, agreed that the oral tradition started in ancient times. Whereas this lack of precision in temporal reference and the absence of written record may cast doubt on the truthfulness of oral narratives, it highlights the dynamic nature of storytelling as it links in a meaningful way a society’s past, present, and future. This chapter discusses oral tradition and the role of the griot on the one hand and examines, on the other, how the celebrated Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène proudly appropriated the title of griot but drew a clear line between the kind he considered himself to be and the current, postcolonial, cash-driven kind, which he depicted in one of his early films, Borom Sarret (1963).6 Griots have an ambiguous status. Although they enjoy freedom of expression and respect for their knowledge from both the elite and the common people, they are also stigmatized because they belong to an inferior caste7 within Senegalese society.8 Traditionally, social stratification in Senegal was stable and strict, and people could not change their group membership. Members of the same caste shared the inherited and unique secrets of their profession, and they also generally married within their group to ensure “blood purity” or continuity within the family and profession. The primary goal of working within this inherited profession was not to make money but to fulfill a culturally assigned duty and serve society.9 This identity, the blood tie that united the caste members, was their privilege and pride, their reason for living. In such systems, griots were professionally obligated to praise the nobles, who were the griots’ patrons. They acted as brokers and go-betweens in the nobles’ marriage arrangements and officiated at all the important ceremonies of their lives.10 Some of the griots’ functions—for example, advising and diplomacy—do not require poetry, but other roles produce forms of verbal art, such as songs, tales, and epics.11

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These days, however, it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to tell the griot by birth from the griot by choice, for two reasons: first, the blurring of boundaries between castes as a result of interethnic and intercaste marriages, and second, the wholehearted adoption of economic standards for measuring achievement. The historical relationship of “natural” or blood connections among caste, family pride, and profession has withered, and now, being a griot is a way of making money. Niane clearly made this point to the reader in the preface of his book: If today the griot is reduced to turning his musical art to account or even to working with his hands in order to live, it was not always so in ancient Africa…The social upheavals due to the conquest [that is, European conquest] oblige the griots to live otherwise today; thus they turn to account what had been, until then, their fief, viz. the art of eloquence and music.12 Niane confirmed the stability of the griots’ position in traditional Africa, which certainly explains why their stories were trustworthy, but he also implicitly distinguished them from contemporary griots, who trade their talents for monetary benefits. Why then did filmmaker Ousmane Sembène call himself a griot? Sembène was by no means a griot by heritage. He chose to call himself a griot to fulfill the self-assigned duty of educating his people through stories, but he was born to a family of fishermen in the southern region of Senegal. Unlike the traditional griot, whose role as the memory of society is culturally assigned, Sembène was a self-appointed griot who concerned himself primarily with the present, that is, with the way things are, how the past affects the present, and how things should be. Born into a working-class family and sharing the background of the average Senegalese citizen, Sembène had an insider’s knowledge of Senegalese society and culture. The self-instructed, well-traveled former soldier and union activist was more politically savvy than the average Senegalese, which afforded him a remarkably unique perspective on

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social and political issues. Manthia Diawara eloquently summarized what makes Sembène a unique filmmaker among his African peers: The other African filmmakers, mostly familiar only with the Paris scene and their own local issues, lacked the international exposure and sophistication of Sembène. While he played up the drama of local authenticity, his experiences with the international enabled him to make universal arguments from his local base.13

Figure 1. Borom Sarret stands by his cart chewing a kola nut.

Source. Courtesy of New Yorker Film.

Indeed, Sembène’s penetrating look at Senegalese postcolonial society in Borom Sarret revolves around the daily struggle of a cart driver who earns his living transporting people and things in Dakar. As Borom Sarret contemplatively stands by his cart eating the piece of kola nut his wife gave him on his way to work, a voice is heard off-screen.

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Figure 2. The griot singing the praises of Borom Sarret’s ancestors.

Source. Courtesy of New Yorker Film.

The camera pans right to reveal the image of a well-dressed, well-fed, and apparently well-off man singing and waving to Borom Sarret, whom is seen grinning for the first and only time in the film. He looks elated by the griot’s song, the meaning of which the viewer infers through Borom Sarret himself: “Who’s singing about my ancestors? The brave warriors of the past! Their blood flows in my veins. Even if this new life enslaves me, I’m still noble like my ancestors.” Ironically, the griot keeps singing and stretching out his hand to receive banknotes from Borom Sarret, who just a minute before was remembering that his family had nothing to eat for the day, while a crowd gathers to watch the performance. As soon as Borom Sarret has given the griot all his money, the griot shakes his hand good-bye and walks away, and then Borom Sarret comes back to reality as he turns away to sit by the squeaking wheel of his cart.

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Although the whole scene may seem like a verbal art show, which indeed it is, Sembène’s intent was clearly to call attention to and condemn the profiteering attitude of the griot, who ruthlessly exploits others. Sembène also heavy-handedly bashed Borom Sarret and the ordinary Senegalese for being consenting victims of a manipulative practice. Whereas until this point in the movie viewers felt sorry for, and sympathized with, the poor but hardworking cart driver, they now become irritated by his irresponsible attitude with the money he earned. Examining this scene only from a rational perspective, however, results in one missing out on the emotional charge that blinds Borom Sarret and makes him feel, for once, that life is worth living, miserable as it is. The griot taps into images that evoke strong emotions in Borom Sarret and make him feel more important. Indeed, it is Borom Sarret’s naïveté that temporarily transports him into new and unreal horizons before he reawakens to the harsh reality of his destitution. The griot is portrayed in the film as one of many forces that conspire to keep the cart driver and people like him in a condition of slavery. Sembène set out to educate his audience about this condition of enslavement. His critical eye diagnosed and depicted the miserable conditions of the poor, whereas the griot intentionally ignores the present and delves into the past. What good does it do Borom Sarret if his ancestors were kings and queens? How relevant is it for him to be reminded of that past when he can barely hang on to life? These are some of the questions Sembène raised. In contrast with the griot in the film, who magnifies the past to enthrall Borom Sarret, Sembène moved the audience with a sorrowful depiction of Borom Sarret’s present condition. Sembène’s viewers are all too aware of the disenfranchised condition of the cart driver, and this awareness sets up their emotional connection with him. Conversely, the griot’s inclination to tell magnified stories to profit from his patrons underscores a practice that is seemingly out of place.

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The downfall of griots was preceded by the collapse of the traditional social structure that created and supported them. Niane insisted on the distinction between modern and traditional griots even further when he wrote, “Nowadays when we speak of griot we think of that class of professional musicians fashioned to live on the backs of others.”14 Any person can fall into this category, regardless of caste. This is to say that being a griot is no longer the result of heredity; it is a choice, and the choice is dictated by the socioeconomic conditions of the individual. In other words, being a griot is a last resort of sorts for those who have no alternative, no other answer to the financial demands of daily life. It is also an option for those who choose the “easier” way of making a living. The contrary is true as well, however, given that some families traditionally known as griots have opted out of singing praises and now earn their livelihood from paying jobs. As living symbols of oral tradition, griots traditionally were the link among past, present, and future, and they also were the molders of social conscience and discourse. In Senegal’s oral-based culture, the griot played a major role in the preservation and transmission of social values. Furthermore, the art of the griot was not simply a demonstration of his competence in using language to convey meaning; it was also an expression of his ability to use language in a unique fashion, to manipulate it to effectively establish and maintain the emotional relationship that binds audience and performer. The profession of the griot also called for the ability to tell and retell the same story without becoming boring or repetitious. Niane’s traditional griot, Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté, thinks highly of his inherited profession: [W]e are the vessels of speech, we are the repositories which harbour secrets many centuries old. The art of eloquence has no secrets for us; without us the names of kings would vanish into oblivion, we are the memory of mankind; by the spoken word we bring to life the deeds and exploits of kings for younger generations.15

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The griot, who has the double responsibility of instructing and entertaining his audiences, must be a talented oral performer. He draws from past events to make sense of the present and uses words to create images that stir emotions in his listeners. Therefore, griots are expected to talk, for talking is intrinsic to their responsibilities within their social environment. In contrast to nobles, who avoid the public gaze, griots seek it, for that is the source of their livelihood. Martha B. Kendall summarized the griot’s demeanor as follows: For the griot, on the other hand, the public gaze is bread-andbutter. Griots are trained from birth to bring the eyes of others to themselves, to use the eyes of others, to attract the public regard… I came to understand what nobles mean when they say griots are “shameless.”…[G]riots not only do not avoid the public gaze; they actually seek out opportunities to experience it. To nobles, whose whole ideology and whole public practice is set against attracting attention, griot public behaviour is indeed repugnant.16 Kendall’s remarks on the griots’ social behavior are enlightening and may hold as a general stereotypical characterization for both past and current griots, although not all griots fall into this category, as indicated earlier. Nevertheless, griots as a class can talk with impunity about almost anything. Sembène clearly stated that they belong to the category of the insane: “Everybody knows that griots are crazy. Every village has its own simpleton who dares to say out loud what other people only whisper in the solitude of their huts. We laugh at him, but we acknowledge that he is right.”17 The label “crazy” may be given to people who, like the griot, take the risk of telling the truth when (in order to save face) common sense recommends concealing it, who take the liberty of going beyond what is normal, expected, or acceptable under specific circumstances. Griots’ acceptance of all these responsibilities drew them closer to their people and made them the people’s confidants, their mouthpieces,

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and the molders of their conscience. These attributes prompted Sembène to borrow the title of griot not only to empower himself as a master speaker but also so he would be listened to, because people love to listen to the griot’s stories. Most important, griots had to be heard because the griot’s stories were not simply for entertainment; they also were educational. In fact, Sembène declared on many occasions that his cinema was an “evening school” for continuing education. Being a griot placed Sembène among the “crazy” and provided him with a shield behind which the artist, with impunity, may cry out his otherwise reprehensible provocation. If Sembène was proud of the griot title he assigned himself, he promptly declared that he was not an adulator, a praise-singer like the one in Borom Sarret. He styled himself as the people’s confidant, their voice, their truth-teller. The next several pages examine Sembène’s storytelling strategies and the purpose of his storytelling. Whereas traditional griots had a clear role in society and proudly served the interests of noble families or, at the very least, the interests of those who supported them, independent screen griots such as Sembène put forth a political agenda, refusing to sing praises. Thus, Sembène carefully scrutinized society, pointed to its flaws, and, in the process, left no aspect or component of society untouched. His strategy was to shock his viewers and force them to think; he told simple but provocative stories inspired by daily life. For example, Borom Sarret, a film that is only eighteen minutes long, is apparently simple and straightforward, containing all the thematic seeds of Sembène’s later films. It is the chronicle of a typical postindependence day in the life of an ordinary Senegalese worker living in the outskirts of Dakar, trying to earn a living by carrying loads around in his cart. The following is an exact chronology of the film’s actions: 1. Borom Sarret says his prayers and heads off to the market in his cart. He takes with him Fatou and Mamadou, his regular “passengers,” neither of whom can pay him. Fatou’s business is not doing well, and Borom Sarret keeps hoping that she will pay him someday; Mamadou,

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who has been out of a job for six months, pays with a handshake as he gets off the cart. 2. Borom Sarret carries bricks for a patron and gets paid for his service. 3. Borom Sarret takes a man and woman to the maternity clinic and gets paid. He eats a kola nut for lunch. 4. The griot praises Borom Sarret’s ancestors. Borom Sarret gives his earnings to the griot. 5. Borom Sarret takes a mourning father and his dead child to the cemetery. 6. Borom Sarret helps to move an educated person in the downtown area, even though carts are not allowed there. Attracted by the prospect of a good payment and the hope for protection by his marabouts, he takes the chance. He gets into trouble with the police, and the customer leaves without paying. Borom Sarret receives a ticket and is deprived of his cart. 7. Borom Sarret walks home with his horse, poorer than when he left in the morning. His wife, tired of him returning empty-handed, leaves the house promising to bring back food. Read closely, the narrative can be broken down among the protagonist (the cart driver) and several antagonists, whom the protagonist confronts in the course of the day. The antagonists can be grouped into two categories: human and “institutional.” The human antagonists stand between Borom Sarret and his ultimate goal and invalidate his efforts to make money; the “institutional” antagonists function to confuse the protagonist and frustrate him. In Borom Sarret, a construction en abîme (story within a story) allows the telling of the same story from the perspective of two different storytellers. Both Sembène and the griot in the film tell the story of the cart driver, and yet, because their motivations do not intersect, their stories are far apart.

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Figure 3. Antagonists and Protagonists.

Note. See Mbye B. Cham, “Structural and Thematic Parallels in Oral Narrative and Film: Mandabi and Two African Oral Narratives,” in The Oral Performance in Africa, ed. Isidore Okpewho (Ibadan, Nigeria: Spectrum Books, 1990), 251–269.

The griot in the film sings the praises of the cart driver to please him and make money from him. As the griot makes the cart driver smile, the cart driver momentarily forgets the pains and frustrations of his condition. The griot fetches a story from his repertoire to stir the cart driver’s emotions, causing him to drift temporarily off-course. Thus, he is reminded of a bygone past, dead heroes, ancient pride, and grandeur, all of which are of no relevance to his current misery but rather serve to delude him. Sembène as griot does the opposite. He finds in the cart driver a typical Senegalese worker and follows him around with his camera as he goes about his daily routine. But Sembène employs the familiar to question the contradictions within routines that are otherwise taken for granted. Therefore, the film serves as a rerun of the viewers’ daily lives, and as such, it allows viewers to see themselves from a spectator’s point of view, to analyze and critique themselves but, most importantly, to mend their ways and take action where needed. Unlike the film griot, who distracts his listeners from the present by reviving irrelevant memories from the past, Sembène emphatically kept viewers in the present and forced them to examine its harsh realities, distinguishing and distancing himself from

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the praise-singing and cash-driven griots and radically countering their practice.

Figure 4. Appearing here is an oncoming cart with Borom Sarret and two passengers.

Source. Courtesy of New Yorker Film.

His view on current griots was summarized in an interview with Maya Jaggi cited by Thierno Dia: “But now we have a new breed of griot who’s a mouthpiece for the powerful; he’s just there to sing their praises and get paid.”18 Sembène started out by establishing the neediness of the cart driver, whose only source of income is his job of transporting things in his cart. It is expected that any person using his services (riding in the cart) will pay for the service because Borom Sarret counts on payment to feed

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his family and the horse. The first contradiction is that his most regular customers, Fatou and Mamadou, ride free every day because they cannot afford to pay the cart driver. Fatou’s life is linked to the whims of a market over which she has no control, a market to which she must go every day to sell and buy food. The cart driver hopes to be paid but understands that things are not going well for her and so never asks for payment. As for Mamadou, although educated, he has been unable to find a job. Jumping onto the cart on the run, he shakes Borom Sarret’s hand in thanks for the free ride. Although unhappy about the lack of payment, Borom Sarret never complains to Mamadou.

Figure 5. The Mosque, an imposing structure in its form as well as its stark white color.

Source. Courtesy of New Yorker Film.

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Sembène underscored the fact that Mamadou, like Fatou, is keeping his life on hold. By not giving up the quest and by repeating the daily routine, they sustain their hopes. In the same way as Borom Sarret himself, Mamadou and Fatou are victims of modern life. The cash economy and joblessness, two offshoots of modernity and independence, turn the three characters into downtrodden citizens. Fatou and Mamadou are, however, the least of the obstacles to the cart driver, and in both subtle and obvious ways, Sembène draws the viewer’s attention to the complexity of the elements that conspire to hold back the protagonist. A greater stumbling block to the success of the cart driver seems to be religion as it is presented in the film. Not only does religion have an imposing structural presence (the mosque), but the recurrent discursive references to the mosque illustrate its influence on the protagonist’s daily life. Borom Sarret starts with about two seconds of totally black screen and the sound of a voice coming from the mosque calling Muslims to prayer. The first image on the screen, as it turns light, is of the mosque, starkly white and with its tall minaret, right in the middle of the frame. This shot is followed by one of the protagonist saying his prayer. The camera then lingers on a street filled with people, cars, and motorcycles. The voice of the muezzin can be heard throughout this first part. The camera moves back to the cart driver as he completes his prayer and sets off to work. The appearance of the huge mosque in the opening scene implies its centrality in the daily life of the people. The consistency and persistence of the calls to prayer and the loudspeakers that echo the call reflect Islam’s strong and pervasive influence. This influence is also perceptible in the internal monologue of the protagonist throughout the film and, to a lesser degree, in his wife’s as well. As she gives Borom Sarret a “good luck” kola nut on his way to work, she declares, “May God protect you!” Borom Sarret concludes his prayer with this formula—“Merciful Allah, protect me and mine from the laws and the infidels”—while he puts huge amulets around his neck. There are obvious indications that the protago-

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nist practices Islam, but it is also made very clear that he strongly believes in the power of amulets, evidenced by the massive pile viewers see. As he asks Allah for protection and wears his amulets simultaneously, one cannot help thinking that asking Allah (the invisible force) for protection is one thing and making sure he is protected by his amulets (which he can grasp) is another.

Figure 6. Borom Sarret finishes his prayers with a pile of charms on his side.

Source. Courtesy of New Yorker Film.

Allah and the amulets, though contradictory and exclusive in principle, seem complementary to Borom Sarret. Allah is abstract and verbal —“May all the Saints protect me! May Cheikh the marabout protect me! May all protect me!”—whereas the amulets, which he keeps pulling up as he calls for protection, are material and palpable.

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Sembène points out the confusion that Borom Sarret’s attitude warrants and the debilitating power of ignorance it displays. Although he perpetrates supposedly irreconcilable spiritual practices, the cart driver tries to make them work together. Sembène mocked and demystified the supposed power of marabouts, usually seen as demigods, by proving them incapable of providing protection to the cart driver despite his persistent entreaties for their help. By doing this, Sembène invited the average Senegalese to overcome the strong but false belief that marabouts are capable of saving anyone here or in death, and he urged his audience to wake up and take action. Similarly, an institutionalized and rationalized kind of discrimination and exploitation seems to reinforce and perpetuate the gap between the elite and the masses. There exists a clear divide between housing for the poor and that for the elite, as well as a severe restriction of movement on the part of the masses who live in populous and disorderly neighborhoods, in houses made of sheet metal, wood, cardboard, and other recycled materials on narrow and dusty streets. In contrast, the elite enjoy the luxuries of tall buildings, clean and paved roads, and police protection, and they even are allowed to steal from the masses without consequence. For example, the policeman steps on the cart driver’s medal and forces him to leave without it. Similarly, the man in a suit and tie hires the cart driver but does not pay him. What Sembène suggested here is clearly stated by the cart driver when, at the height of frustration, he walks his horse home and refers to his tormentors, along with all those who know how to read and write, as thieves. The cart driver is a victim of the complicity of the “law and the infidels,” as he calls them. Sembène’s scenario suggests that the protagonist should critically reflect on the validity of the belief he expressed in his prayer at the beginning of the film: “May God protect me from the laws and the infidels.” Indeed, as far as the film is concerned, his prayer was not fulfilled.

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Whereas in traditional African society it was the responsibility of storytellers to serve as both the collective memory of society and as its critical voice, storytellers no longer have the secure status that such responsibility required and consequently conferred on a class of people.

Figure 7. Borom Sarret’s fist is shown against the policeman’s boot.

Source. Courtesy of New Yorker Film.

Therefore, in a cash economy, surviving griots tend to flatter their patrons in order to maintain their customer base. And just as the role of griots was being debased and devalued as colonialism collapsed physically, their function of providing narratives was being usurped by Western media, particularly in the form of Western films that provided the impetus and models for Sembène and his generation of filmmakers in the early 1960s. But as Sembène began to assume his role as an African filmmaker, as a modern griot bent on telling Africa’s stories to its people,

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he diverged from the griot’s focus of singing praises for profit to opening the eyes of his audience and educating his fellow Africans on issues of concern to them. Sembène’s inclination as a filmmaker to resuscitate the independence of the griot’s voice by critically looking at society was illustrated in his next film, Niaye (1964),19 about which film critic Abdelkader Benali wrote the following: Sembène Ousmane met en scène un griot qui constitue la première instance narrative, à la fois observateur et conteur de l’histoire. Agissant comme un filtre sémantique, il contrôle tout ce qui se déroule sur l’écran par sa simple position empathique dans le cadre, et fonctionne comme un adjuvant du cineaste lui-même.20 (Sembène Ousmane stages a griot who constitutes the first-person narrator, who observes and tells the story at once. Acting as a semantic filter, he controls everything that happens on the screen just by his position on the frame, and he functions as an extension of the filmmaker himself.) Niaye, which did not receive much attention from scholars in part because it was not easily accessible, shows the collapse of the structures that hold traditional society together. Niaye is a short film portraying a case of incest in a fictional Senegalese village where the fundamental moral values that served as part of the “social contract” fall apart. The film’s main themes are disintegration of the traditional code of honor, loss of pride and dignity, greed, power struggles, and incest. In the film, the village chief, Guibril Guèye, is of noble descent and has several wives, including Ngoné War Thiandoum, also from an aristocratic family. Guibril impregnated Ngoné War’s youngest daughter but keeps going about his business with total impunity. Ngoné War’s son, Tanor, comes home insane after serving eight years in the French army. His mother cannot even talk to him, because he spends all his time parading through the village with the French flag held high, followed by children and singing “Auprès de ma blonde, il fait bon.” (I feel good by my blond woman.) Ngoné War’s internal monologue reveals her distress:

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The Films of Ousmane Sembène Je ne puis lui [Tanor] dire un mot! Est-ce cela les lauriers de la guerre pour une mère? L’indignité me dévore. De la guerre pour les autres, mon fils m’en est revenu méconnaissable. Ma fille pour qui je rêvais d’un mari égal à elle de rang, son père, mon mari, l’engrossa. Moi de la plus vieille noblesse du pays je ne peux survivre à ce déshonneur! (I cannot say a word to him [Tanor]! Is that the war medal for a mother? I’m devastated by indignity. From fighting for others, my son came back to me unrecognizable. My daughter for whom I was dreaming of a husband of the same social status, her father, my husband, made her pregnant. Being from the oldest nobility of the country, I cannot survive this dishonor!)

Unable to bear the ignominy, Ngoné War commits suicide. Médoune, Guibril’s younger brother, who covets his older brother’s throne, sends insane Tanor to murder Guibril, his father. The girl and her newborn are banned from the village. Médoune usurps the throne, becomes the new chief, and greets the colonial officer come to collect taxes. This film is a pointed critique of a visible moral crisis in a village caught between external influences and the fragility of its internal structures. A very important element to bear in mind here is that the Guèye family is an aristocratic family, the epitome of the societal values and moral principles that are disintegrating. The Guèye family’s situation is all the more tragic because the family is among those that set the community’s moral standards emulated by other people in the community. The Guèyes normally are a moral reference and should unfailingly incarnate the values of dignity and pride associated with their rank. But what viewers see instead is an aristocratic family at its worst, mired in disgrace—an incestuous and dishonorable father; a son moins qu’un homme (less than a man), une loque (a wreck) as his own mother calls him, unworthy of succeeding his father; a daughter pregnant with a bastard—all things to turn them into the village laughingstocks. The Guèye family goes from the highest and most respected family of the

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village to the most denigrated. As the griot says about Guibril Guèye, “D’un type de la caste inférieure, j’aurais compris.” (From a lower caste person, I’d have understood.) Although guilty of incest and ostracized by the people in the village, Guibril neither resigns his throne nor commits suicide. He continues with his business in the village as if nothing had happened. Ngoné War, who cannot bear to be seen by her friends and neighbors, lives in hiding, all the while hoping in vain for the council of village elders to take action (as recommended by both tradition and Islam) against her incestuous father. She ultimately wakes up to a harsh reality—“Où sont les beaux precepts d’alors? Tout est mensonge dans ce pays!” (Where are the old-time precepts? It’s all lies in this country!)—before taking her own life. In his article “L’honneur dans les sociétés Ouolof et Toucouleur du Sénégal,” Boubakar Ly attributed the moral crisis among the Ouolof and Toucouleur ethnic groups to the collapse of traditional social structure: La colonisation, dans la mesure où elle a fait éclater les anciennes structures socio-politiques a accéléré la disparition de l’honneur en tant que morale aristocratique. Pour ne nous en tenir qu’au niveau de la conscience qu’en ont les Sénégalais, on peut dire que la disparition de l’honneur leur est apparue comme une crise des valeurs sénégalaises.21 (Colonization accelerated the disappearance of honor as aristocratic moral in that it made the old sociopolitical structures collapse. To make do only with the level of awareness of Senegalese about it, one can say that the disappearance of honor occurred to them as a crisis in Senegalese values.) In Niaye, the griot understands the mutation of the society so well that he exclaims out loud about the moral decay prevailing in the village. The sense of a break from the past is suggested both verbally and visually: the griot declares, “Une nouvelle vie commence où la vérité sera un délit” (A new life begins where telling the truth will be a crime), while the camera takes a close-up shot of a head being shaved, dwelling on the

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image. Shaving symbolizes change. It marks a breaking point, a change of look, of identity from old to new; it is the sign of rebirth. In the context of the film, shaving marks a shift from old moral values to new ones. Sitting in one corner of the village under the tree that serves him as a workshop, the griot is able to look everywhere and catch every detail in the community’s day-to-day life; he sees and makes sense of everything.

Figure 8. Shown is the griot’s face (in Niaye) as his gaze follows Tanor going to stab his father.

Source. Courtesy of M-NET African Film Library.

This, his diagnosis of the situation in the village, is compelling: Telle figure avenante, telle naissance, tel habit d’apparat ne sont que dorures. Chacun se revêt d’un attribut pour mieux gruger son prochain. Telle personne à la piété légendaire s’en couvre pour mieux accomplir une activité innommable. Notre pays se meurt dans les mensonges et la fausse morale. Seule la fortune est morale. Ngoné War Thiandoum n’a pas démérité de sa naissance. La devise des siens est: Plutôt mourir mille fois, de mille

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manières plus affreuses l’une que l’autre, que de supporter un jour un affront. (A pleasant face, a birth, a ceremonial outfit are nothing but gilt. Each person puts on an air in order to dupe their neighbor. A person known to be religious uses his reputation as a cover to accomplish unnamable acts. Our country is dying down into lies and bad morals. Only fortune is of moral value. Ngoné War Thiandoum did not prove herself unworthy of her birth. The motto of her people is: Rather die a thousand times, in a thousand ways each more hideous than the next, than be humiliated one day.) What is at stake here is power and money. The village elders, undisturbed by the scandal, keep playing games in the middle of the village, whereas Médoune plots to get rid of his brother and replace him. The council of elders does not budge because its interests are tied to those of the new chief, and none of the elders will rock the boat by informing the colonial officer about the murder. “C’est une affaire qui nous regarde, pas le toubab” (It’s an affair that concerns us, not the white man), they say as an excuse for themselves. Surprisingly, the colonial officer visits the village, meets with Médoune in place of the usual Guibril, collects taxes, and leaves without inquiring about Guibril. With the tragedies that hit the Guèye family, including Ngoné War’s suicide, Guibril’s murder, and the insane son’s fetishization of French values, indignity has become the norm in the village, and the moral values of its people have been swept away. Having succumbed to immorality, the village has to make do with new and different values, as the griot implies when the incestuous daughter leaves the village with her child: Que Yalla vous assiste tous deux, qu’il ne vous abandonne pas, qu’il éclaire votre chemin. Depuis quand l’enfant est-il responsable de l’inconduite de ses parents? Yalla fasse que si cet enfant n’est pas de naissance noble, il le devienne et soit de conduite. D’eux naîtra le nouveau. (May Allah assist you both, may he not abandon you, may he enlighten your path. Since when is a child responsible for the

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The Films of Ousmane Sembène misconduct of his parents? May it be so that if this child is not of noble birth, he becomes so by his behavior. From them will emerge the new.)

The griot’s prayer here suggests the village should accept the departure from the traditional values that have been challenged. In other words, the traditional belief of inherited nobility and power through birth has reached its limits with the Guèye family scandal, and that crisis necessitates what Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike called “a genuine refurbishment of the ‘village’s’ culture.”22 Sembène questioned here the sense of social entitlement simply because one was born of noble parents. The fact that the incestuous daughter and her unwanted child are a disgrace in the village does not preclude them from working hard to deserve honor and respect; and Médoune has to deserve to become chief and not just feel entitled to it because of his blood tie to Guibril. In other words, Sembène suggested that power and nobility should be earned, not acquired through birth or blood. The tragic fate of the Guèye family illustrates the collapse of the traditional world order. The griot, flustered by the hypocrisy around him and the complicity of the council of elders, decides to move out of the village: Je ne peux pas vivre dans un pays où l’on ne respecte plus la dignité…(Je vais) là où la vérité n’est privilège ni de naissance, ni de fortune. (I cannot live in a country where dignity is no longer respected… (I’m going) where the truth is neither a birth nor a fortune privilege.) Although the griot comes back to the village, his symbolic departure means the disappearance of the generation of truth-telling griots. The new generation of griots will have to make up praise songs to please the new class of aristocrats, whose success is measured by their economic wealth and political power. The griot refuses to be an accomplice of the system and so is akin to the kind of griot that Sembène incarnated in

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Borom Sarret. They are both uncompromising griots set on telling the truth. Because of Sembène’s close connection with African culture, one might expect that he would have sided with the people, but his scrutiny spared no person and no aspect of African society. He harshly criticized and demonized cultural practices he deemed irrelevant and backward; he insisted on revealing a suppressed African history; he came down hard on the corrupt bourgeoisie that took over after colonialism; he chastised Africans for trading their dignity for food, power, or money (as in Niaye); and he was equally inflexible with gullible victims of modern life (as exemplified in Borom Sarret). Sembène strongly drew on the art of the storyteller, by incorporating seemingly unrelated and mundane stories into all-encompassing works of art. As a screen griot, he reinvented and appropriated the role of the storyteller; he also took advantage of the power of moving images, which enabled him to manipulate his audience visually as an outgrowth of what the traditional storyteller could do only verbally. Most important, Sembène remained faithful to the griot’s traditional mission and drew the substance of his films from the day-to-day reality of his people. 23

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Endnotes 1. Narrator’s voice 22:02 minutes into the film Niaye (Les Films Domirev: Senegal and France, 1964), 35 mm, 35 min., in French and Wolof. 2. Djibril Tamsir Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (Hong Kong: WLEE, 1993), 1. 3. Throughout this work, I refer to the griot as “he” instead of “she” mainly because noblemen had male griots, whereas noblewomen had griottes (female for griots). The griots to whom I refer are the type who inspired Sembène and to whom he compares him. 4. Niane, Sundiata, 1. 5. Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, The World and the Word: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradition, ed. Harold Scheub (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 7. 6. Ousmane Sembène, dir., Borom Sarret (The Cart Driver). Videocassette. New York: New Yorker Films (U.S.) and Metro (U.K.), 1963. DVD Release Date: November 22, 2005. 7. A caste is a system of social stratification that assigns people to a grouping (caste) by birth. Nancy Bonvillain, Language, Culture, and Communication: The Meaning of Messages (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000), 390. 8. Pfaff, Cinema of Ousmane Sembène, 30. 9. Bonvillain, Language, Culture, and Communication. 10. Martha B. Kendall, “Getting to Know You,” in Semantic Anthropology, ed. David J. Parkin (New York: Academic Press, 1982): 197–209. 11. Thomas A. Hale, Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 18. 12. Niane, Sundiata, vii. 13. Diawara, African Film, 31. 14. Niane, Sundiata, vii. 15. Ibid., 1. 16. Kendall, “Getting to Know You,” 201. 17. “Sembène Ousmane: Poet of the African Cinema.” UNESCO Courier 43, no. 1 (1990): 4–7. 18. Thierno Ibrahima Dia, “La Propédeutique de Ousmane Sembène,” L’Arbre à Palabres 21 (2007): 121. 19. Niaye.

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20. Abdelkader Benali, “Oralité et Cinéma Africain Francophone: Une Parenté Esthétique et Structurelle,” Notre Librarie 149 (October– December 2002): 22. 21. Boubakar Ly, “L’honneur Dans les Sociétés Ouolof et Toucouleur du Sénégal,” Présence Africaine 61 (1967): 33–67. 22. Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 202. 23. Amadou T. Fofana, “Sembène’s Borom Sarret: A Griot’s Narrative,” Literature/Film Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2011): 255–265. Part of this chapter is reprinted with the permission of Literature/Film Quarterly at Salisbury University.

Chapter 4

Language Matters  De tout temps, le refus a été le signe d’une dignité fondamentale.1 (Since the dawn of times, refusal has been the sign of fundamental dignity.) Language is a critical component of modern African subjectivities, for it always implicitly points to questions of identity and selfhood. In postcolonial Africa, the choice of the language of expression is itself a political statement. This is reflected in the fact that most African countries are composed of many diverse groups of people who have different ethnic and linguistic identities and yet live, despite these differences, under the same, arguably unifying, national flag, buttressed by a single European language and political structure. However, the European languages that came to be associated with power and prestige exacerbated identity crises among the new African elites, particularly during the early years of independence. These crises have continued for many people to the present day. To grasp fully the alienating power of language, it is essential to articulate, albeit briefly, how crucial language was to the colonizing process. In the next several pages, I discuss the psychological impact of language on the colonized subject and then examine how,

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through his cinema, Sembène promoted a political agenda to teach, use, and value Senegal’s national languages (Wolof, Pulaar, Sereer, Diola, Mandinka, and Soninke2) instead of French, the European language imposed during the colonial period. Analyzing the linguistic and cultural entanglement of the black people in his seminal essay, Black Skin White Masks, the Martinico-Algerian Frantz Fanon argued, Les nègres, du jour au lendemain, ont eu deux systèmes de référence par rapport auxquels il leur a fallu se situer. Leur métaphysique, ou moins prétentieusement leurs coutumes et les instances auxquelles elles renvoyaient, étaient abolies parce qu’elles se trouvaient en contradiction avec une civilisation qu’ils ignoraient et qui leur en imposait.3 (From one day to the next, the blacks have had to deal with two systems of reference in relation to which they had to situate themselves. Their metaphysics, or less pretentiously their customs and the agencies to which they refer, were abolished because they were in contradiction with a new civilization that imposed its own.) Here, Fanon summarized the psychological drama resulting from the confrontation between African languages and cultures and the languages and cultural values of colonial Europe. At the same time as European languages became pervasive and unavoidable throughout the continent, the elite who studied and embraced them experienced more personally and more profoundly the identity struggles that came with them. Espousing European worldviews accompanied mastery of the European languages, which were often in stark contradiction with the indigenous ways of seeing and being in the world. Because language carries with it a culture’s way of understanding and relating to the world, language is more than just a means of communication. Given that it is impossible to dissociate a language from the cultural values it carries, education in the European languages resulted in

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the elite’s internal alienation. Addressing this issue, Fanon aptly demonstrates that “parler, c’est exister absolument pour l’autre…c’est surtout assumer une culture, supporter le poids d’une civilisation”4 (to speak is to exist absolutely for the other…it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization). In other words, the language with which you choose to express yourself defines who you are and how you relate to the outside world. Because Africans, particularly the postcolonial elite, have had their customs and the agencies to which they refer abolished (as Fanon indicated); they find themselves trapped between two fundamentally contradictory worldviews. Torn between the legacy of orality and a colonial institutional heritage based on writing, African intelligentsia are the product of a hybrid construct in constant struggle for definition and selfhood, a condition that Albert Memmi described as “linguistic drama.”5 It is also a psychological drama, which has profound ramifications for the culture and daily life of Africans. Fanon’s emphasis on the alienating power of language was echoed and taken a step farther by Trinh Minh-Ha, who insisted on linguistic imposition’s oppressive function. She wrote that “[l]anguage is one of the most complex forms of subjugation, being at the same time the locus of power and unconscious servility.”6 This equation of linguistic domination—a key stage in the colonizing process—with oppression, subjugation, and servility makes “decolonizing the mind” through linguistic revival an absolute must for regaining psychological balance of the self and, by extension, liberating one’s nation. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explained in his book Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature when he opted out of writing in English, “I believe that my writing in Gĩkũyũ language, a Kenyan language, an African language, is part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggles of Kenyan and African peoples.”7 From Ngũgĩ’s perspective, writing in the national languages of Africa is a way of reclaiming one’s mind, reclaiming one’s liberty to think independently, a process that, seen more broadly, also implies reclaiming one’s national independence. In his view, there can

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be no political liberation without a cultural liberation, and cultural liberation is intertwined with linguistic liberation. He argued, Language carries culture, and culture carries language, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world…Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.8 Following these arguments, one can draw the conclusion that conscious servility ends with independence; however, Ngũgĩ and Trinh agreed that “unconscious servility” lives on for as long as the formerly colonized people continue to depend on the colonial language. In other words, until the formerly colonized reclaim linguistic independence, the worm remains in the fruit. What Fanon, Trinh, and Ngũgĩ all seemed to underscore is the empowering nature of the native language, which alone can faithfully convey the deep-seated emotions and feelings grounded in the culture of an individual or a group. The most compelling illustration of Sembène’s perception of the French language as nothing but a functional instrument of communication occurs in his film Camp de Thiaroye (1988). Codirected by Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow, the film is set in Thiaroye, a military camp situated in the outskirts of Dakar, Senegal. In 1944, the French colonial troops known as tirailleurs were temporarily stationed at Camp de Thiaroye while waiting to be discharged and repatriated to their countries of origin. Because the soldiers depicted in the movie were from the linguistically diverse French West African empire, the dialogue in Camp de Thiaroye is in pidgin, a bastardized form of French derogatorily known as petit-nègre (little negro). Most of the soldiers have never attended school, and so the only language they have to communicate with one another is the pidgin they learned in order to function during their military service. The film ends in a bloody massacre of the tirailleurs, who had revolted after becoming indignant over the inhuman treatment they

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suffered at the hands of their French commanders. Sembène’s view that the French language is but a brute form of communication is foregrounded at the apex of the tension between the returned combatants and their French commanders. A discussion starts among the tirailleurs, namely Dahomey and Niger, on whether they should choose the Frencheducated sergeant-chef Diatta as their delegate: Dahomey: Non, non, non! Nous pas nommer serzan-sef délégué. C’est tubabu qui nommer lui sef. Nous afiriki, chaque chambré nommer délégué. Niger: Hee, Serzan-sef, pas n’importe qui! Lui connasse parler bon français comme blanc. Est-ce que vous, vous connasse français pour délégué parler blanc? Dahomey: He, he, he! Tu con? Niger: Ah? Dahomey: Oui, tu con quate fois. Franci c’est quoi? C’est de langue! Tu parler bon franci, tu parler mauvais franci, ça que tu parler dedans c’est ça qui est bon. Hen, franci c’est comme femme. Tu prends femme, tu fais, tu fais, tu fais; mais c’est pour faire le petinenfant seulement. Et puis c’est tout. Nous pas nommer serzan-sef délégué! (Yes, you’re four times an idiot. What’s French? It’s a language! You speak good French, you speak bad French, what you say is what counts. French is like a woman. You grab a woman, you take her, you take her, you take her, but it’s only to make a little baby. And then it’s over.) [emphasis added] What Dahomey is saying here in a broken but intelligible French is, in a nutshell, that the ultimate goal of language is to convey meaning and make oneself understood, that the means and the form, how ideas are expressed, do not matter as long as the words make sense in the end. Stated otherwise, style and beauty do not matter; language is essentially a mechanical instrument.

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One can see this view differs from other understandings of language from the same period. One example is Senghor’s, who was adamant about properly using French, with the correct grammar, correct pronunciation, and correct intonation. Senghor was highly educated, wrote poetry in French, was part of the intellectual elite, had been fighting hard to prove that Africans were civilized and could speak French like the French, and was married to a French woman. His inclination, therefore, to be a purist of the French language was entirely understandable. Supporting these claims are several anecdotes about Senghor. When he was president, he was said to have had in his cabinet’s meeting room a board on which he systematically corrected his ministers’ errors and another on which he made it a point to correct the French of the journalists who interviewed him before he would answer their questions. By contrast, Sembène’s perception of French as nothing but a tool of communication and his subsequent use of it as such are evidenced in his first novel, The Black Docker (1955). The book was rejected by several publishers, including Présence Africaine (which had also rejected his earlier submissions on several occasions). Sembène ultimately paid out of pocket to have his novel published. These repeated disappointments may help explain Sembène’s lifelong frustration with much of the African elite and the many attempts in his works to settle scores with them. He openly expressed his dislike for the elite in an interview with Carrie D. Moore, who analyzed his works in her 1973 dissertation: “Je n’aime pas du tout l’élite”9 (I do not like the elite at all). He explained, D’abord il y avait énormément de problèmes parce que c’était pour la première fois que je prenais la plume pour écrire un livre. Je ne savais pas comment se composait un livre et comment il fallait rédiger. Et deuxièmement je sentais que j’avais à dire ce que je devais dire, devais partir de ma propre expérience…Quand la première fois le livre est prêt j’ai envoyé ça à Présence Africaine, ils ont refusé. Comme ils avaient refusé même d’autres nouvelles que j’avais écrites à l’époque. Et un jour j’ai rencontré un éditeur

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Debresse, un petit éditeur, qui m’a dit qu’il était disposé à publier mon livre moyennant je paie. J’ai payé 250.000 francs en 1955.10 (First there were many problems because it was my first time writing a book. I did not know how to outline a novel or how to write it. Second, I felt that I had to say what I had to say, and I had to go from my own experience…When the book was ready for the first time I sent it to Présence Africaine; they rejected it the same way they had rejected other stories I had written at the time. And one day I ran into Debresse, an editor, who told me that he would publish my book if I paid. I paid 250,000 cfa [about $500] in 1955.) The refusal of Présence Africaine to publish the book, while unexplained, leads one to consider the possibility that the manuscript did not meet its standards. Présence Africaine was then led by Alioune Diop, an intellectual like Senghor and Césaire, who, despite his friendship with Sembène, must have deemed Le Docker Noir unworthy of publication. The scathing criticism the novel received following its publication confirms these assertions. In her dissertation, Moore described it as an uneven, loosely structured literary failure. It breaks all rules: unbelievable plot, stereotyped characters, melodramatic tone, and grammatically inaccurate sentences…The work served its purpose in that it represented the conscious effort of a writer to master the word, to pull together a series of experiences around a given theme…This novel was somewhat crude in its form.11 The appraisal is by no means complimentary. However, Moore made a point of indicating that the book achieved its intended purpose, which, as with Sembène’s other writings and films, was “to pull together a series of experiences around a given theme,” thereby illustrating Sembène’s perception of French as a tool. His use of French reflects the pragmatism and efficacy of the handyman he was by training. In Camp de Thiaroye, the unique pronunciation, along with the syntactic inaccuracies of the tirailleurs’ language, does not obstruct the viewer’s understanding. With the same sense of pragmatism and purpose he showed in

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his use of French in Camp de Thiaroye, Sembène scrutinized society with his camera and used indigenous languages to disseminate his message. The next several pages discuss Sembène’s use of language in specific films.

Language Choice and Use Manda bi (1968) Translated as The Money Order, from the Wolof Manda bi, Sembène’s second feature film deals with the desperate attempts of Ibrahima Dieng, a nonliterate elderly Senegalese man to cash a money order sent to him in Dakar by a nephew who works in France. The man has no valid identification card, so he decides to have one made, only to be confronted with the abuse, corruption, and envy of local administrators and all those around him. He ultimately turns to a relative for help. The relative manages to cash the money order but then claims to have lost it. The film ends with the protagonist vowing to turn to thieving and lying, only to hear the mailman declare that together they can bring about change. With Manda bi, the very first film in an African language, Sembène paved the way for a new and inspirational film aesthetic in Africa. In the film, Sembène artfully exposed the uneasy linguistic choices invariably confronted by African verbal artists. He did this by bringing faceto-face two worlds that are not necessarily exclusive but that can barely understand each other: the traditional, respectful, and trusting world of Ibrahima Dieng and the chaotic, foreign-influenced, often ruthless world of modern Dakar with its French-educated and corrupt civil servants. The colonial language appears as an empowering locus that excludes the nonliterate from certain spheres of the country’s socioeconomic life. This was a practice that the French linguist Louis-Jean Calvet understood only too well when he wrote,

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Au plan linguistique, le colonialisme institue donc un champ d’exclusion linguistique à double détente: exclusion d’une langue (la langue dominée) des sphères du pouvoir, exclusion des locuteurs de cette langue (de ceux qui n’ont pas appris la langue dominante) de ces mêmes sphères.12 (From a linguistic perspective, colonialism institutes a two-dimensional field of exclusion: exclusion of one language (the dominated one) from the spheres of power, and exclusion of its speakers (those who did not learn the dominating language) from the same spheres.) By systematically excluding indigenous languages and their speakers from spheres of power, colonialism gave opportunities only to those who were educated in French and who had been indoctrinated and molded by that very system. The misfortunes of Ibrahima Dieng, the protagonist of Manda bi, are rooted in his lack of education in French and his belief in the tradition of trust and solidarity in a world filled with dishonest and selfish people. Because he is not educated in the European manner, the very concept of a “national identity card” seems absurd to him, and the civil servants’ lack of understanding and compassion (and their exploitation of his ignorance) underscores profound deviations from the fundamental values upon which Dieng’s worldview was founded. The cardinal societal values of trust, respect, and solidarity are threatened when Dieng, in frustration, swears to adopt lying and stealing as a mode of social interaction. The ultimate message of the film, however, remains the mailman’s intrusive appeal to a disheartened Dieng. “We can change the situation,” the mailman says to Dieng. The mailman’s “we” here indicates the mailman himself, Dieng, and his wives and children, who are then joined by other downtrodden people, such as Dieng’s sister and a hungry neighbor begging for rice. Although there is no clear evidence as to how they might change the situation, what is telling about the ending of the film is that a group of disenfranchised individuals symbolizing the

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common uneducated people have come to terms with the fact that they need to neither emulate the French-educated people in their dishonest and selfish ways nor resign themselves to the role of consenting victims. The final scene stresses that it behooves Dieng and people like him to take their destinies in hand given that the self-serving elite have let them down. This self-serving attitude of the elite is sardonically depicted in Sembène’s next film.

Xala (1974) Xala (The Curse) takes French on directly, taking place on the very day of Senegal’s independence from France. In the movie, crowds are seen celebrating in the streets, but the audience soon becomes aware that only the faces of the rulers have changed: the French colonialists have been expelled from the chamber of commerce only to be replaced by neocolonialists, Senegalese men dressed in tuxedos. As the new rulers sit around the conference table, the now former colonizers, the French, return to offer them briefcases full of money. One among the new rulers, El Hadji, announces his intention to take a third wife and invites his colleagues to attend the wedding. He finds a young, beautiful woman and throws an expensive wedding party. Believing himself invincible, he ridicules the traditional nuptial practices—which he sees as superstitions—of his culture. But on his wedding night, he finds that he is unable to consummate his marriage because someone has put a curse on him and made him impotent. El Hadji, a successful businessman, has separated himself from his community. Believing that his wealth and power make him superior to those who do not share his privileges, El Hadji ignores the needs of the poor and regards the uneducated with contempt. El Hadji is infatuated with his socioeconomic privileges and believes that his less-fortunate fellow citizens deserve their misfortune. Ironically, however, after much investigating, El Hadji realizes that the only cure for the curse is for him to allow those same marginalized people to spit upon him. Figuratively, the figurehead of Euro/Western values is degraded at the end.

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In Xala, while French education encourages the elite to dismiss and look down upon their traditional culture, it also confers power and eases access to economic well-being. Meanwhile, the uneducated people who continue to adhere to the local traditions are left to live off the leftovers of the elite or beg in the streets. Fanon stressed this distinction when he observed, Tandis que les masses maintiennent intactes les traditions les plus hétérogènes à la situation coloniale, tandis que le style artisanal se solidifie dans un formalisme de plus en plus stéréotypé, l’intellectuel se jette frénétiquement dans l’acquisition forcenée de la culture de l’occupant en prenant soin de caractériser péjorativement sa culture nationale, ou se cantonne dans l’énumération circonstanciée, méthodique, passionnelle et rapidement stérile de cette culture.13 (While the mass of the people maintain intact traditions which are completely different from those of the colonial situation, and the artisanal style solidifies into a formalism which is more and more stereotyped, the intellectual throws himself in frenzied fashion into the frantic acquisition of the culture of the occupying power and takes every opportunity of unfavorably criticizing his own national culture, or else takes refuge in setting out and substantiating the claims of that culture in a way that is passionate but rapidly becomes unproductive.) In the film, the elite undermine the local culture and even refuse to speak Wolof, which to them is associated with the lower class. For instance, to distinguish himself from the uneducated, El Hadji speaks only French to his daughter, Rama, who responds to him in Wolof. Angered by his daughter’s insistence on speaking Wolof to him, El Hadji yells at her, “Au fait Rama, pourquoi quand je te parle en français, tu me reponds en Wolof?” (Rama, why do you answer in Wolof when I speak to you in French?) Whereas use of the French language confers higher status on El Hadji, it also estranges him from his own child and even from himself. That is, it makes him feel like someone else by drawing a line of

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demarcation between him and the majority of people in his own society. In the same way that he rejects the national language, El Hadji resists the local culture. In his thinking, the local language and culture weigh him down and prevent him from achieving his ambitions for greater wealth and prestige. In fact, his curse is the result of his refusal to sit on a mortar before trying to consummate his marriage, a traditional practice that he considers ridiculous, just as he considers speaking the national language degrading. In response to the request of his new bride’s aunt that he sit on the mortar and straddle the pestle to ward off bad luck, El Hadji stays firm in his refusal: “Ces histoires-là, c’est ridicule! M’asseoir sur le mortier et d’enfourcher le pilon par-dessus le marché, ah non, ah non, ah non, ça ne marche pas.” (This is ridiculous! Sitting on a mortar and also straddling a pestle, no, no, no, I refuse.) In contrast, El Hadji’s daughter’s resistance to using French for social interaction reflects the more common practice in Senegal, which is to use French primarily for official business. The only time El Hadji’s daughter uses French in the film is when she addresses a police officer. The message here is clear: there is an uneasy tension, a competition of sorts between French and the local languages, especially Wolof, but their domains are clearly delineated. Sembène does not reject the use of French; what he suggests is that it should not overshadow the local languages. For Sembène, just as for El Hadji’s daughter, French should be used for official business. In sum, Rama is Sembène’s personal voice in the film and justifies the director’s effort to make his films in the local languages. In an interview, Sembène clearly stated that, for him, French is merely a tool of communication for which he has no bias: Pour moi, la langue française est un outil dont je me sers et envers lequel je ne nourris aucun complexe…le français n’est ni plus ni moins qu’un outil de travail…la langue française se limitait aux communications avec le dominateur.14

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(For me, French is a tool that I use and about which I have no complex…French is nothing more than a working tool…French was only used to communicate with the colonizer.) To Sembène, then, French is the language of the colonizer, used as a vehicle in the myriad institutions inherited from colonialism and serving to perpetuate the colonial endeavor. Just as language is always a vehicle for a culture, French conveys the European worldview and way of life, which the indigenous people who adopt the language then tend to espouse. Thus, to expand use of the national languages, Sembène and friends went so far as to create a journal in Wolof, Kaddu, about which he said the following in an interview: Je pense que la langue Ouolof devrait être la langue nationale du Sénégal à la place du français. N’est-elle pas parlée par au moins 80% de la population? Depuis cinq ans j’anime une revue, “Kaddu” (c’est à dire “l’Opinion”) qui est actuellement trimestrielle. Vendue 50 francs CFA (un franc français), elle est diffusée à mille exemplaires, ce que l’on peut considérer comme un beau résultat. Nous n’avons jamais sollicité d’aide de l’Etat. C’est une revue à laquelle collaborent non seulement des magistrats, des étudiants, des femmes mais aussi des paysans qui nous envoient des poèmes. Sur dix pages, six sont toujours réservées à des paysans. Je regrette que l’on ne fasse pas de vrais efforts pour développer les langues africaines.15 (I think that Wolof should be Senegal’s national language in the place of French. Is it not spoken by at least 80% of the population? I have created a journal Kaddu (i.e., The Opinion), which comes out every three months now. It is sold 50cfa (one old French franc) in one thousand copies, which can be considered a good result. We have never asked help from the State. It’s a review that brings together not only lawmakers, students, women, but also peasants who send us poems. Six out of ten pages are reserved for peasants. I regret that real efforts are not being made to develop African languages.)

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Wolof was already at that time one of six officially declared national languages in Senegal, and French the official language, the language of school education and the administration. Sembène was suggesting that Wolof become the official language in place of French because more than 80 percent of Senegalese speak it. There are several problems with this idea, not the least of which is that Sembène lost sight of the fact that speaking Wolof does not necessarily mean that the speaker identifies as Wolof. Many people who speak it do so out of necessity. In addition, whereas people may willingly speak Wolof to communicate with one another, making it the official language and forcing Senegalese people to learn and speak it could lead to ethnic resistance. Imposing Wolof as the official language of Senegal would also seem the same or have the same effect as an oppressor language. Perhaps at the time of this interview, Sembène had a naive view of nationalism that changed over time. What Sembène does not say in this quote is that, like his writings in French, in Kaddu, too, he was confronted with the challenges of readership. Whereas 80 percent or more of Senegalese speak Wolof, far fewer knew how to read it in the late 1960s. Although the number of people literate in Wolof has increased since the time of the interview, it is unlikely that those who could read Wolof in the Latin alphabet were more numerous than the French readers, as Sembène seemed to suggest. The question of liberation may have been the motivating factor in the creation of Kaddu, but the lack of readership and lack of funding problems made it impossible for the journal to survive. This experience is indicative of the generally low status of the local languages and the need for a political commitment to develop literacy in them. In an earlier study, Moore pointed out the challenges Kaddu faced: “Kaddu” is ostensibly a community journal published once a month…Efforts are being made to standardize the orthography which means that many hours must be spent on the editing of the various articles. The biggest handicap in the smooth running of the operation is the lack of personnel. Also, the ability of the many contributors to write the language varies greatly. As a result a

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great deal of tedious work falls to the linguists of the team. In addition, the journal has seemingly insurmountable financial problems due to high costs of paper, printing, and mailing…Nevertheless, the “Kaddu” team has limped through its first year in spite of numerous delays and other problems.16 The most prominent difference between what Sembène said earlier and Moore’s observation is the frequency: Kaddu went from being a monthly journal to a triannual, most certainly because of the linguistic and financial challenges it was faced with. Though there is certainly a lot to feel proud about in having a journal in one of the national languages, the radical political views of the journal must have been the chief reason Sembène and his collaborators did not bother to request support from Senghor’s government, as Moore remarked later: The contributors to “Kaddu” have no problems pointing the finger at the enemies, and making life difficult for them. Most frequently the enemy is the “French presence,” either real or implied. Implicit in every criticism of French imperialism is a criticism of the neocolonialist government’s failure to extricate itself from a cultural and economic dependency.17 The anticolonial and propagandist orientation of the journal causes one to wonder how much help Kaddu was to the promotion of Wolof. Perhaps Sembène and friends should have started out by teaching people how to read and write in Wolof rather than bringing them a political journal that they could not read. Kaddu has now disappeared and is nowhere to be found, not even in the National Archives of Senegal. Some people still keep personal copies of Kaddu and academics continue to discuss it, but the one concrete reference to the journal is in Sembène’s Xala, in which a newspaper boy is seen holding copies and calling out that Kaddu is for sale. Perhaps if Sembène had published his novels and short stories in Wolof, they would have had more impact on the growing Wolof readership now than Kaddu did.

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As an artist, Sembène had a particular perspective on language issues in Senegal. He always regretted that in Senegal there was no governmental support for the local languages, not even Wolof, the national lingua franca spoken by more than 80 percent of Senegalese.18 He believed national languages should be developed and supported. Language mattered all the more to him because he was conscious of its alienating powers. He believed political liberation should go hand in hand with linguistic liberation. In his view, the surest way to perpetuate alienation and self-negation was to continue to use and promote the colonial language to the detriment of the local ones, but the failure of Kaddu is an indication of the complexity of the national language question and of the need for more political commitment on the part of the government. Whereas in Xala, people such as El Hadji and his colleagues, who have lost a sense of self and personal pride, are a target of criticism, in Guelwaar (1992), the protagonist chastises his fellow countrymen for trading their dignity, including their languages, for foreign aid. An artist alone can only do so much! Sembène took to heart the promotion of the national languages in Senegal, and his films speak to that choice.

Guelwaar (1992) Guelwaar, meaning “noble man” in Sereer and Wolof, is the story of an ordinary Christian man who is murdered and then mistakenly buried in a Muslim graveyard. Its central theme, tightly woven around linguistic issues, is a protest against and resistance to foreign domination. Guelwaar is slain after he delivers a slanderous speech at a public gathering to distribute foreign aid food, which is presided over by local political and administrative authorities and Western donors. The ceremony offers Guelwaar a unique public opportunity to denounce the Senegalese political regime, which to him seemed reduced to international begging. The film revolves around the efforts of Guelwaar’s family to retrieve his body from the Muslim cemetery in which he was buried. While depicting the day-to-day life of common Senegalese, the film provides a forum for a scathing rebuke of the political chaos and moral depravity characteristic

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of self-aggrandizing and self-serving political elites. The film’s plot is a disheartening comment on French-language illiteracy, which results in the alienation of a staggering number of Senegalese from the overarching political system that governs them. In the movie, the Ciss family, which lives in a village near Guelwaar’s town, Thiès, happens to have lost a family member at the same time Guelwaar is murdered. The family mistakenly collects and buries Guelwaar’s body instead of that of its own relative. The representatives of the Ciss family who go to claim the body at the morgue cannot read French, and therefore, they have no idea what the release certificate— an official document delivered by the hospital—says. When asked by the investigating police officer if he knows what the certificate said, Mor Ciss, the deceased’s younger brother, responds defensively in Wolof: “I can’t read French, but I know that it’s the release certificate for Meysa Ciss.” But, the viewer asks, how can he be sure? This situation illustrates well the kind of frustration average Senegalese routinely face. At the time Guelwaar was produced, the government functioned almost entirely in French, and the vast majority of Senegalese did not read, write, or speak French.19 Although conscious of the average Senegalese citizen’s limited understanding of French, government officials hand out pieces of paper to people who are obviously unable to decipher them. Barthelemy, an expatriate son of Guelwaar, comes “home” from France to attend his father’s funeral. “Ku wacc sa and, and woo war mu toj,” says Baye Ali, referring to Barthelemy’s seeming inability to speak Wolof. The quote is a Wolof proverb that, loosely translated, means, “If you deny who you are, you cannot be anything else.” After a presumably long stay in France, not only does Barthelemy not speak Wolof, but he no longer identifies himself as Senegalese. Barthelemy is the prototype of the colonized man who has managed to visit Europe—the promised land, so to speak—and who now sees himself as superior to his countrymen. Barthelemy’s refusal to speak Wolof distances and alienates him from his people. His attitude illustrates the personality change of the

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“Negro” newly returned from the mother country (Europe). Fanon aptly described this change as follows: “And the fact that the newly returned Negro adopts a language different from that of the group into which he was born is evidence of a dislocation, a separation.”20 Indeed, throughout the film Barthelemy exhibits clear signs of dislocation and separation, which culminate in his brandishing a European passport and bragging to Gora, the gendarme,21 “Je suis Français, Européen” (I’m French, a European). The passport confers on him a European status and legitimizes his foreignness in Senegal. In Guelwaar, two religious communities are opposed: the Muslims who live in Keur Baye Ali, where Guelwaar is buried, and the Christians who are led by the head of the elders’ council Goor Mag, and their religious leader, Abbé Léon. After the gendarme’s failed attempt to persuade the Ciss family to dig up the body and the verbal exchange between the Christian delegates and the Muslim community that soon turns physical, the Christians withdraw from the village only to establish themselves near the cemetery ready to fight for their corpse. Alerted by Baye Ali, the chief of the village, the local political representative (MP) arrives in a Mercedes and charges the Christians with wanting to destabilize his region. When Barthelemy defies him, the two get into a long and heated argument in French, a language most of the people present cannot understand. Goor Mag then yells out to the two (Barthelemy and the MP), “Lakk bi ngen namp, du ngen ci wax?” (Won’t you speak in your mother tongue?) Although this is the correct literal translation of the Wolof utterance, it betrays the meaning quite a bit. The Wolof expression for mother tongue is the “language you suckled,” the language in which you were breastfed. In other words, the Wolof expression, while laying emphasis on the power of the mother and the mother tongue in the formation of the individual’s personal identity, highlights the alienating nature of a learned language, a condition Sembène understood very well.

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Heartsick at the attitude of the country’s political leaders, Goor Mag calls them “parrots” when meeting with the imam in the cemetery to negotiate a solution for the retrieval of the body that the Christians were determined to get back: “Listen to the men who have taken over from the French,” he said. “They do not even speak our languages any more. They are real parrots.” Goor Mag labels them this way because the majority of Senegalese people, unschooled in French, cannot understand them. Through his films, Sembène relentlessly reminded the Senegalese people of the alienating power of the French language and insisted on the need to promote national languages.

Borom Sarret (1963) The title of the first commercialized Sembène movie, Borom Sarret, means The Cart Driver in Wolof. The film is a brief account of the daily life of an average Senegalese man living in the outskirts of Dakar, the capital of Senegal. The man, who owns a cart and a horse, earns a living by transporting people and things. However, the demands of modern urban life and people’s ruthless attitudes turn him into a silent victim. It is striking that the protagonist in Borom Sarret does not utter a single word in the film; instead, his stream of consciousness is conveyed through voice-over, the voice of Sembène himself. It is not clear why Sembène chose to have voice-over in French and not in Wolof or another local language, considering his oft-cited quote that he embraced filmmaking as a way of reaching out to a wider audience that could neither speak nor read French. The first reason that comes to mind is technical. In 1963, the technology to synchronize sound and image was not readily available to Sembène, and he shot this film with an old 35 mm camera that he had acquired in the Soviet Union. But considering that Sembène was able to have voice-over in French, why did he not choose to use Wolof in the first place? The difficulties probably would have been the same. A better explanation for why Sembène chose the French voice-over is that he targeted Borom Sarret specifically for the French and Senegalese elite, an

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elite that he denigrated consistently in this film and subsequent films for betraying and thwarting the people’s expectations after independence. The film denounces social injustices, the replacement of the European colonists by the local elite, and the continuing alienation and exploitation of the working class. The film clearly showcases what Sembène himself called “Sembène’s Dakar” (the populous neighborhoods) in contrast to “Senghor’s Dakar” (the wealthy Heights). The protagonist gets himself in trouble for trusting the patron dressed in a suit and tie who is moving to “Senghor’s Dakar,” where carts were not allowed. The physical introduction of a member of the elite, although late in the film, marks a turning point in the protagonist’s downfall. The elite’s attitude in the film corroborates all the negative attributes that Sembène usually associates with them: corruption, greed, exploitation, selfishness, and dishonesty. The most compelling reason why Sembène chose French voice-over is to condemn—without any ambiguity, in his own voice—the elite for the worsening of working-class living conditions. Thus, instead of playing the protagonist in his own film, Sembène used the cart driver as a puppet and took it upon himself to do the narration. Toward the end of the film, the cart driver comes to the conclusion that “those who know how to read and write know only how to lie.” Borom Sarret is an indictment of the elite for treason. When the young patron lies to the cart driver so that he can use his service and then gets away without paying; when the police officer who is supposed to protect the cart driver lets the patron drive away but impounds Borom Sarret’s cart and usurps his military medal; when, because of all these things, Borom Sarret is unable to feed his family, which prompts his wife to leave home at the end of the day, the message is clear: the elite have stripped workers of what little dignity was left to them by the colonialists. “I might as well die,” the protagonist concludes on his way home. Borom Sarret sets the tone for Sembène’s critique of the new rulers in Black Girl and later films.

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La Noire de… (1966) Arguably the first feature-length film in black African cinema, Black Girl is a tragic and haunting story. Translated word for word, the French title of the film means The Black Girl of… or The Black Girl from…. In commenting on the title of the film, Francoise Pfaff indicated that the English title partly erases the idea of Diouana, the title character, “belonging” to an undefined owner.22 However, it can be argued that if, contrary to the French title, the English title conceals the fact that Diouana belongs to some unnamed owner, the title Black Girl also typifies her and makes her represent all girls like her. As for La noire de…, this title underscores Diouana’s bondage to some undefined owner or her appendage to some unknown place. La Noire de… raises the same language questions as does Borom Sarret because it, too, has voice-over in French. La Noire de… is about a young Senegalese woman, Diouana, who is taken to live in an apartment on the Riviera by her French employers. Considered by many to be one of the most attractive vacation resorts in the world, the French Riviera turns out to be a black hole of desperation and then death for young Diouana. Before traveling to France, the employers tell Diouana that she will be a nanny, but upon arriving in the French Riviera, they make her work as the family’s house servant. Her world is confined to her bedroom, the family’s living room, the bathroom, and the kitchen. She is never introduced to the town or to the means of public transportation that might have offered her an occasional respite from her employers’ oppressive demands. Diouana’s female employer is an authoritative and unhappy woman who simply cannot understand the plight of Diouana, whom she regards as lazy. Confined, lonely, disillusioned, frustrated, and unable to express herself, Diouana resorts to committing suicide as the only way of preserving her dignity. To make matters worse, Diouana cannot speak French. She is voiceless in the film. Her thoughts, emotions, and feelings are conveyed in interior monologue in voice-over. In contrast to Borom Sarret, which Sembène narrated, here is insight into Diouana’s innermost feelings through the narration of another woman.

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Diouana’s inability to speak French partially accounts for her low status as a domestic worker and gives her employers and their cohorts the impression that she has no feelings. Fearing no resistance, they feel justified treating her with a profound level of disrespect, worse perhaps than the family would treat a dog. For example, the conversation that ensues between Diouana’s employers and their guests while they are comfortably seated in Madame’s living room after dinner, smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee, clearly reveals the way Diouana is perceived. Guest: Et elle ne parle pas français? (And she doesn’t speak French?) Madame: Non! (No!) Monsieur: Mais elle le comprend! (But she understands it!) Guest: Par instinct alors… (By instinct then…) Madame: Oui, si on veut. (Yes, if you will.) Guest: Alors comme un animal. (Like an animal then.) Diouana is described as an animal that instinctively understands French but cannot speak it. In other words, like Pavlov’s dog, Diouana manages to associate sounds and actions but cannot utter a word in French. The film depicts French as a discriminatory factor between humans and nonhumans: mastery of French confers human attributes to the employers and their guests, whereas the inability to speak it relegates Diouana to the rank of subhuman. The only two French-sounding words that Diouana mumbles are “No mse” (No, sir!) and “Vi mse” (Yes, sir!). The latter is a deformed rapid contraction of the French expression “oui, Monsieur,” with a deletion of the initial vowel [o] and its substitution by a voiced fricative consonant [v] followed by a front vowel [i]. These phonological changes make the approximated “oui, Monsieur” vocal, and longer, to support the drilled

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response to her employers. It is important to note that these phonological changes are first and foremost the result of Diouana’s lack of formal education in French and her personal effort to reach out to her employers, who could not care less about her language, or her “humanness” for that matter, but relish the food that she cooks: “Elle ne parle pas français” (She does not speak French), says one of the guests, “mais elle fait bien la cuisine” (but she cooks well).

Figure 9. Diouana is pictured as she comes across members of parliament in front of the National Assembly.

Source. Courtesy of New Yorker Film.

The guests’ comments in this scene articulate an arrogant and selfcentered belief that if you do not speak French, you are less than human. With awareness of that belief, it becomes evident why the ability to speak French entitles one to privileges. For instance, before getting the

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job with the French family, Diouana wanders around downtown Dakar looking for work. She comes across three members of parliament dressed in tuxedos walking down an alley. Two of the men are trying to talk their companion into stopping his oppositional discourse. They tell him that he should serve his interests and those of his family instead. The latter argues in response that one cannot even have his own opinion. The irony in this scene is that when Diouana runs into the members of parliament, she has no idea what they are discussing, and they fail even to acknowledge her presence in their midst. Diouana is clearly in strange territory, and the look on her face as they pass her expresses her sense of estrangement. To these three political figures, Diouana is as alien in Dakar as she is later to her employers in a foreign land. Metonymically, Diouana represents all people who remain invisible to their self-serving representatives. Sembène makes a subtle but strong case for the teaching of local languages when he himself appears in the film in the roles of public letter writer and popular schoolteacher. His choice of roles in the film is deliberate and makes a case for adult literacy schools in the national languages. Such roles support Sembène’s perception of cinema as a school and the filmmaker as someone who stimulates discussion among his people. Sembène’s portrayal of the popular schoolteacher is a critique of the official language policy favoring instruction in French. Sembène proposes popular schools as an alternative to the elitist school system inherited from colonialism. It has already been mentioned that Sembène’s adoption of voice-over in French in Borom Sarret and Black Girl contradicts his frequently cited quote that he came into filmmaking to establish a dialogue with his audience, the majority of whom could neither speak nor read French. Although one may never know precisely why he chose to use French rather than Wolof, a combination of factors was surely at play. Aside from the technical difficulties and the fact that he was targeting the elite, another factor was that Sembène came into filmmaking with the

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mindset of the established novelist he already was. He used his actors like the fictional characters in his novels, as puppets whose every move he controlled and whose voices he silenced to give way to his own. His longtime collaborator and assistant, Clarence Delgado, confirmed this in an interview: “Sembène avait une sacrée expérience au niveau de la direction d’acteurs. Il savait exactement ce qu’il voulait.”23 (Sembène was an extremely experienced stage director. He knew exactly what he wanted.) Because Sembène knew exactly what he wanted, his actors and collaborators, on whom he imposed his “enlightened despotism,” were reduced to executing his decisions, which made working with him, although sought after, difficult and daunting.24 By many accounts, Sembène was an overtly controlling and selfcentered film director, and his actors and collaborators had to either do what he wanted or risk being removed from the project. For example, Samba Wane, a professional actor who appeared in both Guelwaar and Faat Kiné, remembered that it was not until the spectacular performance of the actors of the Théâtre National in their 1984 reproduction of God’s Bits of Wood that Sembène started employing them in his films. Sembène suspected that he would not be able to control them the way he did nonprofessional actors and that they would have demands. As a result, he did not trust them. When asked why he thought Sembène avoided employing professional actors and instead favored amateurs, Wane said, C’est simple hen, c’est très simple! Quand tu as un acteur que tu choisis dans le casting, tu le prends, tu lui dis tout ce qu’il doit faire: comment il faut marcher, comment il faut s’asseoir, comment il faut courir, comment il faut tomber, comment il faut parler etc. Tu lui dis tout. Mais quand c’est un professionnel, tu n’as pas besoin de tout ça. Et cela est frustrant pour Sembène. C’est frustrant de ne pas pouvoir dire à son acteur fais-moi ça, je veux que tu me fasses ça! Par exemple, j’ai eu un problème avec lui pour ça. Dans Guelwaar, on était à Thiès, à l’hôpital. Je devais tenir ma cane et parler. Au signal, je commence. Tout de suite il ordonne de couper. On arrête. Il prend la cane et s’installe devant la caméra. Il fait tout ce qu’il voulait que je fasse. Alors, je lui

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By opting for voice-over in French, Sembène fell into the same linguistic trap he faced in his literature. He resorted to Wolof in his films only after the villagers to whom he showed Borom Sarret and most probably Black Girl accused him of alienating himself. He admitted this in the 1989 interview he gave to Kwate Nee Owoo (KNO). The following is a shortened version of their exchange: KNO: For instance, in Borom Sarret, one of your earlier films, the French language is superimposed or dubbed onto Wolof language, without synchronization between gesture and movement. So that one gets the impression that the French language has been delib-

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erately superimposed on the film in the same manner as it has historically been imposed on the Senegalese people. OS: Well, I started out from the same thought. What I did was to take Borom Sarret and another of my films to the peasants at home in Burkina Faso and various places to show them. My attitude then was that there was nothing wrong with imposing the French language on the films because the French language is a fact of life. But on the other hand, the peasants were quick to point out that I was the one who was alienated because they would have preferred the film in their own language without the French.26 It becomes clear here that Sembène did indeed have language options, although it had not occurred to him at that point that the national languages were a possibility. As he pointed out, “French was a fact of life.” There is little doubt that Sembène came to filmmaking with the practical intention of widening his already established readership with a new audience of nonliterate peoples who could view his films. However, the decision to use national languages to reach a wider Senegalese audience was not his primary reason for turning to cinema as an artistic means of expression. Contrary to the claim, the language factor was a justification he fabricated in retrospect after he made Manda bi, his first film in Wolof. After that time, he remained consistent in his use of local languages in his films until 2000, when he broke the pattern in Faat Kiné.

Faat Kiné (2000) Faat Kiné, a film in French, is the story of a single Senegalese woman about forty years old, a mother of two, who successfully manages a gas station, where most of her days unfold. After her two children pass the baccalaureate exam, the viewer learns that she had twice been deceived by men who took advantage of her and then abandoned her. Her son’s father had been her professor. When she became pregnant with his child, he fled the country and she was dismissed from school.27 Her daughter’s father lied about his fortune and promised to marry her, got her pregnant, stole her money, and disappeared. Faat Kiné’s attitude in the film

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is that of a wounded lioness who lashes out at everyone who gets close to her. Her financial independence and the power it confers on her make Faat Kiné unique in Sembène’s filmography. In addition, and more strikingly, the fact that she speaks mostly French, even to her children, contributes to her unmatched status. In Faat Kiné, Sembène appeared to break away from the language politics of his earlier films. Faat Kiné, her children and friends, and her employees speak French to each other. Wolof is used only when Faat Kiné’s mother, her mother’s husband, or the maid is present and is not being excluded from the conversation. Whereas in all Sembène’s previous films French is spoken exclusively by an elite associated with corruption, deception, and theft from the poor and uneducated, Faat Kiné is empowered by her knowledge of French and liberated as a result. Although nothing in the film indicates that Faat Kiné uses her education and access to French in the same way the elite do, it does empower her. With Faat Kiné, Sembène seemed to suggest that Western education is key to the liberation of women. Contrary to the male elite who, in all of Sembène’s previous films, used French to purposely undermine the local languages and cultures and distance themselves from the nonliterate people, there is no indication that Faat Kiné consciously uses French in a manner that debases Wolof and those who do not speak French. Nevertheless, the fact that she speaks French is symptomatic of a larger issue, the diminishing emphasis on the local languages even in domestic settings, which Sembène had contested in his earlier films. Faat Kiné’s knowledge of and comfort with French and all the privileges that are associated with that knowledge remove the proverbial gag, thus enabling her to voice explicitly what is normally unspoken. This is especially empowering for women who live according to the Senegalese code of conduct. Mastery of French is liberating for Faat Kiné, and it allows her to cross over the boundaries of “appropriate” public behavior. In several instances, Faat Kiné’s counterparts complain about

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the vulgarity of her language. For example, Massamba (Mass), the man she pays to sleep with her, protests vehemently when she asks him the following: “Dis-moi, comment fais-tu avec elle au lit pour de longues foulées à l’horizontal? C’est mourir de plaisir au septième ciel!” (Tell me, how do you do it in bed with her, horizontally for such a long time? It’s dying with pleasure in seventh heaven!) Another use of crude language occurs when Faat Kiné happens to see her son’s father at a parking lot. Even though, given their history, she has good reasons to be disrespectful of him, he is taken aback by the vulgarity of her language, which he points out: “Kiné, ton langage est bien fleuri maintenant” (Kiné, your language is very colorful now.) Contrary to Diouana from La Noire de…, who was never able to express her accumulated frustrations, Faat Kiné’s bitterness is vengeful and cathartic. This is evidenced by her son’s question to her in the privacy of their home: “Kiné, pourquoi emploies-tu des mots qui blessent?” (Kiné, why do you use such hurtful words?)28 As a result of the terrible experiences she endured, Faat Kiné has become impatient, and worst of all, intolerant, as she turns into an economically independent, indomitable, but embattled mother. Faat Kiné is who she is because of the sum total of her experiences, which include heartbreaking love affairs, paternal brutality, family disinheritance, school education, and financial independence. Sembène made it very clear that work and financial independence alone do not liberate women. For example, Faat Kiné’s friend Amy Kassé is educated in French, holds a job, and is financially self-supporting. She is pressured, however, to marry a polygamous man, which causes Faat Kiné to remark that if work alone could liberate women, the peasant women who never stop working would be liberated. Faat Kiné does not mince her words. She spits insults out as she sees fit. Such behavior is strongly discouraged and normally looked down upon in a society that, although not prudish, favors subtlety and discretion especially for women. Faat Kiné’s utterances as she sprays pepper gas

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on her gigolo’s wife are unheard of in women’s public discourse. They defy basic decency: Yow, am nga loo ma wara wax? Yow, sa jekkër, say yu ma namme goor, moom lay woo, fey ko, mu defal ma ko ci be mu saf sapaaral. Muy baay-u caga yi, ngay ndey-u caga yi. Yow, get out waay! [emphasis added] (Should you be saying anything to me? When I feel like having sex, I call your husband and pay him for his stallion work. He is the king of gigolos, and you are the queen of whores. You, get out of here!) This translation is a polite rendering of Faat Kiné’s speech. In more socially liberal societies, such words might sound entertaining, but in Senegal, they are considered obscene, disrespectful, and insulting. In Senegal, referring openly to sex remained a taboo in 2000, when the film was released. Most parents did not feel comfortable talking about sex with their children and systematically avoided situations that might expose family members to sexual scenes or sex-related discussions, even those on television. For instance, on national television, sexual scenes were systematically censored, and when a sex scene slipped through the filter, the common reaction was to walk away or look away from the screen or to pretend to be distracted. The italicized utterance—composed of an English phrase, “get out,” caught between two Wolof words—should not go unremarked. The first Wolof word, yow, is an emphatic pronoun for you, and the last, waay, is a multipurpose ideophone that serves as a tone softener or a term of endearment. Here it is used to trivialize the utterances. The occasional use of English phrases in Faat Kiné’s speech is a mark of both education and fashion. Faat Kiné’s use of French attests to what she has been exposed to as a result of her education. Language matters, and because it matters so much, it was at the heart of Sembène’s preoccupations. Although no one would deny the merit

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of his pioneering use of indigenous African languages in film, it is clear that he did not go into filmmaking with the idea of using Wolof as the means of expression. Not until the nonliterate peasant viewers of his first two films berated him did it dawn on him that he could and should use Wolof in place of French. This fact should not in any way tarnish his significant contribution to the growth and spread of African cinema within and outside the continent. At times, Sembène’s desire to make films in Wolof prevailed despite demands of his sponsors that he make them in French. For example, Sembène had decided to make the film Manda bi in Wolof. But his coproducers, le Comptoir Français du film, wanted a French version of the film. As a result, two versions of the film were made—one in Wolof, the other in French—to satisfy the French government. The French version, which is not in circulation, is barely known to the public. The imposition of the French language on the actors was itself a betrayal of the narrative, which was intended to be a satire of the educated masses. Sembène’s conviction that there can be no serious claim of nationalism without rejection of the colonial stranglehold on language was at the heart of his struggle to promote Wolof. Even so, support from the government was indispensable for such a politically charged enterprise; yet Sembène was not inclined to compromise with the Senegalese government and in particular with Senghor, whom he always saw as iconic of the neocolonial bourgeoisie.

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Endnotes 1. Sembène quoted in Gadjigo, et al., Dialogue with Critics, 87. 2. For a detailed description of language policies in Senegal, check the following references: Jacques Leclerc, Sénégal, Dans l’Aménagement Linguistique du Monde (Québec: TLFQ, Université de Laval, 2003), http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/afrique/senegal.htm; Moussa Daff, L’aménagement Linguistique et Didactique de la Coexistence du Français et des Langues Lationales au Sénégal (DiversCité Langues 3), 1998, http:// www.teluq.uquebec.ca/diverscite/entree.htm. 3. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire masques blancs (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952), 89. 4. Ibid., 13. 5. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfield (New York: Orion Press, 1965), 108. 6. Trinh Minh-Ha, Woman, Native, Other, 52. 7. Ngũgĩ, Decolonising the Mind, 28. 8. Ibid., 16. 9. Moore, “Evolution of an African Artist,” 224. 10. Ibid., 248. 11. Ibid., 17. 12. Calvet, Linguistique et Colonialisme, 64. 13. F. Fanon Les damnés de la terre (Paris : François Maspero, 1961), 117. 14. Gadjigo, et al., 90. 15. Hennebelle, Guy. “Sembène Ousmane: “Denoncer la nouvelle bourgeoisie.”” Afrique-Asie 79 (1975): 64–65. 16. Moore, “Evolution of an African Artist,” 171. 17. Ibid., 172. 18. Gadjigo, Dialogue with Critics. 19. The adult literacy rate is the percentage of people fifteen years old and older who can, with understanding, read and write a short, simple statement on their everyday life. 2009 → 50%; 2006 → 42%; 2002 → 39%; 1988 → 27%. The World Bank, “Data, Senegal,” 2011, http://data.worldbank. org/country/senegal. 20. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles L. Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 25.

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21. A gendarme is more or less the equivalent of a police officer in the United States. From now on, I will call the gendarme a police officer. 22. Pfaff, Cinema of Ousmane Sembène, 119. 23. Fatou Kiné Sène, “Aux Côtés de Sembène, Entretien de Fatou Kiné Sène Avec Clarence Thomas Delgado,” in “Sembène Ousmane (1923–2007),” ed. Thierno I. Dia et al., special issue, Africultures 76 (2009): 56. 24. Olivier Barlet, African Cinemas: Decolonizing the Gaze (London: Zed Books, 2000): 68. 25. Samba Wane, interview with author, Dakar, July 12, 2011. 26. Kwate Nee Owoo, “The Language of Real Life,” in Busch and Annas, Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, 132–133. 27. Up until very recently, when girls became pregnant during the school year, they were dismissed from school. 28. The son’s question came about when he and his sister decided they would talk their mother into finding herself a life partner.

Chapter 5

Sembène on Religion Ousmane by Convenience and Ceddo at Heart Nous ne serons jamais ni Européens, ni Arabes; Nous sommes et resterons des Africains.1 (We will never be Europeans or Arabs. We are and will remain Africans.) In Senegalese daily life, religion, Islam in particular, does not pass unnoticed. The frequent calls to prayer (the first of which is at dawn), the extensive and imposing presence of mosques and their minarets visible from kilometers around, and the language of daily life filled with Arabic borrowings are constant reminders of the strong presence of Islam and its influence on the local cultures. For instance, a foreign visitor in transit through Dakar during the Friday prayer, or during Ramadan, Eid Al-Fitr, or Eid Al-Adha could easily be led to believe that Senegalese are all Muslims. Senegalese likewise celebrate Christmas, Easter, New Year’s Eve, and all pre-Islamic and pre-Christian holidays with the same enthusiasm. Having been raised a Muslim in the southern region, where African spirituality—characterized by deference to one’s ancestors and respect for local shrines—as well as Christianity are the predominant

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religions, Sembène became aware of the tension inherent in the coexistence between these different forms of worship very early on in life, and he made a point of drawing attention to the dangers of religious intolerance in many of his films. In his book Muslim Societies in African History, David Robinson explained that Islam spread into Africa from the north, where it was introduced as early as the seventh century by the Arabs, and thereafter spread south across the Sahara and Sahel regions.2 According to scholars, Islam arrived in the northern regions of Senegal as early as the eleventh century, but it was not fully integrated into the larger Senegalese peasant populations in the rest of the country until after the breakdown of traditional local monarchies at the end of the nineteenth century.3 Robinson claimed that about half the people living on the continent of Africa today practice some form of Islam, and almost 25 percent of the world’s Muslims now live on the continent.4 Though Islam is more widespread in some regions, these figures indicate a strong presence and a fast-growing Muslim population overall on the continent. This growth is particularly noteworthy in Senegal, where more than 90 percent of the population now claims Islam as their religion.5 The other religions, including Christianity (predominantly Catholicism) and the indigenous “African spirituality,” as the historian Mamadou Diouf called it, account for the rest.6 Although many African filmmakers “posit film as a crucial site of the battle to decolonize minds, to develop radical consciousness, to reflect and engage critically with African cultures and traditions,” Sembène was the only filmmaker who so adamantly presented Islam as a colonizing force in Senegal, not entirely dissimilar to the way most people regard French colonialism.7 Throughout his career as a filmmaker, he consistently portrayed Islam and Christianity as alienating and divisive forces that had the potential to foment destructive social tensions. Although Sembène himself was born a Muslim and was educated in the Koran, after the war, he became as disillusioned with the religious leaders who were instrumental in rallying support for the French colonialists as he

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was disenchanted with the early postcolonial political elite, which he considered corrupt and self-serving. This chapter focuses on the representation of Islam and Christianity as foreign and alienating forces in Sembène’s films.8 It examines the significance of Sembène’s insistence on calling attention to religious tensions in light of the religious climate in Senegal today, and it addresses Sembène’s desire for his countrymen to respect and preserve Senegal’s pre-Islamic and pre-Christian values. Because Sembène used mise-enscène to underscore the prevailing tension among his film’s protagonists, this chapter draws on close examination of mise-en-scène and how it is used “realistically” to convey meaning by depicting the relationship among people and objects within specific shots or scenes. The analysis focuses mainly on three films: Ceddo (1976), Guelwaar (1992), and Faat Kiné (2000). Ceddo is a critical reconstruction of Islam’s penetration into and growth within the Joloff kingdom at an unspecified time in history. The film centers on the establishment of Islam in Senegal and the power struggles that subsequently ensue between new converts to Islam and those who still adhere to indigenous religions. The film also highlights the competition between Islam and Christianity and the awkward dependencies between Christian clerics and foreign slave traders. In Guelwaar, Sembène illustrated the uneasy coexistence of Muslims and Christians who come to the brink of war over a case of mistaken identity in which a Christian man is inadvertently buried in a Muslim cemetery. Though the two groups ultimately settle their dispute, Guelwaar illustrates their mutual lack of understanding and a hostility that is quick to surface between followers of the two religions despite centuries of living in such close proximity and apparent peace. In his next-to-last film, Faat Kiné, Sembène was far more subtle in the way he addressed religious tensions, suggesting barely perceptible, though nonetheless profound, ongoing tensions between Muslims and Christians in the current era.

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Ceddo (1976) Historically polysemous, “Ceddo” is a Wolofization of the Pulaar word Ceɗɗo, whose plural is Seɓɓe .9 Pulaar is a large ethnic group and a language with several dialects spoken across West Africa. The word has slightly different meanings in each dialect. In its current usage among certain Pulaar dialects of northern and southern Senegal, Ceɗɗo refers to Mandingo-speaking people. Even today, Mande languages—including Bamanankan, Mandinkakan, Julakan, and other related dialects—are generally called Ceɗɗe in these Pulaar dialects. Historically, however, Ceɗɗo was a social subclass in Pulaar society, which M’bouh Séta Diagana aptly described in his dissertation. Diagana explained that Pulaar society is divided into three major social classes: the Rimɓe, the Nyeeñɓe, and the Maccuɓe, each of which is further divided into subclasses. The Rimɓe, according to Diagana, is the highest of the three social classes and is composed of the Toorooɓe at the top, followed by the Seɓɓe (singular Ceɗɗo). Being a Muslim was the common criterion for being a Toorooɗo (plural Toorooɓe), which explains the heterogeneity of the subclass. The Seɓɓe were former members of the king’s court and courageous warriors who resisted Islamization in the early days.10 The Wolofization of the word led not only to a substitution of the implosive consonant [ɗ], which does not exist in Wolof, with regular [d], but also to a simplification and consolidation of its meaning. Thus in the film, Ceddo is neither an ethnic group nor a social subclass. Rather, it is considered a mentality or a state of mind: the inclination to resist, to say no, to rebel against the status quo. It is this meaning that Sembène adopted in his film, as he explained in an interview with Josie Fanon: Ceddo est un mot Pulaar qui désigne ceux qui se sont opposés d’une manière ou d’une autre à une forme d’asservissement. Cela signifie “conservateur de la tradition.” Les Ceddo, ce sont les gens du refus. On trouve l’esprit Ceddo aussi bien chez les musulmans que chez les catholiques.11

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(Ceddo is a Pulaar word that designates those who, in one way or another, resisted some form of subjugation. It means “keepers of tradition.” Ceddo are the people who refuse. We find the Ceddo spirit among Muslims as well as Catholics.) Sembène did not use Ceddo to refer to a class of Pulaar people, nor did he use it as an ethnic identifier. Rather, he used Ceddo to refer to a spirit of resistance against alienating forces and a tenacious attachment to traditional African values. It is this last meaning that is also employed throughout this chapter. Given Islam’s long history in Africa, its influence on all spheres of life in Senegal in particular, and its resulting integration and assimilation of indigenous cultural practices, most Senegalese people today barely perceive Islam as a foreign religion. Rather, there is a propensity for claiming Islam’s local antiquity, which Sembène forcefully dismissed in Ceddo. The film depicts and problematizes the complex interplay of what Ali Mazrui called Africa’s triple heritage: the competing presence and struggle for influence or survival of Islam, traditional African cultures, and Euro-Christianity.12 By portraying Islam as a colonizing force, Sembène also expanded the field of foreign colonial actors in Senegal beyond the French and exposed Islam as an equally significant and invasive force that has succeeded in passing itself off as Senegalese.13 That depiction of Islam prompted Mbye Cham to write about Ceddo that it is the most irreverent rewriting of Islam in Senegal by a Senegalese artist. It reconstructs its history in Senegal in ways that radically destabilize and undo the dominant Islamic myth espoused by the Muslim elite and their followers, who happen to be the majority of the Senegalese.14 Cham’s choice of the word “irreverent” highlights the uncoated and unusual language and imagery Sembène used to depict Islam in Ceddo, which Cham perceives as Sembène’s personal attack on the religion.

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Whereas the use of the word “provocative” might have been less personal than the use of “irreverent,” the image of the revered imam being fatally shot (in the groin, of all places) by Princess Dior, the very woman he was dreaming of marrying and procreating with, is both shocking and indeed irreverent. Although in the film it is implied that Islam will survive through the many disciples the imam leaves behind, his death suggests the end of the intolerant and fanatical kind of Islam he had been preaching. One remarkable aspect of the film is the way the imam employs elements of the holy Koran to usurp the king’s powers before replacing him wholesale as the foremost leader—religious and secular—of the people. Every time the imam speaks in the film, he first says, “Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem” (In the name of Allah, the most beneficent, the most merciful), a statement that implies that he seeks Allah’s guidance in completing his task, which is undertaken for His sake. The imam’s constant invocation of Allah helps him quickly attract followers, who dress in white and adorn themselves with necklaces of prayer beads that are strongly reminiscent of the beads Madior wears after he renounces Islam. Wearing the prayer beads is symbolic of the imam’s followers’ appropriation of Islam as well as the imam’s unique power over them. In the film, the imam is seen only holding the prayer beads, sometimes rather forcefully, whereas his disciples are seen with the beads around their necks—a suggestion, perhaps, of the imam’s hold over them. Not only do the followers repeat everything the imam says, they snap their fingers in obsequious demonstrations of their devotion to him. The king, whose power rests solely on tradition with nothing as solid as the written word to support his authority, finds himself pushed aside. The imam takes advantage of the power vacuum and forces a change in the inheritance law, decreeing in the name of sharia law a transition from a matrilineal system in which nephews inherit from their uncles to a patrilineal system in which sons inherit from their fathers. Although this is the only kind of change clearly mentioned in the film, the shift from a

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matrilineal to a patrilineal society has profoundly revolutionary consequences on power structure within families, rules of inheritance, and women’s rights to inheritance that are beyond the scope of this chapter.15 The imam declares the traditional way pagan and outdated and bans it before vowing to confront any challenger to the new law; he admonishes angry Madior, the king’s nephew and legitimate heir, “Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem,” désormais le fils légitime selon la loi de l’Islam est ayant-droit. Telle est l’ordonnance de la Charia recommandée par le prophète. Tout musulman doit s’y conformer. Toi Madior, tu ne fais pas exception à cette règle…Je t’avertis que quiconque tente de ressusciter l’idolâtrie me rencontrera car je ne suis ici que pour l’Islam. (In the name of Allah, the most beneficent, the most merciful, from now on only the legitimate child according to Islamic laws may inherit. That is the Sharia law as recommended by the Prophet. Every Muslim must obey. You are no exception to the rule, Madior…Be warned that whoever tries to go back to idolatry will face me, for I represent Islam here.) In another challenge to the king’s authority, the imam addresses the king directly by name. Everyone else addresses the king as Buur except the imam. Using the king’s name, Demba War, is a clear sign of defiance and disrespect. When the king objects, the imam responds, “Ne sais-tu pas qu’il n’est de roi qu’Allah, le créateur de la terre et du ciel; lui qui m’a créé et qui t’a créé? En plus, moi je ne suis que les prescriptions de Dieu.” (Don’t you know that there is no other king but Allah, creator of the earth and the sky; He who created me and you? And I’m only following God’s orders.) The imam’s statements have strong religious resonance because he makes a point of supporting everything he says with phrases from the Koran, which make him sound as though he has been enlightened by some higher authority, unlike Demba War. The Holy Koran the imam quotes attracts people’s awe and attention, whether or not they understand the Koranic phrases. Perhaps they are also attracted by the idea of reading and writing, skills that seemed

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mysterious and magical back then. As a new convert to Islam, Demba War lacks the doctrinal knowledge to counter the imam’s statements, and he submits to the prescription of Allah conjured by the imam. The imam, having established that serving Allah through the text is his mission, co-opts the text as a way to advance his political agenda and takes ready advantage of their inability to read. The imam’s audacity in taking it upon himself to decree the ban of the Ceddo from the kingdom prompts the king to respond: “Imam, tu outre-passes tes prérogatives! Ton devoir est de diriger les prières, pas plus.” (Imam, you are stepping over your boundaries. Your duty is to lead the prayers, nothing more.) With growing confidence, the imam replies, “C’est une assemblée de musulmans. Donc, j’ai droit à la parole.” (This is a Muslim gathering. Therefore, I have a say.) Indeed, in a Muslim setting, which Demba War’s kingdom has become, the text becomes the only source of inspiration and guidance for leadership. Because the imam controls the text, he also controls the people, a fact that the king confirms when he declares to an upset Madior, “Now we are all Muslims, and we are guided by Islamic laws.” In a compelling mise-en-scène of verbal performance in Wolof, Madior uses metaphors to describe the king’s fragility and to warn him of the threat hanging over his monarchy. In this long take and medium closeup, with the camera mostly facing Madior, a sequence of shot-reverseshot establishes the ongoing dialogue between Madior, his uncle, the griot, and the diegetic (on-screen) audience, whose facial expressions mirror the intricate nature of the conversation. By spending ten minutes on this scene and using about fifty shots with an average length of twelve seconds per shot, Sembène emphasized its centrality in the film and forced viewers to dwell on it. Camera movement is minimal except for a few pans, zooms, and tilts. This editing maintains the spatial and temporal unity of the scene and forces viewers to focus on dialogue and character interaction.

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Figure 10. Here is a frontal shot of Madior as he squats and talks to his uncle and his court.

Source. Courtesy of M-NET African Film Library.

In this scene, colors contrast and clash, just as the different characters defend conflicting interests. Madior, who appears on the scene after the Ceddo delegation is sent out by the imam, confronts the king, the imam, and their respective courts. Madior is dressed in Ceddo-style clothing of natural, local colors, with a traditional necklace and a chain of cowries around his head. He presents a total contrast to the Muslim characters, who are wearing long white boubous, and the king’s advisers, who are wearing darker colors. The Ceddo and the king’s advisers are all wearing locally produced and dyed cloth, unlike the Muslims. The seating arrangement is also telling. The characters in the scene are seated in two rows facing each other, separated by a small path leading to the king, who is perched on a wooden bed covered with a thick handwoven wool blanket. Because of the king’s status, the bed is placed so that the king is higher than the rest of the people, who are seated on mats on the floor. To the right of the king are three members of his court and the imam and his followers. To his left are his other two court members.

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Madior squats, facing the king from the other end of the alley. In this squatting position, which suggests his outsider status and his respect for the king, Madior moves back and forth as he laments,

Figure 11. Madior comes face to face with the king.

Source. Courtesy of M-NET African Film Library.

C’est cet homme qui est un danger. D’où vient-il? Qui est-il? Qui connaît son Allah? Son Allah-là, vaut-il mieux que nos fétiches-ci. Le ver est dans le fruit, oncle. Celui-ci (l’Imam) a plus d’autorité que toi dans cette assemblée. C’est lui ton enemi; c’est lui le malheur…Cependant, toi, tu es un ronier. Tu ne fais pas d’ombre à tes racines. Mais la peau d’une chèvre dévorée par l’hyène ne peut servir à rien d’autre. (It is this man who is the danger. Where is he from? Who knows his Allah? Is his Allah better than our spirit shrines? Uncle, the worm is in the fruit. In this assembly, he (the imam) has more authority than you. He is your enemy. He is the problem. As for you, you are a ronier, you do not shelter your own roots. The skin of a goat devoured by a hyena is useless.)

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When Madior mentions the imam’s Allah, he points and looks vaguely toward the sky, and when he mentions the Ceddo’s spirit shrines, he points toward the ground. The comparison of the two reveals the contrast between the invisible, distant, and conceptual Allah of the imam and the concrete, visible, and tangible spirit shrines of the Ceddo. In addition, the two proverbs that Madior uses in this quote point to the imminent danger lurking in the kingdom. The first proverb is about the ronier—a very tall and linear palm tree. Because of its height, a ronier tends to project a narrow shade far away from its roots. The implication is that the king cares more about people to whom he is not related than he does about his own kin. For example, although Madior is the king’s nephew and therefore first in line to marry the king’s daughter, if tradition were followed, the king has promised that she will be wed to Saxewaar, a stranger to the family. The second proverb, “The skin of a goat devoured by a hyena is useless,” is a warning against the force that is threatening to tear apart the kingdom. This metaphor also reinforces the termite allegory he uses to refer to the king’s throne: “Jaal bii nga toog, maxe na” (The very throne you are sitting on is infested with termites). In other words, the end of the kingship is imminent. Thus, left isolated and unsupported because the king is weakened, the Ceddo have two options: to convert to Islam, which most of them do, or to fight the imam and his followers. But although in theory they have the option of fighting the imam, in reality they have neither the numbers nor the weapons to do so. Therefore, those who choose to convert are spared, whereas those (including the king’s nephew) who decide to fight are quickly defeated and sold into slavery. The mise-en-scène in which the Ceddo are shaved and named is also meaningful. In a long take, all the Ceddo are shaved, and the imam’s disciples repeatedly chant (in Wolof), “Ki leegi tuddu na X. Nel X!” (This one’s name is X now. Say X!), as they escort each of the now-bald Ceddo to the imam, who assigns them new names. A semantic analysis of this sentence suggests the psychological manipulation that underlies the

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renaming ceremony. The imam and his followers use the time marker “now” to denote a new beginning by erasing the past of the Ceddo, just as the shaving ritual divests them of their old identities. By insisting that the converts shout out their new names after the imam’s disciples have done so, the imam and his disciples force a new identity on the Ceddo. They demand that the Ceddo embrace their new identities, forcing the once proud warriors to take on vastly new—submissive, subjugated— roles. Such renaming and therefore remaking is a common colonial tactic to estrange and alienate the colonized from themselves and their past.

Figure 12. Sembène himself acts as a Ceddo.

Source. Courtesy of M-NET African Film Library.

Note. He is shaved and topless between the imam’s disciples as he is renamed Ibrahima.

The conversion ceremony symbolizes rebirth. In many ways, it is a reproduction of common Muslim naming ceremonies practiced in Senegal, in which a baby is brought out in public a week after his or her birth, shaved, and then given a name, a personal identifier. In this scene, the sound of babies crying off-screen suggests a second birth for the Ceddo as they are stripped of all the symbols of their Ceddo identities

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and renamed Ibrahima, Boubacar, Ousmane, Fatimatou, and so on. It is significant that Sembène himself chose to play the role of the very first of the Ceddo to be shaved and renamed. This forced conversion of the Ceddo to Islam leaves one to wonder about the degree of their commitment to their new faith. Viewers might wonder why Sembène chose to act as a Ceddo in the film; not only was he instructed in the Koran when he was a child, but he was allegedly a devoted member of the Layène brotherhood before he joined the military.16 After his time in the military, however, Sembène reportedly renounced the brotherhood and ceased praying altogether in protest against certain religious leaders’ abuse of authority in influencing their followers to accept French colonialism. In his biography of Sembène, Gadjigo paraphrased Sembène: Mais un autre point est fondamental pour lui: Le rôle des dirigeants religieux…utilisés par la France pour endiguer la révolte des populations dakaroises après le massacre de Thiaroye. Ils ont utilisé leur autorité religieuse pour “calmer” les esprits et endiguer la révolte.17 (But another point is fundamental for him: the role of the religious leaders who were used by France to end the revolt of the inhabitants of Dakar after the Thiaroye massacre. They used their religious authority to calm people down and end the revolt.) And directly quoting Sembène, Gadjigo continued, “Je n’avais rien à faire avec Dieu. Pourquoi faut-il s’adresser à Dieu quand ce sont les hommes qui vous font mal?”18 (I had nothing to do with God. Why turn to God when it is humans who hurt you?) Years later, Sembène echoed the same sentiment in Faat Kiné, by Pathé, the handicapped man who crawls into Faat Kiné’s office four minutes into the film. Pathé claims that a couple had drugged him and stolen all his belongings, including the wheelchair for whose purchase Faat Kiné and others contributed. When Faat Kiné tells Pathé that he was being

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punished by God, Pathé replies, “God has nothing to do with it,” and vows to “slit their throats like lambs if he finds them.” Viewers learn later in the film that Pathé was arrested and sent to prison for killing the people who had robbed him. Pathé’s words and actions are in keeping with Sembène’s position that people must take it upon themselves to redress the wrongs others have inflicted on them; they should stand up for themselves and not hide behind the illusion that God will fight in their place. Although taken in its literal sense this may sound like Sembène condoning murder, it should not be understood as such. Instead, Sembène encouraged people to take their destinies in hand and not to count on an external force, even God, to solve their problems. Symbolically, the scene indicates that Pathé, a physically challenged person who depends on the help and compassion of the people around him, has found within himself the resources and force to redress the injustice done to him. Sembène’s choice of a handicapped person in this context makes sense only if one considers how handicapped are generally viewed in Senegal. Handicapped people typically invite compassion and very often receive charity from members of society. God is believed to be on their side more so than non-handicapped people because of their vulnerable condition. Thus, God takes it upon himself to avenge their injustices. Although this may be an overgeneralization, physically challenged people constitute a good proportion of street beggars in Dakar, for instance. Bear in mind, however, that not all handicapped are beggars. In this scene, it is noteworthy that Pathé did not wait for God’s justice as would usually be expected. Sembène had always attempted to subvert the image of the handicapped people as condemned to beg, and this subversion is illustrated in Faat Kiné. Thirty-nine minutes into the film, Faat Kiné runs after a man in a wheelchair she mistakenly takes for Pathé. When she reaches him, she realizes her mistake. She then opens her purse and pulls out a bill to give the handicapped man. The handicapped man asks her to read

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the back of his wheelchair where it says “Private Messenger.” The handicapped man refuses her money but instead gives her a business card in case she needs his services. Then he leaves her, promising to deliver her message to Pathé. Another, more subtle treatment of physical handicap occurs toward the end of the film (eighty-eighth minute) when Adèle, Faat Kiné’s housemaid, turns on the television, demonstrating how the invention of a prosthetic arm has changed the life of the Scottish man Kembel, who had lost his arm to cancer. Both of these instances confirm Sembène’s insistence on the need for the handicapped not to accept their condition as hopeless, with recourse only to begging. Sembène’s sympathetic portrayal of the Ceddo in Ceddo and his own adoption of the Ceddo mentality of resistance and respect for ancestors make clear that at heart he identified more with the Ceddo ethos than with Islam. He was Ousmane—his Muslim name—only because he was born of Muslim parents and raised as such. Sembène’s home in Dakar is named Galle Ceddo (home of the Ceddo); he was a reputable man who often refused the status quo, a free spirit who did things his own way. Apparently, at every FESPACO he attended,19 Sembène led a libation ceremony with other filmmakers at the Place des Cinéastes in order to pay their respects to the ancestors. Nonetheless, despite his repeated claims that he was an atheist, when he died he was buried with all the honors of a Muslim dignitary. The most illustrative example of Sembène’s mentality of resistance, however, is his dispute with Senghor—president of the Republic of Senegal at the time Ceddo was released—concerning the spelling of the film’s title. Senghor and his linguistic advisers decided that the film’s title should be spelled with one “d” (“Cedo”). Sembène refused. His refusal to comply gave Senghor a pretext (a ridiculous one) to ban the film in Senegal, and it remained banned for as long as Senghor was president. There is, however, reason to believe that Senghor knew Sembène well enough to predict that he would not comply. Therefore, although it was not a secret that the film was censored because of its critical portrayal

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of Islam and Christianity in a country where these two religions are predominant forces, the inexcusable spelling “mistake” in the title was the official reason. Sembène declared on many occasions that he was not a believer and even had that written in red letters on the wall of his Dakar home.20 Despite his irreverent portrayal of the imam in Ceddo21—a representation also deemed disrespectful and aggressive by Louis Marcorelles, for whom “[l]’impertinence et l’agressivité savamment calculée du réalisateur sénégalais Sembène Ousmane sont légendaires”22 (the Senegalese director’s fine mix of disrespect and aggressivity is legendary)—Guelwaar, a later film, portrays religious leaders in a better light even in the tension-filled context in which they seem to operate.

Guelwaar Unlike Ceddo, in which the imam abuses his power and manipulates his followers, in Guelwaar, the imam uses his influence to resolve a very tense social quandary. He recommends the disinterment of a dead body despite the physical resistance of fellow Muslims. When the policeman calls a meeting in the village chief’s home to discuss the possibility of digging up Guelwaar’s body, the policeman seeks approval from the imam, who confirms that when there is doubt, Islam recommends disinterment. In Guelwaar, the imam is treated as a hero, and his irreproachable sense of duty is crucial to solving the problem. In a run of the camera, a significant mise-en-scène depicts the buildup of tension between Muslims and Christians. In the first twenty-five minutes, viewers learn that at the time of Guelwaar’s burial, the imam was visiting his fourth wife in a different village, and so the imam does not appear until the sixty-fourth minute, when he shows up at the meeting the village chief hosts in his home.

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Figure 13. Aloïse (standing) points at the imam in protest against Baye Ali’s statement that his father, Guelwaar, is better off left in the Muslim cemetery.

Source. Courtesy of M-NET African Film Library.

The meeting involves the policeman, the Ciss brothers (three younger brothers of the deceased Muslim man, Meysa Ciss, whose body was mistakenly left at the morgue), and a number of other people from outside the village. Although uninvolved at first, the imam nods in agreement with the policeman’s proposal to dig up the body. Seated with his two brothers and holding a machete across his legs, Mor Ciss is resolute; nobody will dig up his brother’s body despite the policeman’s irrefutable proof of administrative blunder. The village chief, who initially seemed to side with the policeman but fears being exposed by the Ciss family for mishandling the privileges associated with his status, provokes a brawl between Muslims and Christians by declaring that, although a Christian, Guelwaar is better off left in the Muslim cemetery, where he is safe from the fires of hell.

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Aloïse reacts instantly. He stands up and limps center stage, points his finger at the imam, and yells, “It is not true! Your religion is not better than ours.” Then, pointing at the chief, Baye Ali, he says, “Would you bury your father in a Christian cemetery?” This statement, which is received as an insult, prompts all the Muslims to rise in shock and aggressively converge toward Aloïse. Aloïse is much younger than Baye Ali and therefore, according to tradition, is not supposed to insult him, especially in public. This would be terribly humiliating for the chief. Moreover, Aloïse has the gall to refer to Baye Ali’s father, which is also considered disrespectful. The Ciss family, which has been trying to thwart the process every step of the way, finds here a golden opportunity to erect yet another roadblock. Thus, one of the Ciss brothers tries to punch Aloïse but is stopped by Aloïse’s brother. The imam then obstructs a potentially deadly blow to the pastor’s head, and viewers experience a heightened emotional moment when the pastor’s eyes come in contact with the imam’s as he realizes how close he has come to being bludgeoned to death. As tensions build, the policeman and his colleague rush the Christians out of the village in their truck as a Muslim throng armed with sticks and stones runs after them. As the imam leaves the scene, he calls the chief and the Ciss family “a bunch of cowards,” which unveils internal frictions among the Muslims. Viewers learn that the Ciss family and the village chief contest the legitimacy of the imam, who seems to be leading them to prayer against their will. When two men, dressed all in white, run around breathlessly informing the Muslims that Christians are digging up corpses, the imam and his disciple, Ismaïla, head to the cemetery. After they arrive, the Muslims make way for them to go to the front, and the imam and Ismaïla then turn around to face the crowd. At the same time, on the Christian side, Goor Mag calls for Abbé Léon (the pastor), and the two, accompanied by Dibocor, head toward the imam and Ismaïla. In a medium close-up scene that lasts ten seconds, the five men meet at the halfway point and then look probingly into each others’ eyes for a few seconds before Goor Mag breaks the silence: “Nogaye Marie is there in the shade.”

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Nogaye Marie is Guelwaar’s widow. Saying that she is in the shade suggests that the imam, Biram, should greet her.

Figure 14. From left to right are Dibocor, the imam with the white scarf, and Ismaïla behind him. Facing the imam is Goor Mag, and the pastor is to the front right corner with a headband on.

Source. Courtesy of M-NET African Film Library.

The imam, bowing his head, answers that he is ashamed to talk to her at the moment. Goor Mag continues, saying, “In a house in mourning, although we are all expected to bow our heads, there is no shame.” The imam replies, “Goor Mag, our ancestors knew how to deal with these things. What is happening to our country?” The imam turns toward his disciple, who gives him a hat, which the imam hands to the pastor. It is the pastor’s hat, which a Muslim man had thrust off his head during the brawl in Baye Ali’s home. Goor Mag does not respond immediately to the imam’s question. Rather, in a long shot, viewers see him reflectively walking away from the others, followed a

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few seconds later by Dibocor and then the pastor. The imam and his disciple remain standing where they were. When Goor Mag and Dibocor finally stop and turn to face the pastor coming toward them, the imam and Ismaïla understand that Goor Mag’s movement toward the opposite side of the cemetery is an invitation to talk. Then the imam and Ismaïla, along with the policeman, walk toward Goor Mag, Dibocor, and the pastor. As the imam approaches, he starts taking off his scarf. Goor Mag and Dibocor put down their canes horizontally in front of themselves. The imam puts down his scarf horizontally in front of himself. The imam steps over his scarf at the same time Goor Mag and Dibocor step over their canes, all entering a symbolic circle delineated by the canes and the scarf. In a medium close-up shot, the three men sit close together within the circle, an arrangement suggesting privacy as well as unity. By isolating themselves, they make of the circle a world within a world; it re-creates an authentic and untainted African world at the fringes of the one corrupted by the pressures of the outside religions. Within this circle, the three men cease to be icons of their religions; the imam once again is Biram, and Goor Mag and Dibocor are not Christian deans but Biram’s former playmates, who grew up, free of religious prejudice, with Biram. To enter the circle is to make a pledge to have a heart-to-heart talk, as the next scene illustrates. A remarkable aspect of this scene is the fact that the imam and the two Christian deans must walk away from their religious groups and strip themselves of their religious symbols before they can engage in fruitful conversation. They must do this to be able to touch one another’s true humanity. To overcome religious barriers, they appeal to their traditional African values, the values they were brought up with, the values they inherited from their parents and their ancestors.

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Figure 15. Goor Mag, the imam, and Dibocor are inside the circle.

Source. Courtesy of M-NET African Film Library.

This elaborate scene is a caution against the alienating and bedazzling effects of the foreign religions and the dissensions they can lead to. Once again, Sembène warns his countrymen against the religions’ alienating and unsettling power, and he encourages a return to the more commonly shared values of pre-Islamic and pre-Christian Africa. This appeal to fundamental—some might say essential—African values is echoed elsewhere in Guelwaar. While standing by the Muslim cemetery, the pastor asks Barthelemy why he is suddenly wearing sunglasses. When Barthelemy explains that he had been bitten by an insect, the pastor replies that an African remedy would be perfect. Just as with the resort to African values to solve the crisis between the two religions, the suggestion of a traditional African medicine to treat Barthelemy is an invitation to be mindful of African resources and knowledge. The irony in this instance, however, is that the pastor recommends the African remedy to a renegade, Barthelemy, who throughout the film attempts

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to disassociate himself from his African heritage by claiming to be European, refusing to speak Wolof, and living in a hotel by himself in his own hometown. With great determination, the imam, followed by Ismaïla, leaves the circle and confronts the Ciss family. When faced with the physical resistance of the Ciss family, the imam uses a club to strike one family member before saying the f— word in an extraordinarily obscene insult. Normally, it is unheard of for an imam to insult someone, so the imam’s voicing of the sacrilegious insult shatters the mysticism surrounding him and brings him to the same profane level as an ordinary person—one with emotions and feelings, likes and dislikes, but most important, one who responds impetuously if necessary. The imam’s swearing is an act of rebellion against the institution that he represents, which prohibits swearing. The swearing, which catches even the diegetic audience by surprise, sends a strong message of determination to resolve the problem. Tellingly, Guelwaar is remembered in Senegal as the film in which the imam swears. Guelwaar is a critique of Islam and Christianity in that it presents both religions as external and alienating forces. For instance, Christians, a minority group in Senegal (representing less than 10 percent of the population) are taught to “turn the other cheek” rather than retaliate. Perhaps because of their belief in redemption, the Christians act humbly throughout the film even when they are physically attacked. The pastor himself is unassuming, leading a group of Christians who reverently follow his every move. For instance, when the Christian group that is assembled at one end of the Muslim cemetery pledges to move forward, armed with spades and sticks to fight back the Muslims who have assaulted their five emissaries (Goor Mag, Dibocor, the pastor, Barthelemy, and Aloïse) and injured the pastor, all that is needed for them to reverse their vow is for the policeman to tell the pastor to lead the group back. The pastor turns around without uttering a word, and the group follows. One might be reminded here of the moment in the

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film when, in a flashback, Guelwaar is at the police station reporting that hooligans have been harassing the Christian women’s association that is meeting in his home. At the end of his declaration, he submits a written statement signed by the ten Catholic deans of the district and says to the policeman as he leaves, “We may be Christians, but we won’t turn the other cheek.” The Christians’ behavior at the cemetery refutes that statement, for they do turn the other cheek, not only by betraying the dead person but also by wavering in their move to fight for Guelwaar’s body. Their Muslim counterparts, in contrast, are portrayed as oppressive and embattled and, more disturbing, disrespectful to the Christians, whom they call yeefer (literally, nonbelievers). Viewers learn that Baye Ali serves in many capacities in the village and takes unfair advantage of his powers.

Figure 16. Yamar shows Baye Ali his elbow.

Source. Courtesy of M-NET African Film Library.

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The Ciss family knows about Baye Ali’s illegal dealings and threatens to denounce him if he supports the policeman’s initiative to unearth the body. The three Ciss brothers (Mor, Yamar, and Ndoffène) catch Baye Ali on his way to the mosque at the forty-sixth minute of the film. After revealing to him that they know how he misappropriates the aid money that is supposed to be for the village, they firmly advise him to have a talk with his elbow before falling asleep that night. Having a talk with one’s elbow means pondering something, weighing the pros and cons before making a decision. The message clearly hits home, because as soon as Baye Ali starts talking at the meeting the following day, Ndoffène, sitting opposite Baye Ali, raises his left elbow and points to it, which catches Baye Ali’s attention. Viewers perceive Ndoffène’s nonverbal exchange with Baye Ali through a shot-reverse-shot between the two, which is the basis for Baye Ali’s inconsiderate and inflammatory declaration that Guelwaar is better off in the Muslim cemetery (The shot-reverse-shot, which establishes a nonverbal exchange between Ndoffène and Baye Ali is the basis for the latter’s declaration). Ignorance also causes Amadou Fall (the local MP) to state that Islam is a traditional religion of Senegal, which Barthelemy proves wrong by responding to the MP’s statement, You’re completely wrong there. Where does your religion come from? Don’t tell me it springs from the banks of Limpopo, the Nile, or the Niger. Its roots are here you say? But you go on pilgrimage to Mecca. That’s in Saudi Arabia. We Christians go to Israel, to Jerusalem. Strange roots those! Obviously, if Islam and Christianity were traditional Senegalese religions, their followers would not need to go to Saudi Arabia or Jerusalem for pilgrimage. The Limpopo, the Nile, and the Niger are all African rivers here used as icons of African tradition and authenticity. Earlier in the film, viewers learn that Guelwaar was murdered because he dared to challenge the status quo and to expose the indignities suffered by victims of corrupt local leaders. The turning point in Guelwaar is the fiery speech that Guelwaar delivers at the foreign aid recep-

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tion. Guelwaar takes it upon himself to chastise his countrymen over the indignity and shame inherent in relying on foreign aid, turning his supposed thank-you speech to the donors into a series of disparaging remarks about foreign aid. The public gathering at which Guelwaar denigrates the political authorities and the docility of his people is not attended only by Christians; it is a community-wide gathering where neither the Bible nor the Koran is quoted. In his fiery and pointed speech, Guelwaar appeals instead to traditional pre-Islamic and pre-Christian values of pride, dignity, and resistance against dependence and foreign domination.23 According to Sembène’s longtime assistant, Clarence Delgado, Guelwaar was inspired by an isolated fait divers in Senegal.24 Yet the film proffers a strong and prescient warning for what could happen if Senegalese people are not more tolerant about religion. The belief that one religion is superior to all others and the conviction that people who adhere to one religion go to heaven, whereas all others are doomed to go to hell, are conducive to the kind of showdown developed in the film. Through Guelwaar, Sembène warned Senegalese people about the widespread illusion that Senegal is somehow immune to religious conflict and that the religious turmoil occurring in other parts of Africa and the world cannot also erupt in Senegal. It is clear that the film attempts to portray religious leaders as flawed though well-meaning, but it also shows how greedy and selfish political leaders can abuse religious sentiments to serve their own interests. The last exchange between Goor Mag and Biram at the end of the film reveals Sembène’s belief that when the prism of religion becomes too constraining, core indigenous values should prevail. African societies do, after all, predate both Islam and Christianity. The last words of Biram eloquently summarize this lesson. Goor Mag, while standing outside the cemetery fence after Biram has helped deliver Guelwaar’s body to the Christian community, says to him, “Biram, you honor all men!” Biram responds in a similar way by calling his name: “Goor Mag, next time you

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see a vulture attacking your enemy’s body, remember that it could be you, and chase it off.” This moment of deliverance is both magical and emotional as it brings to closure a mundane crisis that took unnecessarily long to resolve. This last exchange between Goor Mag and Biram emphasizes the need for people not to give in to their religious prejudice in their treatment of one another, which is also a subtle subtheme of Sembène’s subsequent film, Faat Kiné.

Faat Kiné Whereas Ceddo and Guelwaar deal explicitly with religion and have received much attention from scholars of African religion, Faat Kiné is more subtle in its depiction of the tension between Muslims and Christians in Senegal. Though religious prejudices permeate individual interactions in Faat Kiné, Sembène also employs a nonverbal exchange between two characters that illustrates negatively charged interpersonal relations and echoes the tension between Muslims and Christians. This is illustrated in a mise-en-scène that takes place at Faat Kiné’s gas station fifty-eight minutes into the film. A traditionally dressed middle-aged Muslim man drives into Faat Kiné’s gas station, buys gas, and decides he wants to say his prayers. He asks the pump attendant for a prayer mat and a place to pray. Viewers can see that the man, who is sitting behind his steering wheel, is not paying attention to the pump attendant’s directions but is instead distracted by the cross hanging around the attendant’s neck. The pump attendant walks away to get the prayer mat. In the meantime, the middleaged man has parked his car and stepped out to get the prayer mat. The pump attendant hands him the mat and points to the place where he can say his prayers.

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Figure 17. A middle-aged Muslim man receiving directions as to where he can pray is distracted by the cross hanging around the pump attendant’s neck.

Source. Courtesy of California Newsreel.

The middle-aged man grabs the mat, looks the attendant in the eyes, and then looks down at the cross. He takes four steps forward and away from the pump attendant, stops, turns, and comes back to the pump attendant, still standing at the same spot. The middle-aged man stares at the cross again, and this time, as he walks away from the pump attendant, he yells out, “Allahou Akbar” (Allah is the greatest). The Muslim call to prayer from an off-screen loudspeaker can be heard throughout this sequence. Praising Allah is an act of faith in Islam, yet in this context it is rather confrontational and provocative because of the Muslim man’s overt and unwarranted focus on the pump attendant’s religious symbol.

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Figure 18. The pump attendant’s pendant catches the attention of the Muslim man.

Source. Courtesy of California Newsreel.

Visibly disturbed, the pump attendant remains motionless and speechless as he watches the middle-aged man walk away to the prayer place. Others have similarly read this scene as a form of religious intolerance.25 Sembène proceeds to build tension through the work of the camera, which pans right from a high angle to give an aerial view of the city of Dakar, including the minaret of the Grande Mosquée, where calls to prayer can still be heard. As the camera pans away from the Grande Mosquée, it lands on Mami (Faat Kiné’s mother), who is high up on a terrace rocking back and forth in a chair. At this moment, a church bell also begins to ring. The structure of this scene creates the illusion that these four places (Mami’s home, the gas station, the mosque, and the church) are close together, although in reality they are not. The trouble Sembène took to construct the Kuleshovian illusion suggests the importance of these signifiers.26

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Furthermore, the incongruous overlap of the mosque’s call to prayer and the sound of the church bell intensifies the suggested tension between the two religions. This overlap speaks to the tension even more distinctively than does the nonverbal exchange of the middle-aged Muslim and the Christian pump attendant. The concurrent calls from the two religions produce an aggressive and disturbing polyphony suggestive of an uneasy coexistence. Although the coincidental calls may be a filmic construct, the mise-en-scène of the nonverbal interaction of the middle-aged man and the pump attendant clearly is meant to reveal the subtle but tense relationships between Muslims and Christians. Sembène clearly suggests two ways of circumventing religious prejudice through his depiction of Mami and his depiction of the children’s plan to get Faat Kiné and Jean married at the city hall instead of the church or the mosque. Mami’s position on the terrace places her physically above the prevailing tension—above religion—and suggests distancing oneself from it. Likewise, when Jean and Faat Kiné dance cheek-to-cheek, their children discuss where the marriage ceremony should take place. Djib, Faat Kiné’s son, jokingly warns Jean’s son that the wedding will not be at the church, to which the latter retorts that it will not be at the mosque, either. The two finally agree, with a complicit shake of hands, on a neutral ground: à la mairie (at the city hall). This courteous and friendly conversation between the two young men, while acknowledging their religious differences also deemphasizes these differences and makes room for peaceful coexistence. Sembène here draws attention to the fact that there is definitely religious hostility, although not necessarily overt, in Senegal. His persistence in reminding viewers that, contrary to commonly held belief, Senegal is not immune to religious problems was prescient, as recent developments in the country’s political arena confirm. In a 1979 interview with Josie Fanon, Sembène acknowledged and deplored the power and influence of religious authorities in politics: “Quand on connaît le Sénégal, on sait que personne ne peut assumer le pouvoir sans

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l’accord des chefs religieux.”27 (When you know Senegal, you understand that nobody can lead the country without the consent of the religious leaders.) In the first twenty years of its independence (1960–1980), Senegal was led by a Christian president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, whose religion never interfered with his equal treatment of the different religions and the many Muslim brotherhoods within the country. Senghor was able to work with the various groups and their leaders without being overpowered by them; he was able to show them respect and consideration and secure their trust and support without ceding his secular authority over them. Senghor was succeeded by Abdou Diouf, a Muslim, who led the country from 1981 to 2000 and, like Senghor, did not favor one religion or one brotherhood over others. Diouf was aware of the power of the religious groups and worked with them without alienating one group from another. In stark contrast to Senghor and Diouf, who were discreet about their personal religious choices, Abdoulaye Wade, president of Senegal from 2001 to 2012, openly flaunted his membership in the Mouride brotherhood. Unlike his predecessors, who adhered to a separation of secular and religious powers, Wade has openly shown preferential treatment to the Mouride brotherhood. His favoritism for one religious group has drawn much criticism in Senegal since his very first visit as president to Touba (capital of Mouridism and home of its spiritual leader), when he knelt down to the khalif (the spiritual leader), thus humbling the institution the president embodies. That act prompted the release of a poignant article by the Senegalese philosophy professor Ousseynou Kane, who fittingly used the image of a “Republic on its knees”28 to qualify the president’s act of allegiance. This image of the republic on its knees inspired several other critical reactions about the president’s sectarian inclinations. Wade frequently visited the holy city of Touba, where he invested enormous sums of money to modernize the city’s infrastructure. Because

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he had not invested similar amounts of money elsewhere, other prominent Muslim brotherhoods and the Christian population became frustrated and embittered. For example, on December 5, 2009, the Senegalese Press Agency (l’Agence de Presse Senegalese, or APS) quoted Wade as declaring the following when he symbolically lay the foundation for what is to become la Grande Mosquée Mouride in Bopp, a Dakar neighborhood: La capitale sénégalaise, Dakar, mérite une mosquée comme la Grande mosquée mouride qui sera érigée au quartier Bopp….Je demande aux disciples et amis de Serigne Touba de contribuer à la construction de la mosquée.... Au début, j’ai donné 300 millions de Francs CFA, c’est avec ça que travaille l’architecte. Aujourd’hui, j’ai remis 200 millions de francs CFA. Ce qui fait 500 millions de francs CFA.29 (Dakar, the Senegalese capital, deserves a mosque like the Grande Mosquée Mouride that will be erected in Bopp…I ask disciples and friends of Serigne Touba to contribute toward the mosque…At first, I gave 300 million cfa francs which the architect is currently working with. Today, I have given 200 million cfa for a total of 500 million cfa.) In an interview with a local Senegalese newspaper, L’Observateur, Imam Mbaye Niang commented on Wade’s declarations. Imam Mbaye Niang is both a religious leader and a member of the Senegalese parliament, where he sits for the political party MRDS (Mouvement de la Réforme pour le développement social, or Reform Movement for Social Development): Wade ne devait pas exhiber son appartenance confrérique. Il pouvait être plus discret dans ce domaine. Parce que l’exhiber peut poser des problèmes. Ça peut créer des frustrations. Le président de la république est le président de tous les Sénégalais, quelle que soit leur confrérie, quelle que soit leur ethnie ou leur appartenance.30

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There is nothing wrong with the president of the republic being a disciple of some religious brotherhood, or even a taalibe Mouride (Mouride disciple) for that matter. After all, the majority of Senegalese Muslims claim affiliation with one of several brotherhoods; this is a unique feature of Senegalese Islam. However, the fact that the president is a devout taalibe Mouride does not justify his alienation of the other religions and brotherhoods. Senegal had never before been subject to the open religious tensions that have occurred during Wade’s presidency. Several instances of clashes between different Muslim brotherhoods, or between Christians and Muslims, have been recently reported. The concern that Senegal might become prone to religious violence prompted Samir Abourizk to write a compelling novel, La religion face au pouvoir: la laïcité en danger, published in 2006. What is significant is that Samir Abourizk leads a political party in Senegal and is originally from Lebanon. Abourizk’s novel is the result of several years of research on the causes of violence in many countries including Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Algeria, Iran, Afghanistan, and Libya. His remarks about the relationship between politics and religion in Senegal are inspired by his experiences in these countries and the unfounded, yet widely held, belief in Senegal’s immunity to religious violence. In fact, Abourizk cited several examples of acts of violence motivated by religious sectarianism in Senegal. For example, he mentioned the physical confrontation between Muslim students from different brotherhoods at the University in Dakar and the anonymous death threats made to the Catholic clergy in Dakar. His book is an appeal for Senegal to promote secularism and discourage calls for Islamization. He insisted on the necessity of separating the political from the religious and argued against the introduction

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of religious education in public schools, which he sees as an infringement on secularism. Abourizk’s novel strongly echoes and reinforces Sembène’s concerns. Sembène saw both Islam and Christianity as alienating forces that did not originate in Africa. Faat Kiné is a subtle but poignant illustration of religious tensions that Senegalese need to be aware of. The idea of stepping back from religion is reinforced in Faat Kiné by the indifferent attitude of Mami, shown rocking back and forth in her chair high up on top of the building, while both the mosque and the church call followers to prayer. However, it is the children—with their involvement in the club Utopie et Prospectives, where religious affiliation and gender barriers do not exist —who carry the message of hope by calling for a total liberation from male domination and a tension-free coexistence between Muslims and Christians. On the one hand, in Guelwaar, Biram and Goor Mag return to their African values to solve the dilemma of what to do with Guelwaar’s body; on the other hand, in Ceddo, although Islam does not disappear with the death of the imam, its continuation rests in the hands of former Ceddos who will have to Africanize the religion for it to survive. Viewers also get the same sense of Africanization of Christianity in the lively and colorful fast-forward mise-en-scène of the church service in Ceddo at the fifty-third minute of the film. Sembène insisted in all these films on the need to return to the fundamental values common to Africans before Islam, Christianity, and colonialism became powerful religious and political forces in the country. In his view, centuries of Islamic presence and European domination should not make Africans reject their core spiritual beliefs and social values. Resisting alienation is his ultimate message in these films. Commenting on Sembène’s attitude toward religion, Maguèye Kassé (a longtime companion of Sembène’s) wrote, “Vous savez le rapport à la religion est un rapport purement individuel. Nous avons une société où la religion doit recevoir la sanction de tout le monde. Au nom de quoi?…Pourquoi faut-il que nous renoncions à ce qui fait notre être?”31 (You know religion

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is a purely personal matter. We are in a society in which everybody must be religious. In the name of what? Why do we have to renounce who we are?) Kassé raised here a remarkably difficult question in Senegal, where it is seemingly unacceptable to be without a religion. Sembène understood that well when he said laconically, “Nous ne serons jamais ni Européens, ni Arabes; Nous sommes et resterons des Africains.” (We will never be Europeans or Arabs. We are and will remain Africans.) Sembène was a Ceddo at heart, and he died as one.

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Endnotes 1. Sembène quoted in Gadjigo, Conscience Africaine, 128. 2. David Robinson, Muslim Societies in African History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 38. 3. Moriba Magassouba, L’Islam au Sénégal: Demain les Mollahs (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1985). 4. Robinson, Muslim Societies in African History, 27. 5. Alexis Arieff and Congressional Research Service, Senegal: Background and U.S. Relations (Fort Belvoir, VA: Defense Technical Information Center, 2010), http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R41369.pdf. 6. Imruh Bakari and Mbye B. Cham, African Experiences of Cinema (London: BFI, 1996), 243. 7. Ibid., 2. 8. This chapter does not focus on traditional African religions. However, Robert Baum’s “Tradition and Resistance in Ousmane Sembène’s Films Emitaï and Ceddo” is a compelling discussion of Sembène’s representation of traditional Diola religion in Emitaï. 9. The sounds [ɗ]and [ɓ] are implosive [d] and [b] respectively and are common in Pulaar. 10. M’bouh-Séta Diagana, “La Littérature Mauritanienne de Langue Française” (PhD diss., Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne, Papa Samba, 2004), 26–27. 11. Josie Fanon, “Je ne pense pas que les autres religions nous aient apporté quelque chose. Entretiens Avec Ousmane Sembène,” Africultures 47 (April 2002): 21. 12. Ali Mazrui, “Islam and Afrocentricity: The Triple Heritage School,” in The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam’s Impact on Contemporary Literature, ed. John C. Hawley (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 169–184. 13. Mbye B. Cham, “Official History, Popular Memory: Reconfiguration of the African Past in the Films of Ousmane Sembène,” in Samba Gadjigo et al., Dialogue with Critics, 26. 14. Ibid. 15. For resources on this issue, see A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, “Patrilineal and Matrilineal Succession,” Iowa Law Review 20, no. 2 (January 1935): 286– 303. 16. Gadjigo, Conscience Africaine, 101.

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17. Ibid., 122. 18. Ibid., 123. 19. FESPACO is the Pan African Film Festival, held every odd year in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. 20. Olivier Barlet, “Sembène le mécréant” in “Sembène Ousmane (1923– 2007),” ed. Thierno I. Dia et al., special issue, Africultures 76 (2009): 67. 21. Cham, “Official History, Popular Memory,” 26. 22. Louis Marcorelles, Le Monde, May 9, 1977. 23. Amadou T. Fofana provided a compelling discussion of Guelwaar’s speech in “Guelwaar, a Verbal Performer,” West Africa Review 8 (2005), accessible through Africa Knowledge Project, http://www.africaknowledgeproject.org/index.php/war/article/view/284/540. The entire speech is in the appendix of this book. 24. Clarence Delgado, interview with author, Dakar, July 2011. 25. Savrina P. Chinien, “Ousmane Sembène, Artiste Postcolonial?” in “Sembène Ousmane (1923–2007),” ed. Thierno I. Dia et al., special issue, Africultures 76 (2009): 81. 26. The Kuleshovian illusion is a montage of distinct and distant elements, whose combination gives the illusion that they are close together when in reality they are not. 27. J. Fanon, “Je ne pense pas que les autres religions,” 21. 28. Ousseynou Kane, Sénégal, la Course au Ndigueul (December 8, 2011). http://www.afrik.com/article24293.html. 29. Abdoulaye Wade, APS, Agence de Presse Sénégalaise, Seneweb.com. APS, December 5, 2009. http://www.seneweb.com/news/Societe/dakar-mrite-une-grande-mosqu-e-mouride-selon-me-wade_n_27228.html. Posted and accessed on Decmber 5th, 2009. 30. Mbaye Niang, “Interview,” L’observateur, December 14, 2009. 31. Fatou Kiné Sène, “Une vie Jalonnée de Combats. Entretien de Fatou Kiné Sène Avec Maguey Kassé,” in “Sembène Ousmane (1923–2007),” ed. Thierno I. Dia et al., special issue, Africultures 76 (2009): 60–62.

Chapter 6

Women in Sembène’s Films Le silence est un acte de suicide. Si nous refusons de crier l’injustice, si nous refusons de défendre le droit, nous sommes tous complices.1 (Silence is an act of suicide. If we refuse to decry injustice, if we refuse to defend what’s right, we are all accomplices.) Although women and men tend to be socialized separately and differently in many parts of Africa, women’s issues cannot be analyzed in isolation from men’s in the context of Sembène’s cinema. Whereas the division of labor between women and men is often clearly delineated and women and men often occupy separate social spheres, their worlds are fundamentally interdependent. Some tasks may be accomplished by either women or men, but others are strictly assigned to a specific gender. There were in the past and still are today socially acceptable roles for women and men, with boundaries real or imagined, which, according to prevailing cultural standards, individuals should not cross. Gender in this context is the social category that defines what one can and cannot do, what one can and cannot aspire to, and whether one will or will not have influence or even a voice.

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Such is the relational paradigm that has traditionally characterized social dynamics among many ethnic groups in Africa in general and in Senegal in particular. Most Senegalese ethnic groups are male-dominated and consequently structured in a way that generally empowers men over women. Even with greater numbers of girls entering school each year and the escalating impact of Western cultural hegemony in Africa, these social dynamics remain fully entrenched in many areas, especially among rural inhabitants and the poor. Why this is so is no mystery; as Boyce Davies noted, “[M]en weaned on centuries of male domination will not willingly relinquish their power and privilege.”2 Sembène was fully aware of how these entrenched social divisions disadvantage women and remain among the greatest challenges facing African women who seek social justice and greater equality with men.

Sembène’s Representation of Women Critics of Sembène’s cinema seem to agree that his representation of women is multifaceted, ranging from strong and empowered characters to characters who are but passive victims of repression and domination. For instance, Moore described the women portrayed in Sembène’s works as either objects to be used as the possessor sees fit or as forces of social change in a rapidly transforming society.3 But she noted that these two are not necessarily mutually exclusive in Sembène’s films. Catherine Ruelle, in a special edition of CinémAction, examined Sembène’s films and classified the representations of women into three main groups: (1) confined women, (2) women of strong will in control of their lives, and (3) mysterious women.4 Françoise Pfaff pointed out that Sembène’s generally positive depiction of African women, including the militant spirit of Rama in Xala and the combative disposition of Collé in Moolaade, encouraged critics to call Sembène a feminist.5 In his tribute to Sembène’s life and work, Sada Niang rightly remarked, “Au fil des ans, l’intérêt de Sembène pour les laissés pour compte de la société postocoloniale fit de la femme africaine, puis des enfants, ses personnages principaux.”6

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(Over the years, Sembène’s interest in the disenfranchised of postcolonial society made African women and then children his main characters.) Ken Harrow, although critical of what he calls Sembène’s “Féminisme de vieil homme” (old-fashioned feminism), pointed out the contrast between the personalities of El Hadji Abdel Kader Bèye’s three wives and daughter in Xala and the often belligerent image of Faat Kiné in the movie of that name.7 Savrina P. Chinien emphasized the optimistic forecast in Faat Kiné for women’s condition through a reading of the evolution of the film’s three generations of female characters: Faat Kiné’s mother, Faat Kiné herself, and her daughter, Aby.8 In the same vein, Sheila Petty argued that Sembène always portrayed African women as courageous and as instigators of social change.9 David Murphy, who undertook a comprehensive study of the representation of women in Sembène’s novels and films, came to the conclusion that “of all modern African writers, Sembène was the most consistent in his questioning of the status of women, and he has produced a range of female representations which take us far beyond the African women originally imagined by Negritude.”10 Sembène believed African women were often silenced and that they lacked public venues in which to voice their views in the same way that he considered the working classes disenfranchised and exploited. His cinema, therefore, served as a forum for debating women’s issues as much as it served as a voice for the poor and the marginalized. Murphy rightly summarized how Sembène used his art in the service of women’s interests: “His work thus acts as a means of giving voice to the concerns of women, and as an attempt to imagine a new set of male-female relationships” (150). Sembène was not satisfied with merely projecting positive images of African women in his films. He sought as well to complete a trilogy of films dedicated entirely to women in recognition of their place and roles within African societies. However, of the planned three films, only Faat Kiné (2000) and his last film, Moolaade (2004), were completed before

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he died. Faat Kiné portrays a successful businesswoman who is also a single mother of two, whereas Moolaade is a moving film concerning female circumcision, which is practiced among certain African ethnic groups. Although these are the only two films Sembène specifically dedicated to the cause of women, it would be unfair to reduce Sembène’s involvement with women’s issues to only these movies, for every one of his films, to a certain extent, challenges men’s domination of women. For Sembène, the liberation of women was a sine qua non condition to the liberation of the continent, a view that he articulated in a 2005 interview with Ken Olende and Charlie Kimber: “The future liberation of Africa will never happen without the liberation of women.”11 Liberation is a comprehensive notion, and for Sembène, the liberation of women included due recognition of their daily heroisms and crediting them accordingly, giving them a voice and points of view and relieving them of the weight of questionable and unnecessary practices inherited from long-held traditions. Overall, Sembène’s lifelong engagement with women’s issues focused on improving their condition, which Savrina P. Chinien summarized when she wrote, Sembène milite, à travers son art, pour l’égalité des hommes et des femmes en prônant leur émancipation par l’éducation et l’abolition des coutumes telles la polygamie et l’excision.12 (Through his art, Sembène weighs in for equality between men and women by calling for their emancipation through education and the abolition of such customs as polygamy and excision.) To put it bluntly, Sembène understood and tried to convey in his films that it is from the hands of African men that African women must take their rights to equality and social justice. Africans must reassess certain legacies from the past, and Faat Kiné visually illustrates and vigorously denounces what Sembène considered to be the obstacles to women’s liberation in Senegal. This chapter begins by establishing, through an analysis of Faat Kiné, what Sembène saw as the hurdles to the liberation of African women. Next, the chapter focuses on Sembène’s portrayal of

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women as victims, and finally it scrutinizes Sembène’s representation of polygamy.

Faat Kiné A tribute to what Sembène termed, in an interview with African Screen, “the everyday heroism of African women,” Faat Kiné unfolds within a backdrop of contrasts—between women and men, young and old, modern and traditional, Muslim and Christian, wealthy and poor—which bring about palpable tensions that permeate the film.13 The primary source of tension underlying Faat Kiné’s relationships is her success, as a liberated middle-aged woman and single mother, in penetrating and imposing herself on the male-dominated business world. Through Faat Kiné, Sembène encouraged his audience to scrutinize rapidly changing social relations, including gender expectations and divisions of economic power. This section investigates the interplay of these changing social categories in Faat Kiné. The establishing shot—a long take—sets the locale, Independence Square, and the tall, modern buildings surrounding it in the heart of Dakar. The bright lighting and lively background of the shot denote the dynamism and vibrancy characteristic of downtown Dakar. This establishing shot also includes a procession of traditionally clad women carrying heavy loads of water on their heads and competing for the right of way with multiple lanes of vehicular traffic. From the film’s outset, social categorization is apparent in the contrast between what is urban and modern and what is rural and traditional. Yet as the opening scene suggests, Sembène is about to upset this image of traditional versus modern while also challenging the strict delineations of gender roles. As Faat Kiné drives into the scene in her fancy Citroën car, she is forced to wait and watch the eight traditionally dressed, water-bearing women slowly walk single file across the busy urban street. These women symbolize the continuum of traditions,

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in which women are relegated to domestic work while their men seek remunerated employment in the public sphere. As for Faat Kiné, she epitomizes the independent and self-motivated modern woman who does not serve men and expects little from them in return. The juxtaposition between Faat Kiné and the other women marks the beginning of Sembène’s effort in the film to bring new social ambiguities into sharp relief.

Figure 19. Faat Kiné’s car is pictured as she stops at a roundabout to let watercarrying women cross in front of her.

Source. Courtesy of Califonia Newsreel.

As Faat Kiné drives on, Yandé Codou Sène’s extradiegetic praise song to Faat Kiné and womanhood plays in the background, articulating the direction of the story: “Faat Kiné is not a dog, Faat Kiné is not a cat, Faat Kiné is not a goat, Faat Kiné is not a sheep,” she sings repeatedly in Sereer after praising Faat Kiné’s bravery. Why Sembène chose to have the song sung in Sereer, a language he himself did not know and one that is spoken by fewer than 20 percent of the Senegalese people, is an

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intriguing question. Why did he convey such powerful lyrics through a language that was less accessible to his audience? Was this done for more realism or was it that Sembène wished to reach out to multiple ethnicities? Why was the song not in Wolof, or in French for that matter, like the dialogue in the rest of the film? The initial panoramic view ends with a dissolve and leads straight into Faat Kiné’s car, whereas most of the other scenes in the film end abruptly with sharp cuts. The effect of this smooth transition into the next scene is evocative of the passage, incarnated by Faat Kiné, of women moving from a stage of second-class citizenship to that of relative independence. By choosing Independence Square for the shooting of this opening scene, Sembène suggested a central theme for the film, which interrogates other forms of liberation and independence, in this case for women. Faat Kiné stands up against and questions traditional gender-based role divisions in society and in so doing proves to be even more capable than some of her male colleagues. Contrary to most traditional women, like her mother, Faat Kiné challenges the barriers erected against female economic endeavors and accomplishments. For instance, she succeeds in managing her gas station, caring for and effectively supporting her family, and paying for the education of her two children. Although gas stations are usually managed by men in Western societies and even more so in Senegal, this is a realistic depiction given that Sembène patterned his portrayal of Faat Kiné after a woman he knew. Meanwhile, one of her male counterparts, the gas station manager Alpha, fails in all of these realms and ultimately goes bankrupt. Through the character of Alpha, as will be seen, Sembène quite blatantly suggested that polygamous marriages can lead some to economic ruin. Three particularly significant male characters in the film—Gaye, Sène, and Bop—symbolize a certain African tradition in which gender and age determined social hierarchy and the patriarchal exercise of power that subordinated and silenced women and children was accepted unquestionably. This is the social structure that Djib, Faat Kiné’s son, publicly

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condemns and physically confronts in the trial-like last scene of the film. The confrontation unfolds at a party Faat Kiné throws for Djib and his older sister, Aby, to celebrate their passing of the baccalaureate exams. Aby’s father, Gaye, a retired professor, ran out of the country after he impregnated Faat Kiné and never took responsibility for his daughter’s education. Bop, Djib’s father, got Faat Kiné pregnant, cheated her out of her money while pretending to buy a house for them, and disappeared. On the day of the big celebration, both of these biological fathers show up at the party, shamelessly attempting to reclaim parental rights and authority over their children and wanting to entice Faat Kiné back into their lives. When Djib is informed that his “father” wants to see him, he comes to meet him for the first time. The party is interrupted as the meeting between the two turns into a very public and heated argument. During the verbal confrontation, Djib uses three adjectives to insult the “fathers” and a friend of Gaye’s. He calls them “loud-mouthed,” “philistine,” and “moralistic.” In his view, such characteristics reflect the means by which authoritarian patriarchs perpetuate their domination. These three men are symbolic representations of what Djib, later in that same scene, calls the fathers of African independence. In Djib’s view, they are loud-mouthed so as to assert their authority, yet they offer little substance in their loud pronouncements. Moreover, they make big but empty promises to delude the public, knowing that they will not be held accountable, for only they have the right and power to speak up. They are philistines because they are hostile to any change that will threaten the status quo and by extension their hold on power. And they preach a selfserving morality instead of having the courage to break away from detrimental traditions and the legacies of colonialism. When the confrontation between Djib and the three men becomes physical, Gaye, Bop, and Sène are thrown out of the party. Then the party resumes. The choice of the three adjectives—loud-mouthed, philistine, and moralistic—conveys Sembène’s judgment of the fathers of African independence and reflects his view of the lethargy, lack of initiative, shirking

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of responsibility, and failures that have characterized their leadership of the continent. Gaye and Bop ran away from their responsibilities as fathers during the most taxing years of the children’s lives but then return to fight for paternal rights, as if being a father involves no duties. As Djib points out to them, “Le droit à la paternité n’exige-t-il pas des devoirs, voire des obligations?” (Doesn’t the right to fatherhood imply duties, obligations even?) In reality, no one questions their role as the biological fathers of the children. Even more deplorable than their claim of fatherhood after having shirked all parental responsibilities is the aim of both men to reassert themselves in Faat Kiné’s life in order to take advantage of her financially. These two father figures symbolize well what Djib says of them: “La honte de l’Afrique nouvelle. Tous des hypocrites!” (The shame of Africa. Hypocrites all of you!) Mami, Faat Kiné’s mother, represents an older generation of women. Adèle, the housekeeper, is situated oddly between Faat Kiné and Mami and, despite her younger age, seems closer to Mami because she is only slightly educated and performs roles within the house traditionally assigned to women. Adèle gets along well with the children and appears to be happy in the household and satisfied with her job. Sembène’s physical placement of Mami and Adèle on top of the terrace, away from the party in which they are involved only from afar, indicates their exclusion and linguistic isolation from the world below them. This is a world that both women keep referring to as the world of “women with a man’s heart,” of “children with a lion’s heart,” and it is one to which the two women do not belong. The two women observe from a distance the world from which they are excluded and get from it only snippets of information through the maid’s rough translation of what is being said at the trial taking place in French just below them. The arrangement of the scene conveys distance, separation, departure from the old ways, and adoption of new ones. Mami and Adèle indicate that, despite the harshness of new social realities, they welcome some of the changes they witness, observing with some pride that “today’s women are men’s pillars.” In other words, whereas women used to be subjugated by men, men can no

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longer stand without them. Mami’s observation suggests collaboration between the two sexes on grounds if not of equality, at least of complementarity and mutual support. Unlike Mami and Adèle, Faat Kiné and her two friends are educated and represent the transitional generation of liberated Senegalese women —mothers of children born out of wedlock who are financially independent and now question the very foundation of traditional sociocultural beliefs and behaviors. Djib, his sister, Aby, and their friends constitute the new generation of Senegalese. The point of the confrontation between father and son in the last scenes of the film is to show that people have awakened to the failures of their fathers (leaders) and are no longer naively accepting of authority or susceptible to manipulation. What Djib and his friends demand is a break from those practices and from the fathers’ staid ways. After Djib’s tirade against his father, Bop, Mr. Gaye says to Djib, Assez! Assez! Tu es très mal élevé. Le fait d’être fort en thème ne t’autorise pas à faire pleurer ton père. Mets-toi à genoux et demande-lui pardon. (Enough! Enough! You are very impolite. Whatever your talents at school, you do not have the right to make your father cry. Get on your knees and ask him for forgiveness.) When Djib refuses to obey Mr. Gaye’s command, Mr. Sène joins in: Deet, deet, mon petit, respecte cet homme. Mes enfants, ici en Afrique les pères sont respectés, les vieillards honorés. Ce sont des valeurs morales que nous avons héritées de nos ancêtres. Vous serez les guides de demain, et vous ne devez pas faire fi des valeurs africaines. Quant à toi Djib, tu ne dois pas juger ton père, metstoi immédiatement à genoux devant lui et demande pardon. (No, my little one, respect this man. My children, here in Africa, fathers are respected, the elderly are honored. These are moral values that we inherited from our ancestors. You will be the

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leaders of tomorrow, and you should not ignore African values. As for you Djib, you should not judge your father. Get down on your knees right now in front of him and ask for forgiveness.) This excerpt summarizes the fathers’ moral code and justifies their behaviors as depicted in the film. Djib, Sembène’s mouthpiece, speaks out against the social hierarchy that promotes the supremacy of the father figure and consequently of masculinity and that subordinates women and children by depriving them of the right to speak. He opposes everything the fathers and their friends advocate, and he has the support of the diegetic audience. Viewers are set up to support Djib’s (and by extension Sembène’s) cause because they bear witness to the depravity of the older social order. The “prosecution” ends with the older ways being sentenced to death and their proponents humiliated and banished from the house and the new social order. The confrontation scene in Faat Kiné revisits several central themes that preoccupied Sembène and that recurred in most of his films. Djib is Sembène’s mouthpiece, and he does not mince his words as he prosecutes the deceptive “fathers” who have obviously abused the traditional social structure to their own selfish advantage. Sembène’s message is very clear: the development of the continent cannot be achieved without total liberation of its active forces, including women and young people. All of Sembène’s films revolve around this concern for liberation. Whether he approached women’s issues tactfully enough to make an impact, whether he was the right person to speak for women, one thing remains unquestionable: he had opinions concerning women’s problems and had the courage to position himself at the forefront of their struggles for emancipation.

Women as Voiceless Victims In Sembène’s very first film, Borom Sarret, the main female character, the cart driver’s wife, Fatou, appears on the screen for less than one

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minute of the film’s total duration of eighteen minutes. Yet her brief appearance leaves a lasting impression that haunts viewers. In the film’s second minute, viewers see the wife pounding grain with a pestle while her husband, the cart driver, says his prayers. As the cart driver readies himself for work, Fatou gives him a kola nut and says, “Prends ceci, et que Dieu t’accompagne. Et pense que nous n’avons rien pour midi.” (Take this, and may God be with you. Remember that we do not have anything for lunch.) Fatou reappears on the screen only in the film’s last scene, when her husband walks back into their home from work. Although the husband had a productive day and earned money, he gave the money away to a griot on the street. To make up for the money he squandered on the griot, he takes a risk and goes with his cart into downtown Dakar, where horses are banned. Unfortunately, he is discovered by the authorities and is fined. More problematic, his cart is seized. Thus, at the end of the day, he returns home empty-handed. After tying up the horse, he declares to Fatou, who has been waiting until he gets home to start cooking, “Si c’est moi que tu attends, je n’apporte rien, rien, même pas la charrette.” (If you’ve been waiting for me, I bring back nothing, nothing, not even the cart.) Fatou is shown carrying their child on her back as she starts a fire for cooking. After the cart driver has declared that he has nothing for her, she takes the cooking pot inside their room and comes back out with the baby in her arms. She hands the baby to her husband and says, “Tiens le petit, je te promets qu’on mangera ce soir!” (Hold the little one, I promise we will eat tonight!) Analyzing this scene, Françoise Pfaff wrote, “Les rôles sont, à ce moment, visuellement et socialement inversés car l’épouse est contrainte de pallier aux manquements de son conjoint.”14 (The roles, at this point, are visually and socially reversed, for the wife is obliged to fill in for the failure of her husband.) One remarkable issue here is the determination with which Borom Sarret’s wife promises dinner. Viewers are left to wonder what she has in mind and how she is going to fulfill her promise. What is unsettling

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is that Borom Sarret, after an entire day of running around carrying people and things, has failed to provide for the family. It is even more unsettling that he could have provided for his family because he did earn some money; however, he chose not to keep the money for his family but to give it to a griot, forgetting that “charity begins at home,” as the old saying goes. Now his wife must be the family’s salvation. As Pfaff pointed out, the wife’s stepping up to the role of provider subverts the traditional gender role and underscores her previously unacknowledged strength and capability. The transfer of the baby from the mother to the father implies a transfer of roles and responsibilities and metaphorically suggests that the wife now wears the pants while the husband wears the pagna.15 The husband’s pride is at stake and his authority under threat, but given the circumstances, does he have a choice? In response to the innuendo of the wife’s statement, Maxime Scheinfeigel posed the following questions: “Quand sa femme le quitte en lui laissant l’enfant, quelles valeurs (familiales) s’écroulent ici? mais aussi: quelles valeurs vont naître?”16 [When his wife goes out leaving him with the child, which (family) values crumble here? but also: which values are brought into being?] Although prostitution might come to mind (not that this is the wife’s only option, for she could borrow from a grocer or neighbor), Daniel Serceau’s take on the wife’s unstated meaning is thought-provoking: “Si l’épouse déclarait sans ambiguïtés: ‘Je vais me prostituer,’ le film s’effondrerait.”17 (If the wife declared without ambiguities: “I’m going to prostitute myself,” the film would have collapsed.) In Serceau’s view, Sembène, by leaving room for imagination, made the situation realistic and plausible. Would the husband and viewers believe the wife if she openly announced that she was going to prostitute herself? Serceau argued that such a statement would have sounded inauthentic and intolerable to the husband. This is also the place to emphasize Sembène’s open-ended film strategy, which stimulates audiences to discuss the ending of the film after the screening. Not providing closure

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for the issues he raised in his films was Sembène’s personal didactic choice. Also, because film typically reflects contemporary social norms, in the Senegal of 1963 it would have been indecent to make such a statement in private, in public, or on screen. For example, it was still shocking to Senegalese viewers some twenty-nine years later to hear Hélène Sène declare openly in Guelwaar (1992) that she is a registered prostitute working along with her friend Sophie to support their families.

Figure 20. Borom Sarret’s wife heads out of the house, leaving baby in the hands of her husband.

Source. Courtesy of New Yorker Film.

Despite the strong personality she reveals at the end of the film, Borom Sarret’s wife is almost entirely invisible and voiceless. Viewers would probably not have known her had her husband behaved responsibly with the money he earned.

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Like Borom Sarret himself, his wife is a victim of postcolonial circumstances, which confine them to living in a slum and condemn them to hustle for every meal. Borom Sarret comes from a family whose status is celebrated by the griot in the film, but this status is irrelevant in a postcolonial society where the protagonist has to drive a cart to make a living. The other voiceless and objectified character in the film is the pregnant woman, whom the cart driver transports to the hospital along with her husband. Between the cart driver’s hungry child, who cries as its mother leaves the house at the end of the film, and this unknown pregnant woman headed to the hospital to give birth, Sembène drew a sketch of the plight of Senegalese women and children’s conditions that catches viewers’ attention. The film traces the full cycle of life with the pregnant woman and the birth of her child, Borom Sarret’s starving child, and the dead baby carted to the cemetery. The cycle of life illustrated by the children’s circumstances reflects the tragic condition of the working class who may live to starve like Borom Sarret’s family. The pregnant woman clearly longs for change and seizes the opportunity of the cart ride to rest her head not on her husband’s shoulder but on the cart driver’s. Her gesture, ostensibly inappropriate, is a challenge to her husband’s hold over her, and that perceived challenge is, among other things, what triggers the cart driver’s reaction: Et cette femme qui a toujours sa tête sur mon épaule, elle ne peut pas poser sa tête ailleurs, sur l’épaule de son mari? Ce sont les femmes de maintenant, on n’arrive jamais à les comprendre. (And this woman whose head is still on my shoulder, can’t she put her head elsewhere, on her husband’s shoulder? It’s today’s women, one can never understand them.) There is a striking disconnect between this woman’s attitude and the cart driver’s conception of women. His statement denotes a change in women’s attitudes and their growing resistance against traditional gender roles and expectations. In her case, her attitude is probably influenced by city life, given that the couple lives in a slum outside of Dakar,

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at the margins of modernity. As a matter of fact, the narrator in Niaye harshly describes the exodus from rural communities and denounces the loss of dignity that goes with people moving from the village to the city: Où sont les gens? Ils sont partis dans les villes fuyant la campagne espérant faire vite fortune et sans peine. En ville, ils se dévêtissent comme ces cases de l’étoffe de la dignité. (Where are the people? They have moved out of the village into the cities where they hope to make a quick and easy fortune. In the city, like these huts left vacant, they strip themselves of every piece of dignity.) The slum where Borom Sarret and his neighbor live is a re-creation of village life in the urban setting, a widespread phenomenon in African capitals. Several of Sembène’s films, including Borom Sarret, La Noire de…, and Manda bi, show these slums, characterized primarily by the extreme poverty of their inhabitants and the squalid living conditions, which the narrator in Niaye describes as “stripping themselves of their dignity.” In Niaye, women are defenseless victims of a male-centered society in which women have no say, and justice is determined solely by men. Ngoné War Thiandoum, who cannot bear the shame and dishonor that her husband’s incestuous act brings on her family, commits suicide. Ngoné War is by no means responsible for the situation, but she suffers a moral injury that the village elders know how to, but choose not to, repair. Although there are clear provisions in tradition as well as in Islam for cleansing stained honor, the elders choose inaction. Ngoné War’s daughter is victimized on two levels: her father sexually abuses her and impregnates her, and then the village elders ban her from the village. The film ends with her leaving the village with her newborn, the only time viewers see the two of them. Suicide for the mother and exile for the daughter make clear that it is the women who pay the heaviest toll for the dishonor. What fate awaits the daughter? Will she become a maid

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or a prostitute given that she is unschooled in French? This is another of Sembène’s open-ended film strategies. In La Noire de…, aside from the very last scene of the film, which is shot in Dakar, all the scenes depicting Diouana’s family and previous life —from her job-hunting visits in downtown Dakar to her encounter with her boyfriend—are presented to the audience through flashbacks. Strikingly, all the flashbacks are triggered by unpleasant situations Diouana confronts in France, and Sembène made a point of depicting these instances instead of having Diouana verbalize her frustrations. Diouana bottles them up only to act them all out tragically at the end. Sembène’s choice to situate La Noire de… on the Riviera serves a dual purpose: it mirrors Diouana’s dream of going to one of the most wonderful places imaginable, but it also shows her progressive and painful disenchantment. The beauty and elegance of the Riviera are pointed out in the opening scene of the film, when Diouana, who has just arrived by boat from Senegal, is driven by her French employer along the paved and clean roads toward “Hermit Road.” Sembène captures the beauty of the Riviera by stabilizing the camera in the car and shooting the gorgeous landscape and green spaces that line the road. This ride is all that Diouana gets to see of the French Riviera before she is locked up in her employers’ apartment and held hostage to her own dreams. Throughout the film, Diouana is portrayed as a victim of her gender, class, and race. The first flashback occurs on a day on which the employers have invited three friends (an adult couple and an older man) over to eat a Senegalese meal prepared by Diouana. One of the guests steals a kiss from Diouana during dinner under the pretense that he had never kissed a Negro woman. When the older man walks away from his seat to kiss Diouana, the female guest observes, “I have the impression that she is not happy.” After he kisses her, Diouana withdraws into the kitchen and, visibly upset, sits with her hand under her chin. Her female employer soon joins her in the kitchen. In an attempt to downplay her guest’s action, she says to Diouana, “He did that as a joke. Your

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dish was very good! I’m proud of you…Now make us some good coffee!” With that, the female employer walks out of the kitchen and rejoins her husband and friends in the dining room. The second flashback occurs when Diouana is denied breakfast by her female employer. The female employer becomes very upset after burning her finger on the stove while making coffee. The female employer says to herself, “Soon, I will be the maid here” as she rushes into Diouana’s bedroom. She slaps Diouana twice while calling her name to wake her up. When Diouana finally gets up and readies to have breakfast, the female employer says, “If you don’t work, you will not eat!” Little did Diouana imagine that she would be virtually imprisoned by her employers in France. Her only contacts with the outside world occur during her brief excursions to the store next door or when opening the blinds to get a distant and dim view of the Riviera. Contrary to her expectations, the Riviera becomes a black hole of desperation that she is forced to endure between the monotony of daily chores and the loneliness of nights when she is finally able to retire to her room. Door and window frames abound in Diouana’s immediate environment, but they lead her nowhere. They are suggestive of the outside world she cannot access and the claustrophobic life she is forced to live, which stands in stark contrast with her life back in Senegal, where she had lived in a warm, friendly, and mutually supportive environment. Diouana’s shifts between fantasy and reality are also reflected in the changing relationship with a wooden mask as it moves from one owner to another and from one place to another. The sculpture of a human face is a toy for Diouana’s brother and also a powerful nonverbal symbol in the film. Although it is highly unlikely that the mask was carved to serve as a child’s toy, it is presented in the movie as nothing more than an object devoid of significance that Diouana’s brother uses and discards as he pleases. In her desire to be appreciated and accepted, Diouana buys the mask from her brother and gives it to her employers as a present. The employers take the mask to France; for them the mask is a decora-

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tive object symbolizing their open-mindedness and exposure to an exotic culture. Once in France, the mask ceases to be an inconsequential child’s toy or mere wall decoration; rather it becomes an object of reflection for Diouana, a prop, a symbol of what she has left behind and of her African identity. Because Diouana cannot speak French, she communicates her frustrations through her behavior: refusing to eat breakfast and then refusing to look after her employers’ child. She locks herself in the bathroom and refuses to open the door even when her employer insists that she do so. She is distraught and cries in front of them when they read a letter she has received in the mail, supposedly from her mother in Senegal. She throws her apron away and gives back her wages, but she wrestles her female employer to keep the mask she had taken down while her employers were out that day. After Diouana commits suicide, her male employer is shown back in Dakar, walking in a crowded neighborhood toward Diouana’s house so that he can return the mask and Diouana’s other belongings to her family. One way to think of the mask is as the soul of Diouana returning home. The mask is Diouana’s surrogate. The very powerful image at the end of the film of Diouana’s brother covering his face with the mask and chasing Diouana’s employer down the street leaves a haunting last impression. Sembène constructed this illusion when he took a closeup shot of Diouana, at the apex of her inhibited frustrations in France, staring at the mask as if it were a mirror reflecting her own image. This high-angle shot highlights the mask, forces viewers to dwell on it as a reflection of Diouana’s own face, and helps establish a spiritual connection between Diouana and the mask. The result is that the mask reflects Diouana; the mask is Diouana. As the only thing familiar and that she can relate to in the foreign environment where everything else reminds her of not belonging, the mask is part of her and symbolizes a silent witness of her experience. It is her umbilical cord to home.

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Figure 21. Diouana stares at the mask like her own mirror image.

Source. Courtesy of New Yorker Film.

Diouana appears to be a victim of her condition, and her suicide should be seen as an act of defiance against the system that oppressed her, not as a sign of weakness. She is not only the lonely, anonymous girl on the Riviera; metonymically, as Pfaff stated, she symbolizes “all the uprooted maids of the world and their silent revolts,”18 and maybe even more, as Sembène himself explained in an interview with Pfaff: This black woman [Diouana] is someone who has been transplanted from her original environment. She no longer has a name. Before, she was not even aware of the fact that she was “black,” with all the possible connotations associated with this word. She used to function adequately in her own surroundings. But once she left her country, she lost her identity as Diouana. She became

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somebody’s black maid. She became an object belonging to a white family—their trophy.19 Diouana turns into a voiceless victim in the hands of her employers. Although her suicide is an act of resistance against her enslavement, she dies the victim of the circumstances surrounding her.

Polygamy Polygamy is widespread in Senegal and is very often erroneously associated with Islam. This association may have something to do with the fact that Senegal is overwhelmingly Muslim, and Islam is known to tolerate polygamy, whereas Christianity, the second-largest religious group in Senegal, officially prohibits it. Another reason for the association is that Islam is often used as a pretext by individuals who engage in polygamy, which leads some people to believe that polygamy is practiced by all Muslims and only by Muslims. In truth, in Senegal, it is not unusual for non-Muslim men, including believers in traditional African religions and Christians, to have more than one wife. Polygamy is an ancient practice that existed long before the arrival of Islam and Christianity in Africa. The historian Hampaté Bâ explained why polygamy exists in certain countries and how it is perceived by Islam: Il y a des pays pour lesquels la polygamie est une nécessité sociale péremptoire…En Islam, la polygamie n’est pas une obligation, mais une tolérance (limitée d’ailleurs) compte tenu de la diversité des tempéraments et des conditions sociales de la société.20 (There are countries where polygamy is a social necessity…In Islam, polygamy is not an obligation but something tolerated (and in a limited fashion) depending on the diversity of temperaments and social conditions of people.) Though Bâ confirms both that polygamy did not originate in Islam and that it is necessary in some societies, he also makes clear that it is

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tolerated by Islam. In other words, Islam neither encourages nor requires that Muslim men take more than one wife. When Islam was being introduced to communities in Africa, Muslim religious leaders attempted to accommodate the already established practice of polygamy by limiting to four the number of wives Muslim men could marry. Traditionally, there was no stated limit to the number of wives a man could marry. It is commonly believed in polygamous societies that the desire to have children, especially male children, is one of many reasons why men decide to marry more than one wife. Abdoulaye Bara Diop, who studied polygamy in Senegal, examined the reasons why it was traditionally practiced: [A]ccroissement de la dimension de la famille, source de richesse, notamment en milieu rural…sécurité plus grande du père (sa vieillesse est prise en charge par de nombreux enfants), émulation des coépouses pour l’entretien du mari; satisfaction sexuelle renouvelée de l’homme que n’empêche pas l’indisposition d’une épouse, par suite de maternité par exemple. Il s’y ajoute le prestige social que confèrent plusieurs femmes, beaucoup d’enfants, une nombreuse famille, signe de richesse sinon d’aisance et permettant ainsi l’élargissement des rapports sociaux qui font l’importance de l’individu.21 (Increasing family size, which is a source of wealth, especially in rural areas…more security for the father (in old age, his numerous children take care of him), competition of co-wives over caring for husband; renewed sexual satisfaction of husband who is guaranteed a sexual partner even when one wife is not available, when nursing for example. Adding to this is the social prestige that having several wives, lots of children, a huge family confer. A large family is a sign of wealth and happiness allowing extension of one’s social network, proof of an individual’s importance.) Most Senegalese ethnic groups were and remain patrilocal, meaning it is the obligation of each woman to leave her parents’ home to join her husband’s family. Because male children perpetuate their father’s family (most Senegalese societies and all Muslim societies are patrilinear), they were particularly desired. Couples were expected to reproduce, and not

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having children was considered abnormal. When a couple could not reproduce, the wife was invariably blamed, and the husband was encouraged and even pressured to marry another woman. In couples that had only female children, the husband was also urged to remarry, to increase his chances of having male children. These practices remain common even today in most rural areas and in many urban centers. The traditional economic justification for polygamy was that people’s livelihoods depended on agriculture, which is manual work requiring the labor of many people. The more hands in the field, the more crops one could harvest. Being able to produce enough grain and other foods to support one’s family throughout the year was a source of pride and prestige in the community.22 These motives for polygamy might have made sense and been acceptable in the past, but their relevance in today’s Senegal is debatable. The next few pages examine the depiction of polygamy in three of Sembène’s films, Manda bi, Xala, and Moolaade. What is particularly striking about polygamy in these three films is that it is featured in different settings and works differently in each case. In Manda bi, the protagonist, Ibrahima Dieng, is a poor middle-aged man living in a low-income Dakar neighborhood. Dieng and his family are surrounded by friends and neighbors who are equally poor. Nonetheless, Dieng has two wives (Aram and Maty) and many children to feed. Viewers are too distracted by Dieng’s interactions with criminals and governmental officials (he is desperately trying to cash the money order a nephew sent him from France) to wonder how his large family ordinarily makes it through the day. The two wives have a strong sense of solidarity and work well together despite their noticeable poverty and the challenges of meeting the family’s daily needs. It is the wives who keep the family fed and clean, yet Dieng nevertheless is treated with utmost respect and served generous portions of meals even though he has no idea how the food got into his bowl. Michel Serceau explained this very well in his analysis of the film:

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Dieng lives in Dakar and has been out of work for four years. He has no income but has a large family to take care of. His wives stay at home and also have no source of income. Like the family whose life is now fixated on the money order, critics also have been blinded by the protagonist’s hassles and humiliating experiences, unable to see beyond the drama surrounding the money order. How does the family survive day to day? There is no indication of how they lived before the arrival of the mysterious money order or how they will continue to live afterward. Besides this narrative incongruity that presents the family as living on God’s mercy (“God will not forget us,” one character says), it is important to point out that Maty makes the same statement as Borom Sarret’s wife when the mailman delivers the money order to them: “Take the baskets,” she says to Aram. “Today we will eat.” And the two head out. The difference here is that viewers understand unequivocally that Dieng’s wives are headed to the store, whereas Borom Sarret’s wife leaves viewers guessing. Although Senegalese women, like those depicted in Manda bi, expect their husbands to provide for them, it is not unusual for them to fill in for their husbands when the husbands are broke. In fact, there is an implicit understanding that if the husband does not provide the dépense quotidienne (the amount of money provided by the husband every morning before leaving the house, for the daily needs of the family), his wife or wives will find a way to feed the family. Women such as Maty and Aram would ordinarily belong to social networks and practice miscellaneous

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activities that generate small incomes they can count on for rainy days. There is, however, no suggestion of such a system in the film, and thus the two wives appear to be economically dependent. A significant aspect of Dieng’s polygamy is that despite his poverty, and the fact that he and his family live on the fringes of urban Dakar, the family lives together harmoniously and shares everything in the same way that traditional polygamous families used to live, even though viewers do not learn much about the internal family dynamics. The family is able to live in the “urban” setting while still practicing traditional values. Because of the family’s poverty, however, food is scarce, and when they can afford to eat, they indulge themselves so much they forget or neglect to pray. It is shocking to see Dieng wolf down his meal, breathlessly swallow a papaya, and then painfully crawl to reach a kola nut while belching loudly before laboriously pulling himself into bed. He and his entire family sleep through the prayer. Could this be a Marxist commentary on religion? When Dieng wakes up from his nap and realizes that he has missed the Friday prayer, his moralizing speech to his wife reveals the complex cultural dynamic at play in his family: When your bellies are full, all you want is sleep. What about Allah? There is no room in my house for unbelievers. Where do you think I find the money to feed you? I have been without a job for the past four years. Today is Friday and nobody thought of waking me up. What a shame! At this point in the film, Dieng does not even know about the money order and of course, he did not provide the money that was used for the meal he enjoyed. This statement is profoundly grounded in the Senegalese culture of sutura, a Wolof word very loosely translated as “discretion,” which grants Dieng the prerogative to take credit for the food that the family eats and also for any good that happens to the family in the areas normally under his responsibility as head of household. It is an

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implicit agreement, or a complicity, that none of the parties will breach under normal circumstances. This complex and unstated power relationship at work within the family led Serceau to remark, Le patriarcat et la misogynie de cette société occultent, aux yeux de l’observateur étranger, la complexité de ces rapports, expressions de toute une culture…Les femmes s’y révèlent plus lucides que l’homme quant aux contradictions entre exercice des valeurs et nécessités économiques, plus aptes à défendre la situation financière de la famille. Mais elles préservent en même temps, l’image de cette famille, sa hiérarchie régie par le préjugé viril.24 (Patriarchy and misogyny in this society conceal, to the outside observer, the complexity of these relations, a culture’s deep expression. The wives prove to be more lucid about the contradictions between respecting values and economic necessity than the man. They also prove themselves better at defending the family’s financial situation than the man. But they preserve at the same time this family’s image, its hierarchy being dominated by masculine bigotry.) “Misogyny” arguably is a poor choice of words here, given that the power imbalance between genders within this polygamous family, and by extension in Senegal, does not signify that women are despised or looked down on. The choice of the word may be indicative of Serceau’s own cultural blinders. It is evident that polygamy is only a subtheme in this film. It is significant only because it adds to the layer of complexities of modern life in Senegal and underscores the marginalization and ill treatment of the very people who fought tooth and nail for the country’s independence. Dieng and his family seem ill equipped to thrive in a large urban city such as Dakar, and their struggles to survive make the polygamy as represented in Manda bi seem anachronistic and out of place. Although they may be able to keep alive by occasionally eating well, the children’s future is at risk. Living in Dakar and its vicinity with a large family like

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Dieng’s requires financial means, which he does not have. By contrast, in Xala, Sembène brought to light a vastly different set of social issues related to polygamy, this time among the local bourgeoisie. Xala (The Curse, 1974) is a harsh rebuke of the nascent Senegalese upper class in the immediate aftermath of independence. Set on the anniversary of Senegal’s independence (April 4), Xala is a critical assessment of the new African elite that took over from Europeans only to shatter the hopes and expectations independence was supposed to fulfill. Focused on reaping personal profit, the elite continued with the same self-serving practices as the colonizers they had replaced. After announcing El Hadji’s third marriage to the members of the chamber of commerce, the president proudly declares “Mais la modernité ne doit pas nous faire perdre notre africanité.” (Modernity must not make us lose our Africanness.) Polygamy, ironically, appears to be the only expression of Africanness that the new leaders opt to retain, given that their first acts after taking over are to replace their African clothes with tuxedos and send the police to disperse the crowds. When announcing the news of his marriage to his colleagues, El Hadji coats his language in religious jargon, saying that he remarries “by duty,” a common pretext for polygamists. Although the purpose of polygamy in traditional Africa might have been to extend the family or ensure a sufficient labor force, those reasons no longer hold true, especially in cities such as Dakar, home to El Hadji. Therefore, his claim that he is getting remarried “by duty” is a contrived rationale: duty, in his case, is nothing but greed. His multiple marriages are neither justified by Islam nor supported by tradition because the social reasons he could invoke are irrelevant. All things considered, El Hadji’s polygamy is an egotistical way of showing off his wealth and demonstrating his self-esteem. It is essentially a vicious, self-gratifying, dysfunctional kind of polygamy intended to satisfy his personal greed and flaunt his virility to others. Oumy, El Hadji’s second wife, is disturbed by his sexual desires, and in reaction to the announcement of his third marriage, she dramatically

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yells at him that his third wife’s “split is not horizontal, that it is vertical like every other woman’s.” Oumy means to insult El Hadji’s loose sexual behavior and to stress that there is more to love than just the physical attraction. El Hadji is a selfish individual incapable of love, a fact that is confirmed again after he regains his virility. As soon as he gets back to town, he rushes to his new wife for sex. The latter is menstruating and cannot have sex.25 “Loolu moy lan?” (So what is that supposed to mean?) El Hadji grunts in disapproval and rushes out to his second wife, who, knowing what he is like, is already in her dressing gown when he arrives and does not waste one minute on ceremony. What is notable about El Hadji’s polygamy is that his three wives live separately, in different houses, and El Hadji goes back and forth among them. Unlike Dieng’s wives, who live together in the same house, El Hadji’s first and second wives are seen together only once when they ride with El Hadji to the new wife’s wedding party. This encounter, although brief, allows viewers to see the deep tension between the two wives and El Hadji’s unkindness to the first wife. El Hadji’s relationship with his second wife, Oumy, is essentially based on money: every time they see one another, she asks him for money, but she is never satisfied with how much he offers her. Several times in the film, Oumy snatches El Hadji’s wallet and, while calling him names, helps herself to his money. Oumy’s visit to his office illustrates El Hadji’s obsession with sex: Oumy, sitting across the table facing El Hadji, remarks that he has lost weight and looks strange. She brings up her household financial needs and demands more money. While she talks to him, he is in another world, daydreaming about his third wife lying naked in her bed and him crawling toward her. El Hadji’s first wife, Adja, is the only one who married him out of love. She remains faithful to him against all odds and supports him despite his ingratitude and socioeconomic downfall. Oumy, his second wife— with her wig, black dress, large glasses, and high heels—is the symbol of consumerism, artificiality, and superficial values. She clings to El Hadji as long as he can support her never-ending financial needs and as long

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as she can profit from being under the umbrella of his economic success. She leaves him as soon as he loses his position. As for the third wife, she has absolutely no voice or presence in the film. She is merely an object of admiration and sexual desire. She is El Hadji’s midlife trophy. Their marriage, which seals El Hadji’s demise, ends with his financial ruin. El Hadji’s polygamy is essentially a vicious, self-gratifying, and dysfunctional kind of polygamy intended to satisfy his personal sexual greed. He does not care about the interactions among his wives or children. He does not care about being fair to his wives and children. All he cares about is the satisfaction of his own desires. El Hadji’s polygamy defeats the practice’s traditional and religious purposes but powerfully reflects the form and meaning it has taken on in urban settings. Although many people use Islam as a pretext to marry additional wives, their real motive for engaging in polygamy is usually far more self-serving. Whereas Xala exposes El Hadji’s sexual covetousness as the motive for his polygamy, Sembène’s last film, Moolaade (2004), gives insight into a form of polygamy that is reminiscent of the past. Moolaade is a Pulaar word referring to an ancient practice, deeply grounded in the local cultures, of seeking someone’s protection and the obligation of that person to respond positively to that request. As in Manda bi, polygamy is a subtheme in Moolaade, but its positive depiction demands attention. The main protagonist of the film is an extremely strong woman, Collé Ardo Gallo Sy, the second wife of Ciré, a respected resident of a fictional African village. Amath, Ciré’s older brother, who also lives in the same village, cannot get along with Collé. Viewers learn late in the film that Ciré was pressured by Amath to marry Alima, his third wife, but there is no clear indication as to why he married Collé. The only information that becomes available to viewers is that although Ciré deplores the fact that after eighteen years of marriage, he has only one child (a daughter) with Collé, nevertheless she is his favorite wife. Viewers also learn that Collé had two miscarriages as a result of the scars caused by her circumcision, a common practice in the village and the central theme of the film. Collé’s

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only daughter, Amsatou, was delivered by caesarean section, which left an enormous scar on Collé’s belly. Ciré’s three wives live together in one compound in a sisterhood relationship, with a clear hierarchy among them in what appears to be a harmonious household. The three wives call each other “Sister X.” As second wife, Collé has seniority and authority over the third, who is younger and who considers both the first and second wives her older sisters and respects them accordingly. The children call their real mother “Mother” and their mother’s co-wives “Mother X.” The first wife, Diatou, also a very strong and outspoken person, is the head of the family and speaks for all the women. Nobody within the family makes a decision without consulting her. She has authority over her co-wives and all the children, and moreover, she is held accountable by Ciré for whatever happens at home while he is away. For instance, when four young girls who are trying to avoid being circumcised seek refuge with Collé, who agrees to protect them, it is the first wife whom the husband blames upon returning home: “How come, as the first wife, you allowed Collé to keep the children?” The girls have turned to Collé for protection because she had a bad personal experience with circumcision and later refused to have her only daughter undergo the surgery. The girls come to her because she is the most likely person in the village to empathize with them. The hierarchy among Ciré’s wives is visible from the very first scene of the film, when the four girls run into the compound calling Collé’s name. As they run up to Collé and squat down around her, Collé’s first reaction when she understands what is happening is to send her daughter to call Diatou: “Call your ‘older mother,’ Diatou,” she says to Amsatou. Diatou has to be informed before Collé can proceed with whatever it is that she decides to do. Collé does not ask for Diatou’s opinion or permission, but she does explain the situation to her. And when Ciré appears at that moment on his way out of the village, with all the family standing together making a human fence that ultimately bars him from seeing the

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girls, he addresses only his first wife: “First wife, it’s time to leave,” an explicit delegation of power to her as he heads out. In the same vein, when Amsatou desires merchandise from Mercenaire’s “shop” in preparation for her wedding, and Collé will not buy it for her, she seeks and finds solace with Diatou, who obtains the items for her on credit.

Figure 22. Collé Ardo and her co-wives face the Salindana.

Source. Courtesy of M-NET African Film Library.

As in Manda bi, there is a profound solidarity and candid complicity between Ciré’s wives. For instance, the scene in which the Salindana (the seven women dressed in red, who perform excision) visit Collé at her home to confront her about the runaway girls illustrates the sense of familial solidarity that binds these women. As Collé heads to the house gate, where the Salindana stand waiting (they cannot enter the house because of the moolaade), Diatou catches up with her only to hand her a machete, as if to say, do not let them get you! As Collé moves closer to them, Diatou stands a few steps behind her holding her own machete in support, and next to them stands Alima, the third wife. Although Alima fears that the Salindana might curse their

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family with a spell, she still stands by her “older sisters.” In addition, both Diatou and Alima appear just as pained as Collé during the flogging scene and help comfort her. Despite the strong and assertive personalities of Collé and other women in Moolaade, the film seems to suggest that to be effective, African women’s struggle to free themselves of the iron grip of their men requires the men’s support and perhaps even their collaboration. For instance, although circumcision is performed on women’s bodies solely by women, and despite the men’s acknowledgment that it is a women’s business—“ o yɛ musow ka ko yɛ”26—the women under the leadership of Collé have to fight even to be heard by their men, who erroneously believe that circumcision is an Islamic requirement. Support of the following three men is crucial to the successful outcome of Collé’s fight for the abolition of circumcision: Mercenaire, Ciré, and Ibrahima Doucouré. After beating his wife in a vain attempt to get her to say the word that ends the moolaade, Ciré is profoundly remorseful. Viewers see that his older brother, Amath, who has a lot of power over him, wants to settle a score with Collé. Amath persuaded Ciré to marry Alima to get him away from Collé’s grip. At any rate, after the flogging, Ciré turns around, stands up to his brother for the first time, and threatens to fight him and anyone who lays hands on Collé. “It takes more than a pair of balls to make a man,” he says to his baffled menfolk as he walks away from the final village gathering. This statement emboldens Collé, who, paraphrasing Sunjata Keita’s speech,27 swears to fight back if attacked. Ciré’s support is critical because if his older brother had his way, he would have had Ciré divorce Collé, which would have resulted in her being bedeviled and ostracized. Both she and her daughter escape unscathed from the fury of the men thanks to Ciré’s complicity, which is confirmed when his disheartened brother remarks to him, “Ciré, you have betrayed your menfolk!” Mercenaire is an outsider to the village; he comes only to sell cheap merchandise. He knows most of the people in the village and has the

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reputation of being a womanizer. Viewers learn that Mercenaire is a well-traveled man, who served many years in the military and worked on several United Nations peace-keeping missions around the world, but his big mouth and rebellious attitude led to him being sent to military prison for five years and getting fired. The flogging scene happens in the center of the village at approximately the place where Mercenaire displays his merchandise. The entire village gathers to watch Ciré flog Collé to get her to utter the word that will end the moolaade. The people watching the flogging clearly are divided between those who are in favor of circumcision, and thus cry out their encouragement for the husband to hit harder, and those who are against circumcision and yell out to Collé, “Don’t utter it” (the word). No one from the village intervenes to stop the flogging. Mercenaire, who until now has stayed away from the scene, finally rushes in, snatches the whip from the hand of the visibly exhausted husband, and takes down the infuriated Amath, who has joined in to fight Mercenaire. The flogging is over, but now the elderly and pro-circumcision people turn their rage against Mercenaire. One needs to remember here that breaching the moolaade always leads to death. “O tɛ jeli ni hadama deŋ nii yɛ wa?” (Isn’t it human blood and soul?), Collé says, in the twenty-first minute of the film, in response to Diatou’s question as to whether she understands the responsibilities of the moolaade. Thus Mercenaire becomes the sacrificial lamb killed by the village mob. What his death suggests is that if he had not interfered with the flogging, no one would have intervened, and Collé would have died (although whether he would have intervened had he known it would result in his death is not known). Although Ibrahima (the chief’s son, who comes back from France) neither instigates the movement for change that is going on when he arrives in the village nor partakes in it directly in any way, his presence and his unflinching resolve to marry the woman of his own choosing precipitate the change. His hyper-authoritative father, Dougoutigui (the village chief), gets the message very quickly after Ibrahima arrives from France. As Dougoutigui, his two wives, and Ibrahima’s uncle sit under

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the thatched roof that serves as a living room for the family, Dougoutigui informs Ibrahima that since hearing that Amsatou was not circumcised, he had decided to cancel their proposed marriage. Ibrahima’s response, that his marriage is none of his father’s business, baffles the old man but sends a strong message, which the father receives. “I had never spoken to my father like that,” Dougoutigui mumbles when Ibrahima leaves the room. Ibrahima has an enviable position in the village. He is the chief’s son and potential successor to the throne, he has been abroad for ten years and has a lot of money, and he is back home to reunite with his family and get married. Dougoutigui tries, but fails, to use the incentive of the throne to blackmail Ibrahima and get him to marry someone (for example, his very young cousin Fili) instead of Amsatou. It is essential to note that Ibrahima would not have been able to stand up to his father had he been living with him in the village. His response to his father’s brutal umbrella hit on the shoulder summarizes the spirit of the film: “Father, you may hit me. I’m your son, you can hit me. But the era of little tyrants is past forever.” Ibrahima’s resistance to his father shows how fragile and vulnerable the old man’s power is. When blackmailing and physical violence do not help turn Ibrahima around, the old man has no other means of pressuring him. The last scene of the film suggests that Ibrahima accepts being disinherited and renounces the throne. He then goes on to marry the woman he loves and to set up his television, defying each of his father’s demands. Thus he becomes one of the channels through which change occurs. Contrary to Ciré, Mercenaire, and Ibrahima, the older generation, including the chief, desperately clings to the old ways in the same way that the three male elders do in Faat Kiné. Violence becomes the ultimate resort when everything else fails. Dougoutigui and his age cohorts, along with the values he incarnates, symbolize a certain tradition that is threatened by the winds of change blowing in the village. Although the older people of the village fight back, their values do not hold. The fear of losing these values explains why they set on fire all the women’s radios, beat up Collé, and kill Mercenaire. The last two-shot of

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Ibrahima and Amsatou, on which the camera dwells, suggests the end of female circumcision and the conversion of men into marrying bilakoro (uncircumcised) women, a practice previously unheard of in the village. Ibrahima and Amsatou are aliens of a sort in this community in the sense that they both carry with them a stigma of perceived impurity or abnormality. Ibrahima has been “contaminated” by ten years of Western values while living abroad; he watches television and has different views. Amsatou has the shameful status and heavy burden of being the only uncircumcised woman of the village. In this village, bilakoroya (being uncircumcised) is portrayed as a humiliating, repugnant, and repressed state and is made to seem abnormal by people who have established that being circumcised is the only normal condition. Amsatou and Ibrahima form a couple that will produce a new type of African. By making a film about female circumcision, Sembène sought to break a sanctioned public silence on a profoundly unsettling practice to reveal something that must be addressed with tact, of course, but with the utmost discursive force. Making the plight of women visible through such a powerful visual channel as cinema helps break the complicit silence surrounding it. From Borom Sarret to Moolaade, all of Sembène’s films, each in its own way, challenged then-prevailing notions of womanhood and marriage. Each film provides viewers with opportunities to open a dialogue not only about the condition of women in Africa but about the human condition in general, because examining women’s issues leads naturally to exposing men’s insecurities. Sembène’s films are so compelling because they resonate with actual social issues and the topics people deal with in their day-to-day lives. For instance, in the two films that he explicitly dedicated to women, the individuals who play the main female characters personally identify with the stories. Venus Sèye, who played Faat Kiné, acknowledged that the film tells the story of her own life.28 Sembène’s assistant, Clarence Delgado, said in an interview that Venus Sèye was coached to perform at her best because she had never worked as an actress before.29 Sembène confirmed

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this when he said in a press conference following the film’s release, “The leading actress has never been in film before. I think she does very well. She is not a professional. This role is practically her life. She didn’t act. She performed her life!” It appears that Sèye accepted the role of Faat Kiné not only because in real life she resembled the character but also because she wanted to be a mouthpiece for other Senegalese women. When asked why she agreed to the role, Sèye, in an interview with Baba Diop, explained, Pour toutes mes soeurs sénégalaises, j’ai accepté ce personnage pour leur dire que ce n’est pas parce que nous avons raté notre ambition première que nous ne pouvons pas nous épanouir dans un autre métier.30 (I accepted the role for all my Senegalese sisters, to tell them that it’s not because we have failed to realize our first ambition that we cannot be gratified by another job.) Similarly, the actress Fatoumata Coulibaly, also called FC, who portrayed Collé Ardo Gallo Sy in Moolaade, stated in a personal interview that she is circumcised and had been actively involved with advocating for the abolition of female circumcision in her native Mali before working with Sembène.31 She even made a documentary on the issue, which was shown once on public television (but then disappeared). When asked why she agreed to challenge this ancient practice, she responded, J’ai bravé la coutume, les interdits, parce que tout simplement, je veux que les fillettes ne meurent plus, ne soient plus blessées volontairement pour des raisons banales aujourd’hui. Avant, on ne savait pas tous ces dégâts, mais aujourd’hui, il nous faut changer…Je lutte pour sauvegarder la santé des fillettes, et non pour moi-même, car j’ai été excisée. (I have challenged our customs, our don’ts, just because I don’t want little girls to die, to get hurt intentionally any more for trivial

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reasons. In the past, we did not know all the damages it caused, but now, we must change…I fight to preserve the little girls’ health, not for myself, for I was circumcised.) Sembène craftily made the most out of the life stories of Venus Sèye and FC in his personal undertaking to speak for African women. Sembène was unequivocally opposed to the enduring practice of female circumcision, and Moolaade very strongly attests to that, as he came out against it more strongly than any other African filmmaker. Does Moolaade make a persuasive enough case for the abandonment of such a profoundly embedded practice in some African cultures? Would the weakness of the religious bases of the practice combined with its proven health hazards win out over the perpetuation of the practice in the name of custom? Sembène was very conscious of the difficulties associated with attempting to eradicate the practice, but Moolaade has been a huge catalyst for change by contributing to opening the subject to discussion in places where previously it was never posed: youth associations, cine clubs, moving cinemas, village assemblies, public televisions, and national parliaments. Although Sembène’s position on circumcision is unequivocal, on polygamy his discourse is more subtle. The only time Sembène clearly denigrates polygamy is in Faat Kiné, when, forty-three minutes into the film, Faat Kiné goes to Total headquarters in downtown Dakar. Alpha, another gas station manager, waits for her by the entrance of the headquarters so that he can ask her for a two-million franc loan ($4,000 USD) because his station is going bankrupt. When Faat Kiné denies him the loan, Alpha turns in desperation to Mr. Thiam, a Total CEO. Their conversation reveals the harshest words ever pronounced against polygamy in Sembène’s films: Alpha: Mr. Thiam, do something for me. God damn! That’s the last time. You know what it’s like to have a big family. It bleeds you dry.

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The Films of Ousmane Sembène Mr. Thiam: No, I don’t know about big families. That was in my grandfather’s time. What I do know, however, is that you’re inefficient and backward…You’re an African from colonial times!

This exchange between Alpha and Mr. Thiam reveals an unequivocal condemnation of polygamy in modern-day Senegal. The way Alpha requests a loan reveals that it is not his first time being so desperately stranded for cash. Therefore, to convince his listeners, he feels the need to reassure them that this will indeed be the last time he calls on them. What this tells viewers is that although Alpha is a business owner, he has been relying on personal loans from his colleagues, loans that he also tends not to pay back. Alpha is in deep financial trouble, and he seems to blame it on his large family. Viewers also learn in this scene that Alpha has four wives; the fourth is pregnant, and each of the other three had a baby in the last two and a half years. Mr. Thiam’s statement relegates polygamy to an old practice that is not relevant in modern time. In Mr. Thiam’s view, Alpha perpetuates a maladapted tradition and is incapable of adjusting to current times. Everything considered, Sembène was not against polygamy per se, but he did oppose a certain type of polygamy, the type that undermines the dignity women are entitled to and turns women solely into objects of male gaze and desire, as in Xala. He also opposed the anachronistic kind of polygamy, as depicted in Manda bi, with an economically challenged husband out of place and out of means in the urban setting. However, he treated with dignity and respect Ciré’s polygamy in Moolaade, in which he portrayed a polygamous family as an integrated and solid organic social structure that helps hold society together in rural Africa, where resources are scarce. It is also clear that polygamy is not the main focus of the film, and Sembène deftly bypasses its intricate and often most problematic aspects for that matter. The most problematic aspects commonly associated with polygamous marriages include unfairness, inequality, and injustice of the husband to the wives and to the children of those wives. However, questions of equality and fairness them-

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selves are fraught with cultural biases. In consideration of the twentyfirst century’s global multiculturalism, could it be perhaps conceded that, like monogamy, same-sex marriage, successive divorces and remarriages, and polygamy involving mature women who endorse it of their own free will may be just as legitimate as any monogamous marriage?

Why Did Sembène Speak for Women? Although there is no clear-cut answer to this question, several facts can probably contribute to understanding of why Sembène so consistently spoke for African women and went so far as to dedicate his last two films to their cause. Sembène’s sympathetic portrayal of women and their conditions in his films was in part inspired by the environment in which he grew up and his personal experiences as a man of his time, but it was also inspired by his complicated relationships with the women in his life. David Murphy attributed Sembène’s attentiveness to women to “his disappointment with the men of his generation.”32 Sembène was born in the first half of the twentieth century in the Casamance, an agricultural region, which at the time was “seen as a potential rice granary for the rest of the country, no longer able to feed itself because of its increasing reliance on groundnuts and its neglect of millet and sorghum, which had once been staple crops” (45). In the Casamance, women still have the reputation of being strong and hardworking and of shouldering as much responsibility in providing for their families as do the men. Emitaï portrays an example of Diola society and illustrates labor division between sexes among the Diola. It comes as no surprise that in the film the women stand up to the French soldiers who have come to requisition their rice for the war effort. John Lucas Eichelsheim, who studied the relationship between the Diola ethnic group and the state of Senegal, examined gender relations within Diola society and concluded, “L’opposition de sexe n’est pas hiérarchique mais plutôt complémentaire: les hommes possèdent les rizières, mais

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les femmes le riz.”33 (Opposition between sexes is not hierarchical, it is rather complementary: men own the rice fields, but women the rice.) If gender relations are complementary among the Diola, the same is not true among the Mandinka, the Fulani, and other ethnic groups that live in the area where Sembène grew up. For instance, among the Mandinka, women contribute even more, given their strong belief that they must toil for their husbands to deserve the success of their children and the reward of heaven. Sembène’s father was a fisherman,34 and although not much is known about the family’s living conditions, it is known that they lived in Santhiaba, a rather modest neighborhood in Ziguinchor, which Sembène’s biographer described as follows: Son Santhiaba natal, la ville indigène aux cases en banco privée à la fois d’électricité et d’eau courante. “Les mêmes sentiers en éventail, les paillotes toujours prêtes à s’écrouler, les tas d’immondices; une vie grouillante rassemblée là.”35 (His native Santhiaba, the indigenous city of mud huts deprived at the same time of electricity and running water. “The same winding paths, the huts always ready to crumble, garbage heaps, a place seething with life.”) Like most children of modest families in Senegal, Sembène grew up seeing his own mother and his friends’ mothers working hard day and night to supplement what, if anything, their husbands were able to bring home to feed their families. Gadjigo associated Sembène’s gentle treatment of women in his works with the fact that he was adopted by his grandmother, who spoiled rather than educated him when his parents divorced. But Gadjigo did not mention Sembène’s grandfather. When responding to a question about Sembène’s relationship to women, Sembène’s longtime assistant, Clarence Delgado, attested to Sembène’s authentic understanding of women’s lives but also to the personal nature of his representations of them.

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Chaque film est une partie de Sembène. Il a été élevé par les femmes, a grandi parmi elles. C’est un des rares cinéastes africains à pouvoir aborder les problèmatiques concernant principalement les femmes.36 (Each film is a part of Sembène’s life. He was brought up by women and grew up among them. He is one of few African filmmakers to be able to address issues particularly concerning women.) Sembène no doubt inherited from his father the spirit of freedom that animated him throughout his life. He also was encouraged by his father to become a self-reliant and assertive person who did not fear authority or shy away from expressing his mind. However, the one person whose image, like an object of worship, stood out in Sembène’s personal gallery was that of his mother. According to Delgado, an enlarged photograph of her was framed and placed above the pictures of the iconic figures of resistance Sembène so admired: Nelson Mandela, Samory Touré, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and so forth.37 Portraits of these freedom fighters also appear in many of his films. The fact that his mother’s picture sticks out above all the others illustrates the prime position she occupied in his memory and the preeminence of motherhood. He confirmed his appreciation of women’s plight and the need to address it in a 1977 lecture to students and writers, filmmakers, and other professionals in Kinshasa, Zaire, where he declared that for artists, denouncing the government is easy, but they should “parler de la femme qui lutte quotidiennement pour nourrir ses enfants”38 (talk about women who struggle daily to feed their children). The most compelling statement made by Sembène about women in Africa is in a 2004 interview with Gadjigo, in which his career-long commitment to their causes seems to be partially justified: Je pense que l’Afrique est maternelle. L’homme africain est très maternel; il aime sa mère il jure par sa mère. Quand on insulte son père, l’homme peut supporter. Mais une fois qu’il est porté

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In many ways, this statement confirms the privileged position of Sembène’s mother in his picture gallery, the absence of information about his father, and his generally respectful and dignifying portrayal of women in his films. However, without getting into much detail, Sembène’s biographer laconically wrote, “Sur le plan sentimental, Sembène n’a jamais su tisser des rapports durables. Après deux divorces, il a fini par ‘choisir’ la solitude.”39 (On the sentimental plane, Sembène was never able to maintain durable relationships. After two divorces, he

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“opted” for solitude, in the sense of not getting remarried.) Sembène had the reputation of being unpredictable, with a difficult personality and swinging mood, who declared he would “‘prêt à coucher avec le diable’ pour trouver les moyens de faire un film”40 (“readily sleep with the devil” to find the means of making a film). To reach his goals, Sembène did not hesitate to do what it took and to use not only all the means on which he could lay his hands but also all the people, including the women in his life, as reported by an old acquaintance, Mbissine Diop, who played Diouana in La Noire de ….41

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Endnotes 1. Pierre Haffner, “Sembène Ousmane: Eléménts pour un autoportrait magnétique,” in “Sembène Ousmane,” special edition, CinémAction 34 (1985): 24. 2. C. B. Davies and A. A. Graves, eds., Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature (Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 1986), 7. 3. Moore, “Evolution of an African Artist,” 64. 4. Catherine Ruelle, “La place de la femme,” in “Sembène Ousmane,” special edition, CinémAction 34 (1985): 80–83. 5. Françoise Pfaff, “Les femmes africaines dans les films de Sembène,” in “Sembène Ousmane (1923–2007),” ed. Thierno I. Dia et al., special issue, Africultures 76 (2009): 149–156. 6. Sada Niang, “Ousmane Sembène: une vie,” in “Sembène Ousmane (1923– 2007),” ed. Thierno I. Dia et al., special issue, Africultures 76 (2009): 199. 7. Ken Harrow, “Kiné, la nouvelle femme africaine,” in “Sembène Ousmane (1923–2007),” ed. Thierno I. Dia et al., special issue, Africultures 76 (2009): 157–165. 8. Chinien, “Ousmane Sembène, Artiste Postcolonial?,” 73–82. 9. Sheila Petty, “Pugnacité et Pouvoir: La représentation des femmes dans les films d’Ousmane Sembène,” in Un viatique pour l’éternité: Hommage à Ousmane Sembène, ed. Samba Gadjigo and Sada Niang (Dakar: Editions Papyrus Afrique, 2010), 17–52. 10. David Murphy, Sembène: Imagining Alternatives in Film & Fiction (Oxford: First Africa World Press, 2001), 150. 11. Ken Olende and Charlie Kimber, “Interview with Ousmane Sembène —Father of African film,” Socialist Worker Online no. 1955, June 2005, http://www.socialistworker.co.uk. 12. Chinien, “Ousmane Sembène, Artiste Postcolonial?,” 79. 13. Diop, Baba. “Ousmane Sembène, The Suburbs of Women.” African Screen No. 24 second semester 1998, 94. 14. Pfaff, “Les femmes africaines,” 151. 15. This is a widely known expression in Senegal, where traditionally only women wore pagnas (wraps) and only men wore pants. Pants and pagnas became associated with gender and gender-related responsibilities. 16. Maxime Scheinfeigel, “Borom Sarret, la fiction documentaire,” in “Sembène Ousmane,” special edition, CinémAction 34 (1985): 34.

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17. Daniel Serceau in “Sembène Ousmane,” special edition, CinémAction 34 (1985): 34. 18. Pfaff, Cinema of Ousmane Sembène, 155. 19. Ibid., 120. 20. Bâ, Aspects de la Civilisation Africaine, 103. 21. Abdoulaye Bara Diop, “La polygamie au Sénégal,” in “Sembène Ousmane,” special edition, CinémAction 34: (1985): 53. 22. Cf. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1959), for illustration of what it means to be a worthy man in traditional Igbo society. 23. Michel Serceau, “Le Mandat: un film catalyseur des réalités sociales,” in “Sembène Ousmane,” special edition, CinémAction 34 (1985): 42. 24. Ibid. 25. Menstruation is considered a period of impurity during which a woman is not supposed to have sex. 26. “O ye musow ka ko ye.” A Jula phrase meaning “that’s women’s problem,” it is said by Ibrahima’s uncle. 27. This is in reference to Dani Kouyaté’s 1995 film, Keïta: The Heritage of the Griot. Collé’s speech reminds one of what Sunjata said to his brother when the latter banned him and his siblings from Mande. 28. Baba Diop, “Interview with Venus Sèye,” African Screen 24 (1998): 96. 29. Clarence Delgado, interview with author, Dakar, March 6, 2004. 30. B. Diop, “Interview with Venus Sèye,” 96. 31. Fatoumata Coulibaly, interview with author, August 2011. 32. Murphy, Imagining Alternatives in Film & Fiction, 150. 33. John Lucas Eichelsheim, “Formation d’état et particularisme en Afrique: les relations des Diola au sud du Sénégal avec le pouvoir central à Dakar,” Afrika Focus 7, no. 3 (1991): 6. 34. Gadjigo, Conscience Africaine, 44. 35. Ibid. 36. Sène, “Aux Côtés de Sembène,” 55. 37. Ibid., 51–54. 38. Haffner, Pierre. “Ousmane Sembène: Elements pour un autoportrait magnetique.” In "Sembène Ousmane," special edition, CinemAction 34 (1985): 20–24. 39. Gadjigo, Conscience Africaine, 79. 40. Ibid., 55. 41. Thérèse Mbissine Diop, interview with author, August 11, 2011, Paris.

Chapter 7

Global Issues in Sembène’s Cinema The word globalization is used so frequently that it comes across as a trendy term, a catchword with no definitive meaning, one that is used to account for many new, unusual, and sometimes unexpected situations encountered on a daily basis. According to Zygmunt Bauman, “Globalization is a pass-key meant to unlock the gates to all present and future mysteries.”1 For Kwame Appiah, author of the provocative book Cosmopolitanism, Ethics in a World of Strangers (2007), “Globalization is a threat to homogeneity in the same way that it produces it.”2 In Appiah’s view, although globalization has opened up the capital of Ashante to Western countries, that does not make it a Western capital; Ashante has become cosmopolitan, but it remains Ashante. Although many people consider globalization to be a politically neutral concept that has great “equalizing” potential, others—such as Anne-Cecile Robert, a journalist at France’s Le Monde and professor of European studies—argue that globalization is really about ongoing exploitative power relations between resource-wealthy and resource-poor states. In Robert’s words, globalization “il s’agit d’un monde de rapports de forces où les puissants contin-

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uent d’imposer leur point de vue et de rechercher la satisfaction de leurs intérêts sous le drapeau des ‘libertés’ économiques”3 (is about a world of competing forces, where powerful [countries] continue to impose their point of view and to look to satisfy their interests in the guise of trade “freedom”). Described very simply, globalization is the increased connection between peoples and cultures across ethnic, national, and continental borders. This interconnection is accomplished through “easier” and faster movements of people, faster exchange of information and knowledge, and the rapid flow of financial transactions and movement of money across borders. The increased interconnectedness of peoples and cultures across the globe has resulted in growing influences on and remarkable changes in local economies, politics, societies, and cultures in developing countries. Though globalization is a complex concept that encompasses all aspects of life today, the interconnectedness associated with it far predates the term. In fact, peoples and goods have flowed within and between regions and continents for millennia. Nonetheless, many people still consider globalization to be synonymous with modernization. In developing countries, globalization is used to explain the introduction of new preferences and behaviors. For instance, whereas people used to cultivate chiefly for subsistence, during the colonial era they were forced to cultivate cash crops, and more recently they have been lured by the pressures of globalization to farm in order to sell. These changes have helped contribute to Africa’s burgeoning food crisis. As Tanya Kerssen explained, Most of Africa’s native food crops have been neglected by decades of agricultural development policies that favored introduced crops like maize, wheat and Asian rice. These crops were brought in from overseas by a succession of non-Africans, from colonial authorities and missionaries to agricultural researchers and aid

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agencies, all of whom heralded the new, foreign crops as superior in taste, nutrition and yield. The negligence or downright abandonment of people’s traditional crops and dietary habits increased the dependence of many African countries on food imports. For example, Anne-Cecile Robert quoted Thomas Sankara, iconic president of Burkina Faso (1983–1987), as defining imperialism as follows: “L’impérialisme? Regardez dans vos assiettes. Les grains de mil et de blé importés: c’est ça l’impérialisme.”4 (Imperialism? Look in your plates. The imported grains of millet and wheat: that’s what imperialism is.) What is striking about this quotation is how strongly imperialist manifestations echo global policies. In other words, if in the developing world signs of imperialism are to be found in the food people consume, the same is true with globalization. Whereas globalization per se is not explicitly the central focus of any one of Sembène’s films, its pervasive presence is notable in every one of them. To examine how Sembène addressed the growing influence of globalization on African societies, this chapter focuses on four films: La Noire de…, Guelwaar, Faat Kiné, and Moolaade. Each one of these films presents narrative and imagery that, to a large extent, reflect Sembène’s views on globalization and how African societies are coping with it. This chapter is by no means an essay on globalization; rather, its primary goal is to point to areas of reflection about Sembène’s representation of Africa as a piece of an inescapable global phenomenon. Thus, the chapter begins with a brief discussion of the concept of globalization followed by an analysis of the power and influence of communication media as portrayed in Sembène’s films. Next, it discusses the significance in Sembène’s films of human migration within and outside of Africa. Finally, the last section of the chapter examines how Sembène illustrated the negative economic and psychological consequences of Africans’ tendency to devalue all things African in the face of globalization.

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Influence of Media as a Force for Change Storytelling is often described as integral to the transmission of knowledge within African societies that have strong oral traditions and extended families living together. In the past, and in some rural areas even today, grandparents and older family members used storytelling to inculcate social values and proper behaviors in younger generations, often while sitting together in the evenings around wood fires, during initiation ceremonies, or at informal gatherings with friends. Sadly, living conditions in the current era have rendered such practices almost obsolete. In modern times, especially in urban settings, space limitations, cost of living, changing residence patterns, the primacy of formal education, and other socioeconomic factors have seriously undermined the traditional role of the extended family. Whereas in the past, families would sit together and share stories, nowadays they sit, although not necessarily together, and view television programs, most of which are imported from abroad. Oral traditions are being replaced, and in their place foreign-produced programs seem to be shaping the worldviews of younger generations of people in Africa. Sembène lamented the decline of the extended family’s role and the intrusion of the television in a 1992 interview he gave with Fírinne Ní Chréacháin: Nowadays, the TV is right there inside the hut where, in the old days, the father, the mother, the aunt held sway and the grandmother told her stories and legends. Even that time is now taken away from us. So we are left with a society which is growing more and more impoverished, emptying itself of its creative substance, turning more and more to values it does not create.5 This statement highlights the loss of values that African societies undergo with the advent of television, especially with the mass consumption of television programs that bring foreign values into families and instill in younger people worldviews that very often contradict those of their parents and grandparents. The easy circulation of information and television programs from resource-rich countries to

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poorer ones makes the latter countries vulnerable. Instead of reinforcing their own television and film industries, many African television stations find it more financially profitable to show less relevant and meaningful programs that they purchase inexpensively from abroad. What results is a form of cultural imperialism, as Karin Barber explained: “The impact of the media on non-western countries has been baleful, swamping indigenous cultural production, wiping out cherished traditions and forcefeeding entire populations with cheap, meretricious American consumer culture.”6 In Senegal, in particular, local television programs are influenced by American programs, and they also use a lot of South American and European productions. This extensive consumption of nonlocal products led Eko Lyombe, citing Antonio Gramsci, to write, Hegemony is usually a negotiated process that almost always involves power and a purpose. Rich, dominant political and cultural entities subtly and even unconsciously provide new values, worldviews and meanings that affect and transform poor countries at a psychological and cognitive level.7 In Faat Kiné, Sembène explored the influence, especially on young people, of modern media, such as radio and television. He clearly suggested that these are powerful means of communication and important educational tools used to shape and influence people’s views. For instance, fifty minutes into Faat Kiné, while Mami is playing mankala (a traditional African game) with her grandchildren (Aby and Djib), the three discuss the need for Faat Kiné to find a partner and get married. As they begin to list the eligible men she could marry, the conversation soon reveals one of Mami’s superstitious notions: that Jean, who is one of Faat Kiné’s closest male companions, would bring bad luck because his first wife died when she was still young. Djib’s direct and impertinent response shocks Mami. He says to her, “A believer like you should not say things like that. Isn’t it so that you also buried your first husband?” This statement prompts Mami to lament her grandchildren’s upbringing

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and education, which, in her view, are very much influenced by television. According to her, the children are in part raised by television and by programs that confer values in direct contradiction with her own. “You belong to the TV generation!” she scolds Djib and then abruptly ends their game. Mami is angry with the substance of Djib’s statement, with the suggestion that she is being hypocritical (if she can conclude that Jean is bad luck because he has buried his first wife, she too is bad luck for having buried her first husband, which she does not acknowledge), as well as the manner in which he delivers it. Mami believes that children do not have the right to speak so disrespectfully to an older person. In the last scene of the film, Djib again shocks the elders when he confronts his father and says to him, “Boubacar Omar Payane (Bop), stop lying!” In both situations, Djib feels justified behaving so disrespectfully, perhaps because of seeing such behavior modeled on television. Undoubtedly, to the average Senegalese, Djib lacks manners and should have been more subtle and discreet in his pronouncements. As Mr. Sène tells him in the last scene, “Do not judge your father!” It is not only his father that Djib should not judge but also his grandmother and elders in general. He blatantly ignores—or is perhaps even ignorant of—the unstated cultural rules of courtesy and discretion to be observed when talking to older people. Mami blames her grandson’s rudeness on television: “I did not bring you up,” she says to Djib. If traditionally grandparents played a major role in educating their grandchildren, postcolonial reality dictates otherwise. Television and the imported programs shown on it shape children’s views of the world and of what is considered proper and correct. Because the worldviews and the values projected on television are generally in contradiction with Mami’s, she only notes the negative influences of television. But Sembène’s meaning here differs from Mami’s view. Through Djib, Sembène demystifies the age-based social hierarchy that protects older people with an aura of immunity and makes them invulnerable—even when they are wrong. This gerontocratic privilege is sometimes simply

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abused. In other words, in Faat Kiné, television helps to shatter the age myth, which is a good thing from Sembène’s perspective, because it helps viewers to reflect on and question long-held values whose only justification may be that they serve to preserve the status quo. In Moolaade, set in rural Burkina Faso, the radio is similarly used to expose other worldviews to members of an otherwise closed community. Radio is an essential medium by which village women, in particular, connect with people outside their remote community. In the film, viewers see several radios, at least one in every household. The power of radio to educate and to influence views is confirmed in the last few minutes of the film when the main protagonist, Collé, faces the men of the village and informs them that their long-held and unquestioned belief that female circumcision is mandated by Islam is in fact wrong. She declares to the men that she heard the chief imam of the country explain otherwise on the radio. Once again, it is the radio that enables Collé to learn information beyond the closed boundaries of the village and thus empower herself to share a crucial piece of potentially transformative information. Although other women of the village might not like the practice of female circumcision, they lack the courage, or perhaps more important the arguments, to fight it. Collé is empowered by her understanding that the practice is not founded on religion, and her courageous use of that knowledge makes her the heroine of this film. Amsatou is another example in Moolaade of a woman who learns new lessons and other views from her exposure to radio. For example, she hears on the radio a meaning of the name Mercenaire, which she defines as “the soldiers who kill women, children, and then do coups d’état.” “See, I too listen to the radio!” she says to Mercenaire. Fearing the consciousness-raising effects of radio on the women, the men of the village decide to confiscate the radios and set them on fire. When Sonata, the female griot of the village who is known to hang around men, notices the radios burning, she concludes that the men are attempting to “lock our brains.” From the men’s perspective, radio is responsible for the

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village women’s rebellion against the tradition of female circumcision. Therefore, to squelch the women’s rebellious efforts and to attempt to reclaim their own authority, which they feel is being threatened by the invasive force of the radios, the men not only confiscate the women’s radios but they go so far as to burn them. Merely confiscating the women’s radios is one thing and implies a temporal action that may be reversed. In other words, if the men only confiscate the radios, the women would eventually get them back or find a way of making use of them when the men are not around. The possibility that the women would use the radios when the men are away is suggested by the very old, dusty radio infested with roaches that Diatou brings out and hands to Collé after her radio has been confiscated. Exhuming that radio confirms the idea that no matter how hard the men try, they can no longer stop the flow of information. However, burning the radios leaves no option for getting them back and implies that the men are re-isolating everyone and locking themselves up, in exactly the same way the village is cut off from the rest of the world. The censorship is not imposed solely on women in this film. Ibrahima, the chief’s son, who brings a radio and a television set from France, is instructed to turn his radio off and is prohibited from installing his television in the village. His uncle says, “You can’t turn on your television set around here. Its influence is even worse than that of the radio.” Radios are iconic representations of openness and access to the outside world, and Ibrahima fervently warns his uncle and father about the inappropriateness of their plan to deny radio and television to the women and himself: Why do you prevent women from listening to the radio and watching television? Uncle, you can prevent the people of the village from listening to the radio and watching television for a short period of time. But in this time and age, in all parts of the world, radio and television are our daily companions, our

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everyday companions. We cannot just cut ourselves off from the progress of the world. Despite the men’s persistence in attempting to keep the radios away from the women, the film ends with Ibrahima’s television antenna mounted high up in the sky, about the same height as the minaret of the age-old village mosque. Framing the scene, smoke from the burning radios covers part of the sky. This last scene suggests the ultimate triumph of freedom and openness to the outside world, but it also symbolizes the end of an era: “the era of little and overly controlling little tyrants” as Ibrahima calls his enraged father.

Migration Senegal has always attracted and produced migrants. In the aftermath of independence, rural exodus toward urban centers was the prevailing form of migration, but in recent years, the economic disparity between the northern and southern hemispheres has triggered massive waves of migration out of poorer countries toward Europe and North America, in particular. Having himself been an immigrant in France for more than a decade, Sembène was keenly aware of the social forces of migration and seemed to have foreseen future migratory trends out of the African continent. Although none of Sembène’s films focuses solely on migration, transnational migration appears as an important subtheme in many, most clearly in La Noire de…, Manda bi, Guelwaar, Faat Kiné, and Moolaade. The central character in La Noire de…, Diouana, is a pioneer of sorts and an emblem of the waves of migration following the economic crises that hit the continent in the 1970s and thereafter. In La Noire de…, released in 1966, Sembène captured the immigration story of a young Senegalese woman, Diouana, who leaves her home country to work in France for French employers. In the film, Sembène contrasts the fanciful and modern-looking attractions of the French Riviera with Diouana’s

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home, poor, dusty, bustling, and hot Medina of Dakar. The images offer viewers a poignant visual representation of the classic push-and-pull factors that have long motivated Africans to leave their home countries: the strong pull of Europe’s economic prosperity and the push coming from the poor living conditions and lack of opportunities at home. La Noire de… is like a harbinger for the widespread phenomenon of young Africans attempting to reach Europe at all costs and the potentially deadly consequences of such adventures as they risk their lives walking across the Sahara desert or traversing the Atlantic Ocean in makeshift boats. After several days of hunting for a domestic job in downtown Dakar, Diouana is thrilled when she finds work with a French couple. She returns home on the day she secures her new job and is shown running around excitedly as she announces, “I found a job with white folks!”8 Her mother is visibly pleased and responds with words of encouragement. In contrast, her father (played by Sembène himself) receives the news with a look of total indifference. Diouana’s joy alludes to the fact that there is a hierarchy among domestic workers, with those who work for white people being at the top of that hierarchy. Diouana now seems to feel superior, illustrating the internalized inferiority complex that Fanon noted in commenting on D. Westermann’s work on the psychology of Africans: The Negro’s inferiority complex is particularly intensified among the most educated, who must struggle with it unceasingly. Their way of doing so, he [Westermann] adds, is frequently naïve: “Wearing European clothes, whether rags or the most up-to-date style; using European furniture and European forms of social intercourse; adorning the native language with European expressions; using bombastic phrases in speaking or writing a European language; all contribute to a feeling of equality with the European and his achievements.”9

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Although in this context Fanon is referring to elites, it is also true that the unschooled have their share of feelings of inferiority. Unschooled people such as Diouana are not necessarily conscious of these feelings, but the feelings may be manifested through imitation of the local elites, who in turn imitate the former colonizers. As in Xala, in which the elites adopt the colonialists’ ways of dressing as soon as they seize power, Diouana meticulously dons Western-style clothes and wears high-heeled shoes for her daily walks to and from work; that is her walks between her bedroom, the kitchen, the living room and the bathroom. Diouana’s change in apparel from the traditional Senegalese wrap that she wears in Dakar to the skirts, wigs, and high heels she wears in France is an attempt to fit in with her dream world. On close analysis, Diouana’s inclination to dress up even to perform housework is part of the myth of working for tubaabs (white people). A Wolof saying eloquently summarizes Diouana’s attitude: “Mbindanu tubaab daf koy nuroo” (a white people’s maid should look like one). Regardless of their actual economic means, Europeans are generally perceived to be better off than their Senegalese counterparts. Therefore, a mbindan (a Wolof word for maid) working for white people is not just any mbindan. She is a classy type of mbindan who should look, dress, and behave differently because of her higher status as the maid of a European. Whereas an ordinary maid would dress like a house servant, Diouana believes that a maid in a tubaab household is obligated to dress with European flair. In France, Diouana’s notions of appropriate work attire contrast with those of her female employer, who chides Diouana for looking fashionable and wearing European-style clothes: “N’oublie pas que tu es une bonne!” (Don’t forget that you are a maid!) This exclamation provides evidence of the female employer’s annoyance with Diouana’s outfit and at the same time her lack of understanding of the class issues at work in Diouana’s mind. Diouana’s effort to resemble a typical “white” people’s maid is thus quelled. Fanon further discussed this form of alienation, or

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cultural renunciation: “Le colonisé se sera d’autant plus échappé de sa brousse qu’il aura fait siennes les valeurs culturelles de la métropole.”10 (The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards.) By working in a tubaab household and interacting with tubaabs, Diouana is drawn closer to her models and strives to resemble them by adopting ways that the “common” maid cannot. Diouana’s eschewing of her own native cultural attire and behavior and her longing to emulate Europeans illustrate how the inferiority complex instilled by colonialism is deeply ingrained in the psyche of the colonized. Diouana’s attraction to France is highlighted at the start of the film by her long stare at a tall building when she gets out of the car by her employers’ apartment complex. She is caught by the camera gazing closely at the height of the building with her chin raised all the way up. Diouana has seen tall buildings in Dakar, but she never lived in one. This long and upward stare parallels Diouana’s long journey from her poor roots in the Medina to the wealthy heights of “Hermit Road” on the French Riviera. The building in front of her is a physical embodiment of her dream now come true. But this much-anticipated dream will soon turn into a nightmare for Diouana as, in her loneliness, she starts to wonder, “Is France this big black hole?” And later, “Why did I want to come to France?” In Faat Kiné as well, the magnetic pull of the first world is at the heart of a conflict between Aby and her mother, Faat Kiné. After Aby passes the baccalaureate (or “bac,” the high school diploma needed to enter a university), she dreams only of going abroad to pursue her studies. In the heat of an argument with her mother, Aby reminds Faat Kiné of her plan to go to Canada and to work so that she can supplement whatever money her mother will be able to send her for her studies. She becomes livid when Faat Kiné begs her to reconsider her plan, given that Faat Kiné cannot afford to send Aby abroad. Djib’s shameless father, Boubacar Omar Payane (Bop), who has not contributed one cent to the

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upbringing and education of his son, tries to convince Djib to pursue his university education in France. In Bop’s view, a degree from a French university is superior to a degree from a local university, or what he describes as a “diplôme de complaisance” (diploma of complacency). Dismissing his father’s recommendation to study abroad, Djib embodies an enlightened alternative to the internalized oppression of many people in his father’s generation. Like the portraits of African nationalist heroes hanging on the walls around their house, Djib epitomizes African pride and consciousness. Supporting Djib’s pride and consciousness is the fact that he is the president of a youth association, Utopies et Prospectives (Utopia and Prospectives), the goal of which is a confederation of five West African states, of which Djib will be the president. When Aby lashes out at her mother, it is Djib who intervenes to calm his sister. He interferes not as her brother but as the president of the club whose members have laid out plans for their activities and career after they have passed the bac. These plans include, among other things, traveling within Senegal to better know their country, going abroad for graduate studies after the bachelor’s degree, and coming back afterward. As Djib talks to his mother and sister, he holds in his hand a visual reminder of his strong belief in Pan-Africanism, a copy of Nations Nègres et Cultures. Nations Nègres et Cultures was written by the influential Senegalese historian, anthropologist, and politician Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986), who strongly believed in African federalism. Djib’s revitalization of native pride stands in stark contrast to his father’s internalized oppression. This is a powerful demonstration of the consciousness-raising that Sembène strove to encourage, in particular among young university-educated Senegalese. In both Guelwaar and Moolaade, Sembène integrated stories of immigrants who return home after several years abroad. In the first scenes of Guelwaar, Barthelemy, who has just returned from France to his hometown in Senegal, behaves like a pretentious and arrogant renegade. He

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is openly dismayed with the Senegalese administrative and law enforcement officials he encounters and goes so far as to deny his Senegalese nationality and, by extension, his Senegalese identity. Diouana’s dreams of visiting places such as Cannes, Monte Carlo, and Nice are never realized because her employers never enable her to leave Hermit Road. This road is a dead end where the two irreconcilable sides of herself, her fantasy world and the real one, clash. Diouana commits suicide in part because of the guilt she feels about not being able to send money back home—money, viewers learn, that her mother fully expected as stated in the letter Diouana’s employer reads to her. Although Diouana denies the authenticity of the letter, such expectations represent the kind of social pressures many Africans living abroad face every day. The letter allegedly sent by Diouana’s mother states the following: I’ve had no news since you left…My health is getting worse every day. Why do you leave me penniless? I have nothing to live on while you squander your wages…You mustn’t think only of yourself. You’ve sent nothing since you left and yet you’ve got your wages. What do you do with them? Think of your mother who has to pay even for water and who is so poor. Social solidarity is a widely shared African value. Senegalese people, in particular, share burdens and help one another through difficult times. This becomes a challenge for those who emigrate because people from their home communities in Senegal assume that the mere fact of entering Europe or America has made them economically successful. Therefore, émigrés are expected to support their families back home by sending them remittances. Such expectations are a source of enormous social pressure, especially for individuals who do not earn enough to cover even their own expenses. In La Noire de…, Diouana states many times that she has gone to France to visit and take care of her employers’ children. Yet she dreams about making her friends back in Senegal jealous of her material achievement when she gets paid:

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After the rice maybe they will show me the city. Maybe we’ll go to Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo. We’ll look at all the pretty stores. And when the mistress pays me, I’ll buy pretty dresses, shoes, silk undies and pretty wigs and I’ll have my picture taken on the beach and then I’ll send the picture back to Dakar and they’ll die of jealousy. By wanting to create an impression of material success around her and to take a picture to send home, Diouana makes a strong statement about her preoccupations as a migrant worker, preoccupations that are not unique to her. In fact, although she denies that her mother wrote the letter reminding her of her responsibilities, Diouana’s own personal monologue reveals that she feels pressure to prove that she is a successful migrant. As she explains, “Back in Dakar they must be thinking: Diouana is happy in France. She has a good life!” when in reality, she is suffering tremendously. To save face, Diouana feels the need to feed this illusion. In La Noire de…, Sembène draws from a migration folk story of the Sereer people to build a compelling case concerning global inequalities. The name Diouana is borrowed from a famous Sereer folk song dedicated to the memory of Diouana Sarr, also a maid, who allegedly came to Dakar from a remote village to work for a middle-class family. The song’s narrator, who has been sexually abused by her employer, becomes pregnant and commits suicide in disgrace because the employer refuses to accept responsibility for her pregnancy. Before taking her life, she relates her story in the form of a song, now renowned among the Sereer people. Thus, the story of La Noire de…’s main character parallels that of Diouana Sarr and points to Sembène’s expressed interest in digging into the Senegalese culture for the substance of his films. Sembène drew here a clear parallel between the fate of Diouana and that of all similarly disenfranchised people, who, out of necessity, long to move abroad and conquer the world but instead end up being conquered by the injustices of the world.

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In an extradiegetic performance by Khady Diouf, the song is performed at the end of La Noire de… as a straightforward rendition with almost no alteration; its position at the end of the film occurs for a reason.11 It is sung after Diouana has committed suicide and while the Frenchman for whom she had worked walks down a bridge into Diouana’s neighborhood to return her belongings to her parents. Khady Diouf’s thrilling and penetrating voice overshadows the whole episode as she transmits the message of the dead and fills the last moment of the film with her tearful and evocative voice. Diouana Sarr is thus reenacted and fused into Sembène’s Diouana, who symbolizes the appalling and somber destiny of the disenfranchised. The failure to respond adequately to the expectations of people back home is also at the heart of the narrative in Sembène’s Manda bi. This film centers on a money order sent by the protagonist’s nephew, Abdou, a street cleaner in Paris, to his uncle in Dakar. In a letter that is at once a justification for his emigration to France and a denunciation of the lethargic leadership of his country, Abdou writes to his uncle, I came to find a job, earn some money, and learn a trade. I left Dakar because there are no jobs. I cannot remain day in and day out all my life without a job waiting for leftovers or handouts from others. At my age, I need to get married and start a family… Here’s a money order of 25,000CFA.12 Keep 20,000 for me, give my mother 3000 and keep 2000 for yourself because I know you don’t have a job. In the same way that Abdou is trapped between his life in Paris and the responsibilities of family, Diouana is caught between the tough reality of her daily life and the fantasy images that fed her dreams about France. The scene in which Diouana feels she has been deceived and is trapped between the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom is repeated several times and emphasizes her feeling of imprisonment. In this film, the frequent references to cleaning, cooking, and washing dishes serve to establish Diouana’s subjugation and to highlight

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why Diouana cannot cope. By constantly pointing to Diouana’s internal conflict and repressed emotions, Sembène built the tension leading up to the final tragedy. Halfway into La Noire de…, two scenes in particular demonstrate Diouana’s lack of sophistication regarding both the political history that binds Senegal to France and life in France. In the first scene, to celebrate her imminent departure for France, Diouana callously walks on top of a sacred monument, a memorial for fallen victims of World War I and World War II. When Diouana and her boyfriend sit by the monument’s wall, a subjective shot shows Diouana contemplating the tall buildings around her. Diouana says to her boyfriend, “Do you think France is prettier?” Boyfriend: How do I know? I’ve never been there. Diouana: My mistress asked if I wanted to go with her. Boyfriend: What for? Diouana: For the children. As she waits for a reaction that is not coming, she gets up, turns around, looks at her boyfriend, and walks away, saying to herself, “He’s angry. He is going to say: ‘It’s domestic slavery.’ My mom has agreed, I’m going to France.” She draws this conclusion while removing her highheeled shoes. She then starts jumping up the memorial stairs on one leg, repeating aloud, “To France! To France! To France!” Utterly unaware of her surroundings and focused solely on her journey abroad, she jumps all the way up the memorial wall. When her boyfriend realizes what she is doing, a point-of-view shot of his perspective shows Senegalese governmental officials ceremoniously depositing a bouquet of flowers for the dead by the wall. Viewers understand then that Diouana is walking on the war memorial.

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In the next scene, Diouana’s boyfriend screams at her that it is sacrilegious to be hopping on the memorial and that she should come down. To the informed viewer, her act is a defilement. But perhaps more significant is the paradox of Diouana wanting so badly to live in France, among the French, for whom the dead Africans commemorated by the memorial fought in two world wars. The Senegalese for whom the memorial was erected gave their lives for France and in return, in the aftermath of those foreign wars in which they had no interest, were neglected, exploited, and even killed by the French, as in the case of Camp de Thiaroye. Perhaps Sembène is showing viewers through the story of Diouana how ignorance, in this instance Diouana’s ignorance of the past, can have tragic consequences. The second significant moment of visual contrast is when Diouana and her boyfriend are lying down on their backs in what appears to be the boyfriend’s bed, flipping through the pages of Mon Cheri. This scene suggests that Diouana’s excitement is fanned by the images she sees in the media, images that intuitively shape how she anticipates she will live in France. As Diouana and her boyfriend look together at pictures of scantily clad white models with long hair, Diouana is reminded of her upcoming trip and makes a point of mentioning that fact once again to her boyfriend. Her boyfriend looks at her with some dismay and asks, “What kind of life do you think you will have there?” Diouana responds that she will visit. The boyfriend, visibly upset, sits up, stares at her, gets out of bed, and then walks away from her. This scene lends itself to two possible interpretations. The first is that the boyfriend, as Diouana’s lover, is upset that she is leaving him to go to France. The second explanation is that the boyfriend is viscerally disturbed by her naïveté about racism and her prospects of living the kind of life she envisions in France. This latter explanation is supported by other images in the scene. When Diouana’s boyfriend sulks and moves away from her, he goes to a corner of the room where a flag of the Congolese National Movement, Patrice Lumumba’s political party, is prominently displayed.

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On the flag are the image of Lumumba (1925–1961), iconic figure of Congolese nationalism; the year 1960; and the word Uhuru (which means “freedom”). Lumumba was a Congolese national hero and emblematic figure of its independence from Belgium, and 1960 was the year during which most African countries became independent. Lumumba, the expectations of independence, the euphoria of 1960, and the Uhuru were all short-lived, leaving behind a profound sense of betrayal and disillusionment that film director Raoul Peck captures very well in Lumumba. Sembène might have been suggesting that Diouana’s penchant for France is a betrayal of the values of independence and dignity that nationalists such as Lumumba fought for, like the crushed hopes of the sixties, her own dreams will be short-lived. In his treatment of migration, Sembène consistently emphasized the importance of going away, but he also stressed the need to return home. For example, even in La Noire de…, though Diouana does not return home alive, Sembène suggests that her spirit is returned in the symbol of the mask. Although Abdou of Manda bi might be sorely disappointed when he does finally return, he is clearly focused on his eventual return. In Faat Kiné, Djib convinces angry Aby to pursue her undergraduate studies in Senegal so that they can go abroad together to undertake their graduate studies and then return home to Senegal. In Guelwaar, after denying his Senegalese identity throughout most of the film, Barthelemy proudly declares that he is in fact Senegalese. In Moolaade, the chief’s son, Ibrahima, returns home to start a family. He comes from France with a lot of luggage—a visible indication of his success. Viewers learn that Ibrahima, while in France, has provided funding for a community well and supported the village economically during difficult times. All these efforts demonstrate that he cares for those he left at home. Although Ibrahima’s spectacular return may appear overly dramatic, it confirms Sembène’s overall positive outlook on migration. However, Moolaade was released in 2004, when waves of African youths were being chartered out of Europe; scores of them

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drowned while trying to cross the Atlantic in makeshift boats, and others perished in the Sahara desert en route to Maghreb. With Moolaade, Sembène missed an opportunity to inform viewers of the dangers of illegal migration. Instead of helping debunk some of the myths of migration, he instead provided incentive for the young people to migrate by showing Ibrahima coming home with a truckload of valuable goods and generously distributing banknotes among his family and friends. Another even more disturbing scene about migration takes place in Mercenaire’s stall. Konaté, a farmer, and his son come to the stall, and Konaté buys his son a pair of shoes. As they leave the stall, Ibrahima arrives. Konaté greets Ibrahima and asks his son to greet him, too. Konaté introduces Ibrahima as “our chief’s son who comes from France” and proceeds to tell his son that “you’ll work hard and go there. That’s where money is printed.” Such statements are not only wrong, but they also reinforce long-established myths that one can accumulate wealth only by going to Europe.

Antidependence This section focuses primarily on how the local is tied to the global, how individual finances are affected by the world economy, and how global capitalism competes with and undermines local traditional financial schemes. Although most of Sembène’s films broach these themes, his penultimate film, Faat Kiné, brings them into sharpest relief. In Faat Kiné, Alpha, the financially troubled gas station manager, desperately tries to persuade his colleagues to loan him money. He first approaches Faat Kiné. After she refuses to lend him money, he turns to another colleague, Mr. Thiam, the local CEO of the French petroleum conglomerate Total. Mr. Thiam also refuses to lend Alpha money. Angered by Mr. Thiam’s unsympathetic response, Alpha scolds him: “You are the embryo of free market neocolonialism.” By this, Alpha is suggesting that Mr. Thiam represents the corporate world in a neoliberal

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economy in which profit motives take precedence over the interests of individuals. One of the chief characteristics of this free market neocolonialism is its promotion of the free market and a corollary undermining of social welfare. In this case, Alpha seems to represent the common people who are denied social welfare. The values Mr. Thiam promotes stand in stark contrast to traditional African values that encourage compassion and social solidarity. Alpha’s begging to borrow money to resolve his financial crisis is an illustration of how one might rely on, or take advantage of, such traditional values. During his argument with Faat Kiné, viewers learn that Alpha owes money to everyone, including Faat Kiné. But even though he never pays his debts, he always comes back asking to borrow more. Although Alpha’s extremely large family—he has four wives—may be the reason for his financial troubles, Mr. Thiam has no patience for Alpha and people like him who cannot take care of themselves. Whereas Alpha has no qualms relying on others for support, Mr. Thiam stands for individualism and self-reliance. The neoliberal values that promote competition and each person for himself or herself are echoed as well by Bop, also in Faat Kiné, when he offers Djib unsolicited advice about his career options: “Listen, be ambitious, aim high! Do you know what it means to be ambitious? So, every man for himself.” Bop’s comments make us wonder whether traditional values of mutual help and community support are becoming obsolete. Sembène’s critique of neoliberalism is clear, yet he leaves us guessing as to whether he believes that the new free market values should replace traditional values and financial systems. Although the new values seem to work well for Faat Kiné, who earns her own income and is able to support her family without having to depend on loans or assistance from others, she also relies on traditional mechanisms for saving money. For example, Faat Kiné inquires at a bank about a loan, perhaps to help her daughter realize her dream of attending university in Canada. When she learns that the short-term interest rate is

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19%, she is flabbergasted and says to the bank manager, “Your rapacious claws will not be hanging over my head. I will make do with my tontine.” Tontines are arrangements for setting aside savings and obtaining credit that most Senegalese households use. Tontines, called natt, tegg, piye, boukari, and sani diam ormbotaay in Senegal, are available in most residential neighborhoods, markets, and workplaces in both rural and urban areas. Tontines are often classified by the generic appellation “rotating savings and credit associations” or “accumulating savings and credit associations.” But Abdoulaye Kane prefers to call them “popular socio-financial arrangements” to reflect the wide diversity of mutual aid efforts. Kane defined tontines as [a]ssociations with members who agree to pool their resources, such as money, goods, or labor, making regular or occasional contributions to a fund that is given, in whole or in part to each contribution turn. The order of allocation may be determined by chance (drawing of lots or organization of a family ceremony), by auction or by general agreement on the relative urgency of the different members’ need.13 Also according to Kane, Tontine members can also count on group solidarity to help in difficult times. Social networks in mutual neighborhood tontines provide a social safety net, and it is not uncommon for members to fund one of their counterparts who is facing particular problems. Mutual tontine members also demonstrate their support on various social occasions.14 The most striking aspect of the bank scene in Faat Kiné is Faat Kiné’s use of the image of rapacious claws hanging over her head. This image is a microcosmic representation that alludes to the fact that African states became beholden to Western financial institutions during the latter decades of the twentieth century and remain so today. Decades of excessive debt repayments to international financial institutions have under-

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mined the capacity of many African states to fund vitally needed social services such as education and health care. Like most of his intellectual compatriots at the time, Sembène clearly understood that the foreignimposed austerity measures, known as structural adjustment programs, were crippling average Senegalese people.15 A declining social solidarity becomes visible in Faat Kiné in a distressing scene involving an elderly female beggar and a group of colleagues from Total. When the beggar comes up to the group, standing in front of the Total headquarters in downtown Dakar, she politely asks for alms. Not one person in the obviously well-to-do group responds positively to her request. Instead, Mr. Thiam, the senior member of the group, dismisses her by saying, “Soxna si, bayil ñu ko ba elëk” (Forgive us for not giving to you until tomorrow). While his response to the beggar is a common way for people in Senegal to decline giving alms, in the context of this scene Mr. Thiam’s response comes out as a lack of compassion and an indifference to the plight of the poor. The elderly woman responds with venom, cursing Faat Kiné and her colleagues with, “May you all turn to begging some day.” Sembène’s aim here is not clear. Is he discouraging the act of begging by showing a mean streak in this particular beggar, who wishes ill to the people who do not support her? Or is he saying that even the very long-held and culturally accepted tradition of asking for alms has no place in a neoliberal economy? Though one can only speculate as to Sembène’s intentions, the one thing that remains unquestionably clear is that he had little tolerance for dependence at any level, even at the state level, which is the subject of Guelwaar. Guelwaar, which translates as “noble man” in Sereer and Wolof, is about a people’s loss of pride when their incapable leaders resort to foreign aid and food donations to feed them. In the film, Pierre Henry Thioune, nicknamed Guelwaar, is chosen by his peers to represent his people at a large public gathering organized to thank foreign donors for aid, including food aid that they are bringing to the area. Guelwaar

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is not a politician, nor is he connected in any way to the foreigners bringing the aid. He is a common citizen, but a common citizen who sees with clarity the loss of pride and dignity his people are experiencing as they become increasingly dependent on foreigners to fulfill their most basic human needs. Guelwaar’s very appearance is a statement of selfsufficiency and self-determination: he wears a locally woven traditional outfit and carries a handbag made locally from indigenous materials. In front of his own people, several political leaders, and the foreign aid donors, Guelwaar delivers a scathing rebuke of dependence on foreign aid. The poignancy of his speech is reinforced in the calculated connection between his body language and his articulation of the speech. There are no random gestures in his speech, only physical motions meant to connect in a meaningful way to his verbal utterances. When approaching the podium to deliver his speech, Guelwaar shows total indifference to the cheers around him. He ignores the excitement of the crowd as he walks to the microphone, openly distancing himself from the enthusiasm of the audience he is about to chastise. Typically, a speaker or a politician in such a circumstance would take advantage of the general euphoria to look around, smile at the crowd, and wave in each direction. Here, Guelwaar stands seemingly in defiance of the audience because he has a mission to expose an ugly truth. That mission sets him apart and distinguishes him from the common and often deceptive politician. Because Guelwaar is not a politician or government representative, he does not deliver a politician’s speech; instead, he thoughtfully makes sense of something that everyone has come to take for granted and speaks out against it. Through the actor, the audience gets a sense of Sembène’s views concerning aid dependency. The power of the speech, its prosody and poetics along with the substance of its dramatic delivery, instills fear among the political authorities. Halfway into the speech, the local political leader and another man are shown plotting to “silence” Guelwaar forever.

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The speech is a clear condemnation of the political class. While delivering it, Guelwaar angrily points his finger toward the local political dignitaries. Turning his palm upward as if begging, which puts emphasis on his claim, Guelwaar accuses the local authorities of turning Senegal into a country of beggars. His speech exposes the psychological wounds and material disadvantages of state dependence on foreign aid. It reveals the bitter truth of political incompetence. In the Senegalese culture, pointing one’s finger directly at someone can also be interpreted as an insult, a threat, or even a curse.16 By pointing his index finger toward the dignitaries sitting on the podium, Guelwaar dramatically curses the representatives of the Senegalese neocolonial regime. They in turn put a curse on Guelwaar’s life, but not before his message takes root and germinates in the minds of the youth. Etienne, the young boy who accompanies Guelwaar to the police station when he first appears on the screen, is present at the gathering at which Guelwaar speaks. He listens intently to the speech, personifying a linkage between the present and the future. Etienne represents the Senegalese youth whose future dignity is at stake. The fact that Sembène positions Etienne right next to the podium where the officials at the gathering are seated suggests that Etienne may himself someday assume such a position of authority. Etienne soaks up Guelwaar’s impassioned discourse, which fills him with a new sense of self-determination and the courage to refuse the humiliating handouts and to reject the undignified ways of his fathers and uncles. In the last scene of the film, viewers see Etienne and his peers engage in activities that embody Guelwaar’s message of resistance to foreign aid. While walking home from the Muslim cemetery, they stop a truck headed for a nearby village that is filled with dozens of large sacks of donated grains. They jump onto the truck, pull down several sacks, and begin slashing them and spreading the grain over the ground. When the priest reprimands them, saying that food is sacred and the act of wasting

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grain a sacrilegious act, Etienne retorts, “We cannot live and grow from begging!” The origins of African countries’ dependence on foreign aid are complex and often poorly understood. Serious periodic droughts beginning in the 1960s all but destroyed agriculture in many areas of the Sahel and instigated the migration of young adults from villages to cities and then abroad. This migration depleted the agricultural labor force in rural areas throughout the region. But the cycle of dependence had begun much earlier, during the colonial era when colonial regimes used guns and head taxes to force African peasant farmers to turn from growing subsistence grains to growing cash crops such as peanuts and cotton. The proceeds they earned from the sale of these cash crops were then used to finance colonial operations. The imposed cash-crop economy continued after independence and severely undermined subsistence agriculture. Thus Senegal’s dependence on foreign aid has foreign origins. Sembène believed that with better leadership, Senegal could become more food self-sufficient and therefore break the cycle of being beholden to foreign banks and donors, whose rapacious claws continue to hang over Senegal’s head.17

Trade and the Internalization of Oppression As noted throughout this volume, Sembène endeavored to educate his audiences and challenged them to recognize and reflect on their preconceived notions. This effort was not limited to philosophical quandaries or political ideas. Sembène also pushed audiences to consider and be more discerning about the choices they made in their daily lives, including the food they chose to consume and the goods they chose to purchase. He was particularly attentive to this in his last film, Moolaade. Shot in an unnamed and isolated village, Moolaade begins with the entrance of Mercenaire, an itinerant merchant who sells cheap, lowquality products such as plastic containers, cups, buckets, clothes, razors,

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and stale bread he purchased from the city. When Mercenaire first enters the scene at the beginning of the film, he is pedaling his bicycle and cart, which is filled to the brim with cheap foreign goods. He is accompanied by a dozen or so children excitedly helping him push his cart through the sand on the way to the village, where Mercenaire hopes to sell the products at ridiculously elevated prices to the uninformed village customers. Sembène uses Mercenaire to illustrate how capitalists can prey on uneducated people, by deceiving them and making them believe that products are “state of the art” or “the latest fashion.” For example, when young Amsatou comes to buy bread and batteries, Mercenaire tells her that the t-shirt she seems to like is the very latest fashion, and to another woman wanting to buy a razor, he claims that his razors are “state of the art.” Customers likely believe his chicanery because they have no way of cross-checking his claims and he is their only connection to the urban center. In this scene, Sembène seemed to be drawing viewers’ attention to the inculcation of consumerism through aggressive marketing practices and the influential and transformative nature of global capitalism. For instance, when Amsatou learns that she is to welcome the chief’s son, Ibrahima, her husband to be, she becomes resolute in her “need” to stock up on Mercenaire’s junk products in preparation for the event. Collé, her mother, tries in vain to dissuade her, explaining to her daughter that she has no money to purchase these goods. Seeing her mother’s lack of support, Amsatou turns to her aunt, Diatou, who yields to her desires. Thus, although moneyless, Diatou visits Mercenaire’s stall with Amsatou and makes all her purchases on credit with a hope that Ibrahima will pay the merchant when he arrives. Sembène’s point here is to show how Mercenaire’s goods and his tactics create new consumption patterns, which compete with and eventually displace locally produced goods. Even more disturbing is how tastes and nutritional patterns can change. In Moolaade, people purchase stale French bread instead of their

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far healthier traditional foods. The bread that Mercenaire sells is hard and extremely expensive, and he uses a plethora of excuses to justify why it is more costly than the freshly baked bread in the city. He tells Ibrahima, for example, that “transportation and conservation fees, globalization and free market” are to be blamed for the elevated prices. Mercenaire also claims that his old stale bread is more affordable than a kilo of rice or millet, traditional staples in the village. Although it may sound incongruous that a loaf of stale bread made with imported wheat would be cheaper than a kilo of locally grown rice or millet, it makes some sense in light of the foreign-imposed structural adjustments program. Under structural adjustments programs (SAPs), indebted African countries were systematically discouraged from subsidizing agriculture, which led many farmers to decrease their production. While making this demand on poorer countries, many developed countries, including France and the United States, continued to subsidize their own farmers, who could then export and sell to poorer countries their surplus grains far cheaper than local farmers could produce them. This was the case with Senegalese rice, for example. Kerssen, in her analysis of the plight of West African farmers, wrote, In West Africa, the slashing of import tariffs led to a flood of cheap rice from Southeast Asia, undermining producers of African rice and further shifting consumption patterns away from traditional foods, especially in urban areas. Structural Adjustment policies pushed by the World Bank and IMF heavily promoted cash crops for export at the expense of subsistence food production. (4) Because it was cheaper to buy imported grains, local subsistence farming declined and people turned to cash-crop production. This ultimately led to a preference for foreign foods over everything locally produced. Thus, although more nutritious, local foods are depreciated and considered unsophisticated. A vicious cycle of dependence has been created, in which the local farmers, who must sell their produce to feed themselves

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year-round, cannot produce enough to meet their needs. As a result, they are forced to seek assistance, nowadays more so from emigrant relatives than from government or international food aid. This explains the situation in Moolaade, in which people purchase the stale, vacuous, and overpriced bread with no nutritional value that, in the name of the free market, Mercenaire buys for a cheap 70 francs per loaf and sells for 150 francs a loaf.

Promoting Pan-Africanism Sembène was always attentive to the intellectual and political economic trends of his time. At the beginning of his filmmaking career, he focused attention on dependency theory and notions of core and peripheral states —Senegal being on the periphery with France at the center. Later in his career, he turned his focus to the problems associated with neoliberalism and market-driven globalization, again seeing Senegal at the margins of the global economy. Toward the end of his career, he again shifted his perspective, focusing more on Africa and the potential of PanAfricanism. This final shift in focus is evident less in his films themselves than in the process he followed in making them. For his final three films, Sembène broke from his long-held practice of editing his films in France and instead began to collaborate with the Complexe du Centre Cinématographique de Rabat in Morocco. In his later films, he also employed actors from several other African countries; for example, for Camp de Thiaroye, Sembène hired actors who hailed from all over French West Africa. In his last film, Moolaade, Sembène departed from all his previous films by shooting the film entirely outside of his home country, somewhere in Burkina Faso. For this film, Sembène engaged actors and technicians from many countries of the sub-Saharan region, including Senegal, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso. Affirming Sembène’s Pan-Africanist inclination was his collaborator, Fatou Kandé, a fellow Senegalese filmmaker who worked as the costume designer for Faat Kiné. Kandé explained that Sembène made sure to employ promising actors,

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actresses, or technicians from different African countries in an effort to give them an opportunity for professional development.18 But even in the films themselves are suggestions of Sembène’s African pride and burgeoning Pan-Africanist sentiments. In La Noire de…, Xala, and Faat Kiné, Sembène decorated the walls of his characters’ homes with portraits of the most iconic figures of Africa’s independence and Pan-Africanism: Samory Touré (Guinea), Amilcar Carbral (Guinea Bissau), Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Thomas Sankara (Burkina Faso), Cheikh Anta Diop (Senegal), and Nelson Mandela (South Africa).

Conclusion In their production and in the articulation of their narratives, the films of Ousmane Sembène critique and educate about past, present, and future global trends. In his view, Film simply serves us as a canvas on which to reflect together with each other. What is important is that the cinema becomes eye, mirror and awareness. The film-maker is the one who looks at and observes his people, to excerpt actions and situations which he chews over before giving them back to his people.19 In slightly over forty years of filmmaking––with a relentless determination to make educational films grounded in the local springs of actual life (past and present)––Sembène’s inspiring commitment to playing an active role in the combat for national liberation was commendable. Throughout his career and through his films, Sembène was a strong voice for his people, especially for those who were the least heard in society and politics. In his films, he re-interpreted aspects of African history, reproached bourgeois post-colonial leaders, criticized certain traditional practices, advocated for African women’s emancipation, and encouraged his fellow Africans to discriminately embrace globalization. Though he saw himself as an activist artist, he was proud of having

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remained very much a part of the people he filmed. He maintained with his literary and filmic subjects the same vital contact as that between traditional storytellers and their audiences. He took it upon himself to scrutinize his society and extract from it the substance of his films, which he manipulated as he saw fit and turned through his films like mirror images for his audience to look upon themselves. When he became disillusioned with the limited audience and therefore impact of his writings, filmmaking was Sembène’s ultimate recourse in his resolution to effectuate positive social change. But, was he in the end successful in achieving what he intended to accomplish coming to filmmaking? Were his films ultimately more successful in reaching their goals than were his writings? In other words, did his films actually reach and educate their target audiences? What was or remains, if anything, the sociopolitical impact of his films? These questions, which are beyond the scope of this book, remain to be investigated. Sembène’s artistic œuvre and his life are indivisible. His films articulated his beliefs, opinions, frustrations, and hopes. This observation was made by journalist Siradiou Diallo in an interview he had with Sembène: Cette volonté implacable de faire tomber le masque derrière lequel se dissimule le néo-colonialisme, ne s’exprime pas que dans ses œuvres. Il suffit de l’écouter et l’on sait alors que ses idées et sa vie ne font qu’un. (This inflexible will to drop the neo-colonial mask is not only expressed through his works. Just listen to him and you know that his ideas and his life are one and the same.) 20 In other words, Sembène’s films were but a channel through which he expressed his innermost thoughts and feelings. When one is familiar with the man and his films, it is not difficult to trace his ideas to specific lines actors and actresses deliver in his films. One of Sembène’s longtime collaborators goes so far as to claim that every one of his films was in fact “un règlement de comptes” [a settling of scores]. After all, art is creation

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and as such, it necessarily bears the marks of its creator. That mark may or may not be visible, but it is always there. How Sembène was able to interlace his personal experiences in his films without turning them into self-portraits is where his artistic talents lied. Sembène’s ability to weave together unrelated stories into a meaningful narrative and his ability to turn mundane, day-to-day happenings into extraordinary film scenarios, made him both admired and disdained by his target audience. His critical and provocative cinema leaned more toward depicting aspects of Senegalese culture that were generally concealed. Sembène explicitly expressed his adherence to this approach when he said that, as filmmakers, Nous devons avoir le souci de l’authenticité, ne pas avoir peur de montrer ce qui est laid, refuser de flatter les gens. Notre devoir consiste à montrer comment nous sommes, en disant que nous pouvons modifier ceci ou cela. (We must represent ourselves authentically, avoid flattering people and not dread showing what is ugly about us. We have an obligation to show how we are and say that we can change this or that.) 21 What mattered the most to Sembène was that his films spark discussion among audiences, and their provocative style and open-ended narratives do just that. They often become subjects for debate among those who have the opportunity to watch them. Whether we liked him or not, and whether we like his sometimes disturbingly intrusive films or not, we cannot fail to acknowledge Sembène’s courage and persistence in pressing hard to open discussion on issues of significance to the liberation of the continent and its people. His extraordinary legacy lives on to inspire and motivate current and future generations of African artists. Following are the summaries of all the films discussed in this volume. Although these are not the only films made by Sembène, they are the ones commercially distributed and readily available to the public. The

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film summaries are listed in chronological order and each one concludes with a brief description of the film’s main characters.

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Endnotes 1. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (1998; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 1. 2. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2007), 101. 3. Anne-Cécile Robert, “Mondialisation: le miroir africain,” in “Afrique: mondialisée mais pas dupe,” special issue, Africultures 66 (January– March 2006): (33). 4. Robert, “Mondialisation,” 31. 5. Fírinne Ní Chréacháin, “If I Were a Woman, I’d Never Marry an African,” in Busch and Annas, Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, 138. 6. Karin Barber. “Orality, the media and new popular cultures in Africa.” In Media and Identity in Africa. edited by Kimani Njogu and John Middleton. 7. Eko Lyombe, “Africa: Life in the Margins of Globalization: Media Liberalization, Commercialization and Hegemony in Africa,” in The Media Globe: Trends and International Mass Media, ed. Lee Artz and Yahya R. Kamalimpour (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 10. 8. Working as a domestic (maid, cook, child care worker) was one of the very few jobs available to uneducated women. 9. F. Fanon, Peau noire masques blancs, 25. 10. F. Fanon, Peau noire masques blancs, 34. 11. Mamadou Diouf and Ami Ndione, a Sereer couple, interview with author, Thiès, Senegal, March 18, 2004. 12. 25,000CFA was the equivalent in 1968 of about sixty-two days of fulltime employment at the minimum wage. But in reality, it far exceeds what most poor families in those days had in a year. Today, 25,000CFA is worth approximately $50. 13. Abdoulaye Kane, “Financial Arrangements Across Borders: Women’s Predominant Participation in Popular Finance, from Thilogne and Dakar to Paris: A Senegalese Case Study,” in Women and Credit: Researching the Past, Refiguring the Future, ed. Beverly Lemire, Ruth Pearson, and Gail Campbell (New York: Oxford, 2001), 295. 14. Ibid., 311. 15. For a discussion of globalization and the general history of structural adjustment programs (SAP), see John Gershman and Alec Irwin,

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

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“Getting a Grip on the Global Economy,” in Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor, ed. Jim Yong Kim, Joyce V. Millen, Alec Irwin, and John Gershman (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000), 11–43. For a detailed discussion of Africa-specific economic challenges, SAP, health, agriculture, and hunger, please see Brooke G. Schoepf, Claude Schoepf, and Joyce V. Millen, “Theoretical Therapies, Remote Remedies: SAPs and the Political Ecology of Poverty and Health in Africa,” in Kim et al., Dying for Growth, 91–126. In daily life, when people realize that you are pointing at them, they will point back at you or simply whisper “na la top” (may it follow you), that is, may your curse return on you. For a complete historical analysis of Africa’s food crisis, see Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity by Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins, and Cary Fowler (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977). Fatou Kandé, interview with author, Dakar, August 3, 2011. Ghali, Nourredine. “Interview with Ousmane Sembène.” In Film and Politics in the Third World, edited by John Downing. p41-50. New York: Praeger, 1986. Sembène, interview with Diallo, Jeune Afrique Jan. 1973, 45. Ibid., 46.

Appendix A Borom Sarret (1963) This short, yet poignant, eighteen-minute black-and-white film was Sembène’s first. In Wolof, Borom Sarret translates as “the owner of a cart.” The film recounts a day in the life of one particular Borom Sarret. He is a poor but also ordinary Senegalese man who lives in the outskirts of Dakar, Senegal’s capital city. Borom Sarret earns his living by driving people and goods around in his horse-drawn cart. The film opens with Borom Sarret saying his prayers before heading off to work. On his way, he picks up his regular customers, Fatou and Mamadou, and as usual, they do not pay him for the ride. Fatou’s business is not doing well and Borom Sarret keeps hoping that she will pay him…someday. Mamadou has been out of work for six months and also does not have money to pay for his ride. Later that day, Borom Sarret carries bricks for a patron and gets paid for his service. He then gives a husband and wife a ride to the maternity hospital. Thereafter, the film shows Borom Sarret stopped in downtown Dakar, and while waiting to be hired by new customers, he takes out his lunch, the piece of kola nut that his wife, Fatou, had given him earlier that morning. At this point a griot approaches him, singing of Borom Sarret’s noble origins and brave ancestors. Visibly touched by the praises, Borom Sarret gives the griot all the money he had earned thus far in the day. Next, Borom Sarret is seen driving a dead baby to the cemetery with the baby’s father following behind. His last charge for the day poses a risk that he is now willing to take because he is desperate to earn cash needed for his family to eat. So, although it is against the law to bring carts into a particular area of Dakar, he takes the risk of moving a passenger and his luggage into this

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very area. The police catch him, give him a citation, and impound his cart. He returns home penniless, leaving his wife with the responsibility for feeding the family.

Characters: Husband: Borom Sarret (the cart driver). Fatou: Borom Sarret’s wife. Fatou: A woman who sells at the market. Borom Sarret gives her rides. (Fatou is a very common Senegalese name, often short for Fatoumata.) Mamadou: A jobless young man who rides frequently with Borom Sarret. The police officer: He seizes Borom Sarret’s cart and medal. The griot: Recipient of Borom Sarret’s generosity. Unnamed couple: Borom Sarret gives them a ride to the maternity hospital. Unnamed young man: Borom Sarret gives him a ride downtown and gets in trouble.

Appendix B Niaye (1964) The film begins with Ngoné War Thiandoum leaving her room and discreetly walking out of the village to avoid being seen. She is suffering deeply from the incestuous act of her husband, Guibril Guèye Diop, who is the village chief and the imam. Ngoné War and Guibril’s daughter is pregnant by Guibril, but he walks around in the village as though nothing inappropriate has happened. Ngoné War hopes that the village elders will take action, but they do not. Meanwhile, her son, Tanor, the potential heir to the throne, comes back from the military completely insane. With a young unmarried pregnant daughter, an insane son, and an entirely dishonorable husband, Ngoné War finds the shame impossible to bear. She takes her own life. Médoune, Guibril’s younger brother, who has his eyes on the throne, persuades the insane Tanor to murder Guibril. After Tanor kills his father, Médoune gets the throne, and Tanor is bound up and taken away. The daughter of Ngoné War and Guibril and her newborn child are banished from the village. The village griot sees everything and deplores the moral crises he witnesses in the village.

Characters: Guibril Guèye Diop: Village chief, imam, and Ngoné War Thiandoum’s husband. Ngoné War Thiandoum: Guibril Guèye Diop’s wife and mother of Tanor and of the girl victim of incest. Tanor: Son of Guibril Guèye Diop and Ngoné War Thiandoum.

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Médoune: Guibril Guèye Diop’s younger brother. Déthié: A griot and the film’s narrator. Gnagna Guissé: The only woman to whom Ngoné War speaks.

Appendix C La Noir de … (1966) Sembène’s first feature-length film, La Noire de…, is the story of a young Senegalese woman, Diouana, who travels to France to continue working for her French employers while they vacation on the French Riviera. In Senegal, Diouana had been the nanny for the family’s children. The film starts with Diouana getting off the boat in France. She is met by her male employer, who drives her to the family’s apartment. For much of the film, the children are away and so instead of engaging in her nanny duties, Diouana is forced to work as a housemaid, which she had not anticipated having to do. Diouana, who is uneducated and speaks almost no French, is mostly confined to her bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom of the small apartment. While preparing for her journey to France, Diouana had been dreaming of visiting places such as Nice, Caen, and Monte Carlo, but the only place she gets to know is the neighborhood grocery store. Her female employer makes her work long hours and constantly yells at her. Diouana feels betrayed and trapped. To escape, she commits suicide. At the end of the film, her male employer gathers her belongings and takes them back to her family in Senegal. The film ends with Diouana’s mother refusing to take the money the employer offers her as some form of unspoken compensation for the death of her daughter. In a dramatic last scene, Diouana’s younger brother covers his face with a mask that had belonged to Diouana and chases the French employer away.

Characters: Diouana: Young woman working for a French couple.

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French couple: Husband and wife, French citizens, who live and work in Dakar. They employ Diouana to take care of their children. They are known as Monsieur and Madame. In this volume they are referred to as Diouana’s male and female employer. Diouana’s father: Diouana’s father is played by Sembène himself. In the film, he is also a public letter writer and popular schoolteacher. Diouana’s mother: She appears twice. Diouana’s boyfriend: Diouana runs into him as she goes up and down the stairs in downtown Dakar looking for a job. Diouana’s younger brother: Appears most significantly in the final scene, when Diouana’s male employer returns Diouana’s belongings to her family.

Appendix D Manda bi (1968) Manda bi (The Money Order) is the story of Ibrahima Dieng, a jobless, unschooled elderly Senegalese man, who has two wives and several children. He lives with his family in a poor neighborhood in Dakar. Ibrahima has a nephew, Abdou, who lives and works as a street cleaner in France. Abdou sends his uncle, Ibrahima, a 25,000 cfa francs money order through the post office. Today this is roughly equivalent to $50, but in 1968, it was an enormous sum of money in Senegal. When the postman delivers the money order notification and accompanying letter, Ibrahima is not at home. His wives, after accepting the mail and confirming that it contains a money order for their husband, head to the local shop to gather groceries on credit. When Ibrahima returns home that day, he eats with great appetite the huge and delicious meal his wives have prepared and then takes a nap. After he wakes up, his wives give him the money order notification and letter. When Ibrahima then goes to the post office to cash the money order, he realizes that he does not have an identity card, which is necessary for such transactions. Ibrahima engages a public letter writer (played by Sembène) to read him the letter. The contents of the letter make clear that although the money order was sent to Ibrahima’s address, only a very small percentage of the money was intended for him. At this point, however, the entire neighborhood knows about the money order. The profiteering shopkeeper becomes friendlier and gives easier credit; the hungry neighbors, the needy imam, and Ibrahima’s desperately poor friends all flock to his house hoping to either borrow cash from him or get a few kilos of rice for their families. Meanwhile, in an attempt to secure an identity card so that he can cash the money

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order, Ibrahima goes back and forth in vain from one government office to the next. He goes to an unscrupulous photographer. In an attempt to help, a relative gives Ibrahima a 1,000 cfa check, which a swindler helps cash but demands one-third of for his services. Unable to cash the money order, Ibrahima is still pressed by his needy neighbors and also by his sister, who has come all the way from the village to demand her share. Desperate, he asks a different nephew, a businessman named Mbaye, for help. Mbaye, a member of the Senegalese elite, lives with his wife and son in a modern gaited house, and they speak only in French. Mbaye makes Ibrahima sign a power of attorney, cashes the money order, and then pockets the money himself, telling Ibrahima that the cash was stolen. The film ends with the protagonist vowing to turn to thieving and lying, only to hear the mailman declare that together they can bring about change.

Characters: Ibrahima Dieng: Protagonist. He is a poor elderly man who does not speak French and does not have an identity card. Maty: Ibrahima Dieng’s first wife. Aram: Ibrahima Dieng’s second wife. Abdou: Ibrahima Dieng’s nephew, who lives in France. He is the one who sends the money order. Astou: Abdou’s mother, who lives in the village. Postman: He walks around the neighborhood delivering mail. Mbaye: Ibrahima Dieng’s nephew. A businessman, he ends up cashing the money order.

Appendix E Emitaï (1971) Emitaï (Thunder God) tells the story of the forced conscription of young men from the Casamance (a region in southern Senegal) into the French military during World War II. At the time, France was under German occupation and the French government was pressured to respond to German demands for war efforts. Unable to meet the demands with their limited resources, France turned to its colonies to share the burden. Emitaï shows the ways the French “enlisted” the men they officially called “volunteers” from the Casamance region and also what they did to feed their military during the war. The film takes place in an authentic Diola village with actors and actresses speaking the Diola language. (Diola, sometimes spelled Jola or Joola, is not to be confused with Dioula or Jula, spoken in Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso.) The film begins with African soldiers dressed in French uniforms and under French command slinking around in bushes, hunting for and capturing able-bodied Diola men (farmers mostly) to force into French military service. In the first few minutes of the film, Kabebe, an elderly man of the village whose son is hiding from the army, is shown with his feet and legs tied, sitting under the scorching sun in the middle of the village under the watchful eyes of an armed soldier. Later, two women from the village paddle a canoe across a river into a swampy forest to find Kabebe’s son and to inform him that his father is being held hostage and humiliated by the French army. The young man leaves his hiding to return to the village to untie his father. In return for his father’s freedom, he joins the military. One year later, the French soldiers come back to demand the rice harvest of the same Diola people. This time, however,

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they are faced with the staunch resistance of the village women, who congregate at night to hide their rice. When the armed soldiers arrive in the village, they quickly overcome the local people, who have only bows and arrows to resist the intrusion. The soldiers then ransack the village looking for rice. After searching in vain and finding no rice, they bring the women together in the center of the village and surround them with armed guards. They tell the villagers that they will release the women only when they receive the rice. In the meantime, the village council of elderly men tries unsuccessfully to get the gods to tell them what to do by offering sacrifice after sacrifice. When the men of the village are prevented by the French from burying their deceased village chief, they go into the woods to bring back the rice that the women had hidden. As they head back to the village carrying the rice, the men hear the women singing the traditional war songs over the chief’s body. They are ashamed and try to back down, but it is too late. They are then faced with a shooting squad. The film ends with a black screen and gunshots in the dark.

Characters: Kabebe: A village patriarch. Djimeko: Spirit shrine priest who leads the village resistance and gets killed early in the film. Other men: The village council of elders. French and colonial soldiers: Among the soldiers is one played by Sembène. Women: All the women of the village. Children: Two young boys play as messengers.

Appendix F Xala (1974) Xala (The Curse) takes place on April 4, the anniversary of Senegal’s independence from France. The film begins with a symbolic transfer of power from the hands of the colonizing French to those of the local people. A group of eight Senegalese men dressed in traditional attire walk into the chamber of commerce and eject the French occupants along with their belongings. The next time the Senegalese men appear on the screen, they are dressed in suits and ties and are sitting around the very same desk where the French had been seated when they were last seen. Soon, two of the French men come back holding briefcases full of money, which they distribute to the Senegalese men. One of the Senegalese men, El Hadji, announces his third marriage and invites his colleagues to attend the wedding party. His new wife-tobe is a very young woman approximately the same age as El Hadji’s own daughter. On the night of the wedding, El Hadji finds himself unable to perform sexually. He cannot consummate the marriage because someone he had treated unjustly had cursed him. Considering all that he spends for the lavish wedding party, meeting the financial demands of his other wives and children, and in his frantic and expensive search for a cure to his impotence, El Hadji’s financial needs overwhelm him, and he becomes bankrupt. His second and third wives leave him, and it turns out that the only way to recover his sexual prowess again is to submit to the humiliating experience of being spat on by a horde of beggars.

Characters: Monsieur le President: President of the chamber of commerce.

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El Hadji Abdel Kader Bèye: Member of the chamber of commerce who marries a third wife. Adja: El Hadji’s first wife. Oumy: El Hadji’s second wife. Ngoné: El Hadji’s third wife. Badienne: The third wife’s aunt. Rama: El Hadji’s daughter with his first wife. She is a university student. Dupont Durand: European adviser to the president.

Appendix G Ceddo (1976) Ceddo (the word, loosely translated, means people who resist conversion to Islam) is the story of the establishment and spread of Islam in a traditional Senegalese kingdom. The film also represents other historical events, including slavery, the connection between slave traders and Catholic missionaries, and the roles Africans played in slavery. The film starts with the kidnapping of Dior, the king’s daughter, by the Ceddo in protest against the abuses and exactions of the imam, whose growing influence in the kingdom is causing profound social friction. The imam has many zealous followers, including members of the king’s immediate circle. Being a Muslim himself, the king also follows the instructions of the imam. The imam, with the complicity of his followers and of members of the king’s court, uses his influence to push for fundamental changes in the way the kingdom functions. For example, he changes the inheritance law from matrilineal to patrilineal so that nephews can no longer inherit from their uncles. In addition, he determines that the Ceddo can no longer have a voice and that they should either convert to Islam or be banned from the kingdom. With tensions brewing between the Ceddo and the weakened king, the imam and his followers plot to assassinate the king. After the king is killed, the imam then becomes the ruler. He sends soldiers to free Dior and bring her back. As soon as she comes back into the kingdom, Dior fatally shoots the imam.

Characters: The king: Demba War, the traditional authority.

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The king’s court: The trusted men of the king. The imam: Leader of Muslims. Imam’s followers: Members of the village who become part of the imam’s immediate circle. The Ceddo: Those who stick to the indigenous way of worshipping and refuse to become Muslims. Madior: Nephew of the king. He would have inherited the throne had the imam not changed the inheritance law. Jaraaf: The griot of the royal family and adviser to the king.

Appendix H Camp de Thiaroye (1988) Camp de Thiaroye was inspired by a true story, the French massacre of African soldiers who had just returned from fighting for the French during World War II. Upon their return to Africa after the war, the African soldiers, known as tirailleurs, were sheltered in a transit military camp in a neighborhood called Thiaroye, located in the outskirts of Dakar. While waiting to be discharged from service, the soldiers discover that the French government did not intend to pay them the severance pay they owed them for their services during the war. In addition, the tirailleurs are treated with utmost disrespect by the French military officers running the transit camp. The French military authorities do not feed the soldiers adequately and wonder among themselves what the tirailleurs would do with money…in their huts. When the tirailleurs realize what they are up against, they capture a high-ranking military authority and hold him hostage. Fearing the influence of such an act on other colonized areas for a country whose pride is already seriously damaged, the French bombard the camp, killing the overwhelming majority of the tirailleurs. The film ends with the few survivors from the massacre burying their friends, while ironically, at the port of Dakar, new tirailleurs embark in a navy ship headed to war as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The film Camp de Thiaroye is a tribute to the tirailleurs and at the same time a document to immortalize an event intentionally omitted from colonial historical records.

Characters: Master Sergeant Diatta: The most educated of the tirailleurs and a spokesperson among them.

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Capitaine Raymond: Commander of the returning tirailleurs’ regiment. Labrousse: Commander of the Thiaroye transit camp. Lieutenant Pierre: Resident manager of the Thiaroye camp.

Appendix I Guelwaar (1992) Guelwaar, which means the “noble one” in Wolof, is also loosely based upon a true story. The film is about the body of a dead man, Pierre Henry Thioune, who was a respected and outspoken Catholic man also known as Guelwaar. One learns as the film unfolds that Guelwaar may have been assassinated because political figures felt threatened by a hypercritical speech he delivered at a foreign aid distribution ceremony. Guelwaar’s body is taken to the morgue in Thiès, the nearby city. But when his family goes to pick up his body, they cannot find it. It turns out that a Muslim family had mistakenly retrieved the body and taken it to their village near Thiès, believing that it was one of their family members. The Muslim family buries the body in their village cemetery. After much searching and with the help of a police officer, Guelwaar’s family finally locates his body in the Muslim village, Keur Baye Ali. The assassination is only suggested; the movie focuses on the negotiations to retrieve Guelwaar’s body from the Muslim cemetery. This process reveals the depth of prejudice between Muslims and Christians despite the long history of peaceful coexistence that the two communities seem to enjoy. The Christian community, set on retrieving their body, besieges the Muslim cemetery. The Muslims are determined that the body is theirs and that it will not be unearthed. Ultimately, the imam’s reasonable attitude helps resolve the dispute. Guelwaar weaves together the story of the retrieval of Guelwaar’s body, the frightening tension between Muslims and Christians in Senegal, and a caustic political satire of independent Senegal’s leaders and their reliance on international food aid.

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Characters: Pierre Henry Thioune: Referred to as Guelwaar in the film; he is the deceased person whose body is buried in a Muslim cemetery. He is seen in the film only in flashbacks, delivering his speech, for example. Goor Mag: The patriarch of the Christian community and a friend of Guelwaar. Nogaye Marie: Guelwaar’s widow and mother of Barthelemy, Sophie, and Aloïse. Barthelemy: Guelwaar’s eldest son, who lives in France and comes back for his father’s funeral. Aloïse: Guelwaar’s youngest son; he is physically challenged and lives with his parents. Sophie: Guelwaar’s only daughter. She lives in Dakar and works as a prostitute to support her parents. Abbé Léon: Pastor and spiritual leader of the Catholic community. Biram: The spiritual leader of the Muslim community. Ismaïla: Biram’s disciple; he accompanies Biram everywhere. Baye Ali: Chief of Keur Baye Ali, the village where Guelwaar is mistakenly buried. Mor Ciss, Yamar Ciss, and Ndoffène Ciss: Brothers of the deceased Meysa Ciss. Meysa Ciss: The person whose body is confused with that of Guelwaar. Dibocor: Member of the Catholic community and friend of Guelwaar.

Appendix J Faat Kiné (2000) Faat Kiné is the story of a single Senegalese woman, approximately forty years old, who owns and runs a successful gas station in Dakar. Her two children, Aby and Djib, pass the high school diploma known as baccalaureate (“bac”), and she is very happy to throw a big party for them. Faat Kiné’s children have different fathers, both of whom abandoned Faat Kiné when she became pregnant. Aby’s father, Mr. Gaye, was a teacher at Faat Kiné’s high school. When Faat Kiné became pregnant, she was forced to leave school, as was the rule at that time, whereas Mr. Gaye fled to Gabon. Feeling his family’s honor stained by his daughter’s unwed pregnancy, Faat Kiné’s father attempted to burn her alive. Faat Kiné’s mother saved her life but incurred severe social and physical costs. Djib’s father, Boubacar Omar Payane (Bop), was a crook who ended up in prison. About twenty years later, both irresponsible fathers reappear wanting to reenter Faat Kiné’s life. They crash the children’s bac party. Probably because of her disappointing experiences with the men in her life, Faat Kiné is a feisty person who does not mince her words. Even her children are shocked by the vulgarity of her language. Djib’s meeting with his biological father at the party for the first time since his birth seventeen and a half years earlier gives Djib the opportunity to chastise and settle scores with his father. The confrontation between Djib and his father turns into a satire of Africa’s leaders and their inability to conceive of a new Africa.

Characters: Faat Kiné: Gas station manager and mother to Aby and Djib.

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Aby: Faat Kiné’s daughter and Djib’s older sister. Djib: Faat Kiné’s son and Aby’s younger brother. Mami: Faat Kiné’s mother. Faat Kiné’s father divorced her after Faat Kiné’s second pregnancy. She lives in Faat Kiné’s home. Jean: A Catholic widower who ends up having a relationship with Faat Kiné. Boubacar Omar Payane (Bop): Djib’s father. Mr. Gaye: Former high school teacher and Aby’s father. Alpha: A colleague of Faat Kiné who is also a gas station manager. He is married to four wives and is in constant financial trouble. Mr. Thiam: A senior executive of Total who refuses to lend Alpha money. Mada: A friend of Faat Kiné. Ami Kassé: A friend of Faat Kiné. Sagna: Works at Faat Kiné’s gas station. Mass: A married man and sexual partner of Faat Kiné.

Appendix K Moolaade (2004) Moolaade, a Pulaar word loosely translated as “asylum,” was Sembène’s last film. Collé Ardo Gallo Sy is a very strong woman who is crusading against the old practice of female circumcision, which although officially banned in many African countries is still practiced among certain ethnic groups. At the beginning of the film, four girls run into Collé’s home seeking protection on the morning they are supposed to be circumcised. In fact, viewers learn later in the film that a total of six girls ran away from being circumcised; the other two threw themselves in the village well and were found dead. Having gone through the experience herself and having prevented her daughter, Amsatou, from going through it, Collé commiserates with the girls and protects them under the moolaade. Her protection of the girls is seen as a challenge by circumcision practitioners, who vow to settle scores with her. Her resistance ultimately pays off at the end of the film, when the women and some of the men, including Collé’s husband, agree to end female circumcision. As the village inhabitants try to find a way of pressuring Collé to end the moolaade, the expatriate son of the village chief, Ibrahima, arrives from France. Viewers learn that Ibrahima’s family and Amsatou’s family had an old agreement to marry the two. However, as Collé harbors the four girls, it is revealed that Amsatou was not circumcised. That revelation prompts Ibrahima’s father to decide that his son will not marry Amsatou. Visibly dejected, Amsatou confronts her mother about Collé’s choice not to circumcise her. After her mother has explained to her that Amsatou’s older sister died at birth and that Amsatou herself was born thanks to a C-section, Amsatou tears into pieces the photograph

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of Ibrahima she had in her hands. To his father’s dismay, Ibrahima resolutely moves to marry uncircumcised Amsatou at the end of the film. An outsider to the village, Mercenaire comes in only to sell goods. He knows all the village inhabitants and is particularly friendly with women. The village men respect him but treat him with suspicion. Mercenaire has the audacity to stop the public flogging of Collé to end the moolaade. He pays with his life.

Characters: Ciré: A respectable member of the village and husband of three wives. Diatou: Ciré’s first wife. She has authority over Collé, and the two get along well. Collé Ardo Gallo Sy: Protagonist; second wife of Ciré. She offers four girls protection against circumcision. Alima: Ciré’s third wife; she is terrified of the spell the excision practitioners might cast on them. Amath: Ciré’s older brother, who does not get along with Collé and orchestrates Collé’s flogging. Mercenaire: Former soldier turned trader. He comes into the village with a cart filled with goods to sell. Only he has the courage to stop Collé’s flogging. Amsatou: She is Collé’s only daughter, the first uncircumcised girl in the village. Dougoutigui: Village chief and Ibrahima’s father. Ibrahima: Expatriate son of the chief living in France.

Bibliography

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Gadjigo, Samba, Ralph H. Faulkingham, Thomas Cassirer, and Reinhard Sander, eds. Ousmane Sembène, Dialogue with Critics and Writers. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Gadjigo, Samba, and Sada Niang, eds. Un viatique pour l’éternité: Hommage à Ousmane Sembène. Dakar: Editions Papyrus Afrique, 2010. Ghali, Nourredine. “Interview with Ousmane Sembène.” In Film and Politics in the Third World, edited by John Downing, 41–50. New York: Praeger, 1986. Greer, Bonnie. “Ousmane Sembène.” In Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, edited by Annett Busch and Max Annas, 210–217. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2008. Gugler, Joseph. African Film: Re-Imagining a Continent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Haffner, Pierre. “Sembène Ousmane: Eléménts pour un autoportrait magnétique.” In “Sembène Ousmane,” special edition, CinémAction 34 (1985): 20–24. Hale, Thomas A. Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Harrow, Ken. “Kiné, la nouvelle femme africaine.” In “Sembène Ousmane (1923–2007),” edited by Thierno I. Dia et al., special issue, Africultures 76 (2009): 157–165. Harrow, Kenneth. Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Hazoumé, Paul. Doguicimi. Paris: Larose, 1938. Hennebelle, Guy. “Ousmane Sembène: ‘En Afrique Noire, Nous Sommes Gouvernés par des Enfants Mongoliens du Colonialism.’” Les Lettres Françaises, October 6–12, 1971. Hountondji, Paulin. “Charabia et Mauvaise Conscience (Psychologie du Langage Chez les Intellectuels Colonisés).” Présence Africaine: Revue Culturelle du Monde Noir 61 (1967): 11–31.

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Ousmane Sembène’s Filmography

L’Empire Songhai (The Songhai Empire). Republic of Mali, 1963. 16 mm, 20 min. In French (not commercially distributed). Borom Sarret (The Cart Driver). New Yorker Films (U.S.) and Metro (UK): Senegal and France 1963. 16 mm, 20 min. In French with English subtitles. Niaye. Les Films Domirev: Senegal and France, 1964. 35 mm, 35 min. In French and Wolof. La Noire de… (Black Girl). Les Films Domirev: Senegal and France, 1966. 35 mm, 65 min. In French with English subtitles. Manda bi (The Money Order). New Yorker Films (U.S.): Senegal and France, 1968. 35 mm, 105 min. In Wolof with English subtitles. Taaw. New Yorker Films (U.S.): Senegal, 1970. 16 mm, 24 min. In Wolof with English subtitles (not commercially distributed). Emitaï (God of Thunder). New Yorker Films (U.S.), Metro (U.K.), International Tele- Film Enterprises (Canada): Senegal, 1971. 35 mm, 95 min. In Joola and French with English subtitles. Xala (The Curse). New Yorker Films (U.S.), Contemporary Films (U.K.): Senegal, 1974. 35 mm, 116 min. In Wolof and French with English subtitles. Ceddo. New Yorker Films (U.S.), British Film Institute (U.K.), M H Films (France): Senegal, 1976. 35 mm, 120 min. In Wolof with English subtitles. Camp de Thiaroye (Camp Thiaroye). New Yorker Films (U.S.), Metro (U.K.): Senegal, Tunisia, and Algeria, 1988. 35 mm, 153 min. In Wolof and French with English subtitles. Guelwaar. New Yorker Films (U.S.), IDERA (Canada): Senegal and France, 1992. 35 mm, 115 min. In Wolof and French with English subtitles.

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Faat Kiné. New Yorker Films (U.S.): Senegal, 2000. 35 mm, 110 min. In Wolof and French with English subtitles. Moolaade. New Yorker Video: Senegal, 2004. 124 min. In Jula and French with optional English subtitles. DVD Release Date: December 11, 2007.

Index

abandonment, 199, 211 Abbé Léon, 110, 144, 262 Abdou, 53, 156, 224, 227, 251–252 abnormal, 185, 197 abuse, 47, 100, 139, 151 Aby, 165, 170, 172, 213, 220–221, 227, 263–264 accomplishment, 10 accumulating savings and credit associations, 230 acephalous, 38 action, 2, 6, 10, 13, 17, 31, 38, 44, 46–48, 59, 76, 81, 85, 179, 216, 247 actors, 20, 24, 48, 117–118, 123, 131, 237, 239, 253 adamantly, 128 Adèle, 141, 171–172 adjuvant, 83 administrative blunder, 143 adulator, 74 aesthetic, 10, 100 affiliation, 158–159 affinity, 18 Afghanistan, 158 African, 1–5, 7–8, 10–25, 29–32, 34–43, 45–47, 50–51, 53–59, 65–67, 69, 72, 74, 76, 82–89, 93–96, 98, 100–102, 105, 113, 116, 119–123, 127–133, 135–138, 141, 143–152, 159, 163–173, 175, 177–178, 181, 183, 186–194, 196–205, 209, 211–219, 221–222, 225, 227, 229–231, 234, 236–238, 240, 253–254, 259, 261, 265–266

Africanness, 15, 20, 189 Africultures, 17 Afrocentrism, 14 age-based social hierarchy, 214 agricultural, 201, 210, 234 Algeria, 37, 158 Algiers, 4 alienation, 8, 35, 95, 108–109, 112, 158–159, 219 Alima, 191, 193–194, 266 Allah, 79–80, 87, 132–134, 136–137, 153, 187 alms, 231 Aloïse, 143–144, 148, 262 Alpha, 169, 199–200, 228–229, 264 alternative, 14, 17, 72, 116, 221 Amath, 191, 194–195, 266 ambiguities, 168, 175 ambiguous, 67 American, 3–4, 25, 40, 66, 212–214, 231, 236 Amsatou, 192–193, 196–197, 215, 235, 265–266 amulets, 79–80 anachronistic, 188, 200 analyses, 2, 19 ancestors, 39, 66, 70–71, 75, 127, 141, 145–146, 172, 245 anecdotes, 98 Angers, 24 angles, 18 animal, 114 Annas, Max, 16, 22 anonymous, 158, 182 appeal, 22, 24, 101, 146–147, 158

280

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

appendix, 25, 245, 247, 249, 251, 253, 255, 257, 259, 261, 263, 265 Appiah, Kwame, 209 approach, 5, 11, 16–17, 42, 240 Arabic borrowings, 127 Arabs, 127–128, 160 Aram, 185–186, 252 archival documentation, 13 aristocratic family, 83–84 Armes, Roy, 15, 17 arrows, 38, 254 articles, 12, 17–18, 24, 106 articulation, 17, 232, 238 artificiality, 190 artist, 9, 17–19, 21, 23, 74, 108, 131, 238 Ashante, 209 Aspects de la Civilization Africaine, 43 assembly, 115, 136 assiettes, 211 assimilation, 6–7, 33, 131 association, 24, 52, 149, 183, 221 astute, 21 Atlantic, 218, 228 attacks, 20–21 audience, 2, 9–11, 23–24, 57, 66, 71–72, 81, 83, 89, 102, 111, 116, 119, 134, 148, 167, 169, 173, 179, 232, 239–240 aura of immunity, 214 auspices, 17 authenticity, 69, 150, 222 author, 16, 18, 21, 51, 209 authority, 132–133, 136, 139, 156, 170, 172, 175, 192, 203, 216, 233, 257, 259, 266 avenues, 15 baccalaureate, 119, 170, 220, 263 background, 16, 20, 37, 68, 167–168

Bakari, Imruh, 13 baleful, 213 Bamanankan, 130 banknotes, 70, 228 barbaric, 30 Barber, Karin, 213 Barlet, Olivier, 14, 16–17 Barthelemy, 109–110, 147–148, 150, 221, 227, 262 basic decency, 122 bastardized, 96 Bauman, Zygmunt, 209 bedeviled, 194 Belgium, 227 belligerent image, 165 berated, 123 betrayal, 14, 123, 227 Bible, 151 bibliography, 19–20 Biram, 145–146, 151–152, 159, 262 biting, 21 bitterness, 121 black, 2, 6–7, 12, 39–47, 51, 57, 79, 94, 98, 112–113, 116, 118, 180, 182–183, 190, 220, 245, 254 Black Girl, 2, 112–113, 116, 118 black poetry, 42, 44 blackmailing, 196 blood purity, 67 Boigny, Houphouët, 54 book, 11–12, 14–16, 18–20, 22, 25, 58, 68, 95, 98–99, 128, 158, 209, 239 book-length, 16 Bordeaux, 24 borders, 210 boundaries, 3, 54, 68, 120, 134, 163, 215 bourgeois, 3, 8, 21, 89, 123, 189, 238 brawl, 143, 145 brilliant, 16

Index brotherhood, 139, 156, 158 bu ñuul, 40 buckets, 234 budget, 59 burdensome, 7 Burkina Faso, 24, 119, 211, 215, 237–238, 253 burning, 32, 180, 215–217 burying, 32, 254, 259 Busch, Annett, 16, 22 Buur, 133 Calvet, Louis-Jean, 3, 33, 100 camera, 10, 19, 48, 70, 76, 79, 85, 100, 111, 117–118, 134, 142, 154, 179, 197, 220 Cameroon, 24, 42 Camp de Thiaroye, 13–14, 20–23, 25, 39–41, 96, 99–100, 226, 237, 259 Canada, 220, 229 candidate, 19 Cannes, 222–223 Cape Verde, 52 Carbral, Amilcar, 238 Carrie Dailey Moore, 16, 19, 58 Casamance, 1, 36, 201, 253 Cascade Festival of African Films, xvi Case, Frederick Ivor, 13, 17 cash crops, 210, 234, 236 cash-driven, 67, 77 caste, 67–68, 72, 85 cathartic, 121 Catholic clergy, 158 Ceddo, 13, 17, 20–23, 25, 127, 129–131, 141–142, 152, 159, 257 ceremony, 108, 138, 141, 155, 190, 230, 261 Césaire, 7, 41–42, 98–99, 203–204 challenging, 11, 167

281 Cham, Mbye, 13, 17, 131 changes, 8, 114–115, 171, 210, 257 channels, 66, 196 chaotic, 100 chapters, 11–14, 16–18, 20, 24–25 charabia, 34 charity, 140, 175 charter, 4–5, 10 chartered out of Europe, 227 Che Guevara, 203 cheap exoticism, 20 cheap rice, 236 cheek-to-cheek, 155 chicanery, 235 Christian, 1, 23–24, 75, 108, 110–111, 127–129, 131, 142–144, 146–151, 155–157, 159, 167, 177, 183, 233, 245, 261–262 cigarettes, 114 cinema, 4–5, 10–20, 22–24, 57–58, 66, 74, 94, 113, 116, 119, 123, 163–165, 197, 199, 209, 213, 238, 240 CinémAction, 17, 164 cinematography, 11, 20, 22 circle, 19, 146–148, 257–258 circulation, 123, 212 Ciré, 191–196, 200, 266 Ciss family, 109–110, 143–144, 148, 150 civilizations, 32, 45 civilizing mission, 30 claim of nationalism, 123 clothes, 189, 218–219, 234 code of honor, 83 coexistence, 23–24, 128–129, 155, 159, 261 cognitive, 213 cohesiveness, 16 cohorts, 21, 114, 196 collaborator, 18, 107, 117, 237, 239

282

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

collective memory, 82 colonial, 2–7, 10–14, 16–18, 20, 22–24, 29–30, 32–36, 39–41, 44–46, 48, 50–59, 65, 72, 84, 87, 93–101, 103–106, 108–111, 113, 115–116, 118–123, 127, 129–131, 138, 151, 155, 158, 168–169, 174, 189, 196, 199–200, 210, 212, 217–218, 231–234, 238–240, 253–254, 259, 263 colonialism, 2–4, 7, 20, 30–33, 35–36, 42, 46–47, 49, 56, 58, 82, 89, 101, 105, 116, 128, 139, 159, 170, 220 colonialist discourse, 15 combative, 6–7, 164 comedy, 20 commander, 38, 260 commercial, 4 communication media, 211 community well, 227 compassion, 101, 140, 229, 231 compelling, 17, 58, 86, 96, 112, 134, 158, 197, 203, 223 competing forces, 210 compilation, 17, 19 complex, 11, 25, 43, 47, 65, 95, 105, 131, 187–188, 210, 218, 220, 234 Complexe du Centre Cinématographique de Rabat, 237 comprehensive notion, 3, 166 compromise, 29, 123 Comptoir Français du film, 123 conceal, 188 condemn, 55, 71, 112, 177 condemnation, 42, 200, 233 confidants, 73 confined women, 164 confiscate, 215–216 confrontation scene, 173

confrontational, 153 Congolese, 226–227 connection, 41, 71, 89, 181, 210, 232, 235, 257 conscience, 9, 21, 34, 72, 74, 85 consciousness, 4–5, 7, 56–57, 111, 128, 215, 221 conservation fees, 236 constructing, 20 consumerism, 190, 235 consummate, 102, 104, 255 consumption patterns, 235–236 contemporary, 5, 14, 68, 176 continent, 3–5, 8, 10, 14, 30, 32–33, 46–47, 67, 94, 123, 128, 166, 171, 173, 217, 240 continental borders, 210 contribution, 22, 49, 123, 230 controversial, 8, 42 conversion, 138–139, 197, 257 converts, 32, 129, 138 conviction, 49, 123, 151 coproducers, 123 core and peripheral states, 237 corruption, 100, 112, 120 cosmopolitan, 209 cosmopolitanism, 209 cost of living, 212 Côte d’Ivoire, 37, 237, 253 cotton, 234 council, 38, 85, 87–88, 110, 254 country, 3, 30, 36, 40, 44–45, 56–57, 84–85, 87–88, 100, 110–111, 119, 128, 142, 145, 155–156, 159, 170, 182, 188, 201, 215, 217, 220–221, 224, 233, 237, 259 coups d’état, 215 crazy, 73–74 creative editing, 11 credit, 12, 36, 186–187, 193, 230, 235, 251

Index critical, 2, 6–11, 15–16, 18–22, 32, 43, 52, 55, 58, 71, 73, 79–80, 82–83, 93, 104, 128–129, 133, 141, 150, 152, 154–156, 165, 177, 189, 191, 194, 223, 235, 237, 240 criticism, 15, 99, 107–108, 156 critics, 15, 17–19, 22, 164, 186 cultural, 2–8, 11–16, 18–19, 24, 30–32, 34–35, 37, 39, 42–44, 46–50, 52–58, 65, 68, 72, 80–81, 83–89, 94, 96, 99, 101–102, 106–108, 120, 129, 131, 146–147, 151, 159, 163–164, 166, 169, 172–173, 175, 185, 187–190, 196–197, 201, 211–215, 220, 227, 229, 235–236, 238, 240 cultures, 3, 7–8, 32, 42, 45, 49–50, 94, 120, 127–128, 131, 191, 199, 210, 221 cups, 234 curse, 102, 104, 189, 193, 233, 255 Curtius, Anne Dominique, 13 daily, 1, 5, 8–9, 14, 18–19, 22–24, 29–30, 33, 35, 38, 41, 43, 46, 51, 56–57, 59, 66, 69–72, 74, 76, 78–79, 85–86, 89, 95, 100, 105, 107–108, 111, 119, 127–128, 131, 141, 164, 166–167, 171, 177–180, 185–186, 188, 197–199, 201–203, 205, 209–210, 216, 219, 223–226, 233–234, 238–239, 245, 247, 263, 266 Dakar, 9, 23, 36, 39, 56–57, 69, 74–75, 96, 100, 111–112, 116, 127, 139–142, 154, 157–158, 167, 174, 177, 179, 181, 185–189, 199, 218–220, 223–224, 231, 245–246, 250–251, 259, 262–263 Damas, 7 danger, 38, 136–137, 158

283 Daniel Sorano, 45 database 27 de Gaulle, 44 de Saint-Pierre, Bernadin, 6 deadlock, 21 death threats, 158 Debresse, 99 debunk, 228 decades, 35, 210, 230 December, 157 decline, 212, 231 decolonization, 3, 14 décor, 19 decry, 163 deference, 127 defiance, 36, 39, 133, 182, 232 defilement, 226 defy, 11, 122 degraded, 102 Delgado, Clarence, 18, 24, 117, 151, 197, 202 Delobson, Din, 6 demands, 49, 72, 111, 113, 117, 123, 190–191, 196, 252–253, 255 demarcation, 104 Demba War, 133–134, 257 demonize, 33, 42, 89 demystifies, 214 denounce, 21, 36, 108, 150 dependence, 48, 59, 151, 211, 231–234, 236 dependency, 21, 107, 232, 237 depravity, 108, 173 desire, 50, 123, 129, 180, 184, 191, 200 destitution, 71 devalue, 211 developing countries, 210 Dia, Thierno, 16, 77 Diagana, M’bouh Séta, 130 dialects, 130

284

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

Diallobé, 33–34 dialogue, 8, 11, 38, 49, 56, 96, 116, 134, 169, 197 Diatou, 192–195, 216, 235, 266 Diawara, Manthia, 16, 54, 69 Dibocor, 144–148, 262 didactic, 2–5, 7–11, 13–25, 29–30, 38, 58–59, 66–68, 72, 74, 82, 89, 93, 99–100, 104, 108, 111–112, 116–120, 123, 128–129, 131, 140, 159, 163–166, 170, 173, 175–176, 178–179, 185, 188, 197, 199, 201, 203–204, 211, 217, 223, 228, 237–240, 265 diegetic audience, 148, 173 Dieng, Ibrahima, 100–101, 185–186, 251–252 dietary habits, 211 diglossia, 13 dignity, 21, 83–84, 88–89, 93, 108, 112–113, 151, 178, 200, 227, 232–233 Diola, 36–39, 47–49, 94, 201–202, 253 Diop, Alioune, 99 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 36, 43, 221, 238 Diop, Ousmane Socé, 6 Diouf, Khady, 224 Diouf, Mamadou, 13, 128 disadvantage, 16, 164 disconnect, 177 discourse, 5, 7, 15, 20, 72, 116, 122, 199, 233 discretion, 121, 187, 214 discrimination, 81 discursive, 58, 79, 197 disenchanted, 129 disgrace, 84, 88, 223 disillusioned, 113, 128, 239 disillusionment, 43, 227 disinheritance, 121

disrespect, 114, 133, 142, 259 disrespectfully, 214 disseminate, 35, 100 dissensions, 147 dissertation, 16, 19, 98–99, 130 dissimilar, 128 distributors, 66 divisions of economic power, 167 divisive forces, 128 Djebar, Assia, 13 Djib, 155, 169–173, 213–214, 220–221, 227, 229, 263–264 dockworker, 2, 56–57 doctoral, 19, 23 doctrinal knowledge, 134 domination, 4–5, 35–36, 46, 48, 59, 95, 108, 151, 159, 164, 166, 170 Dominican Republic, 52 Dougoutigui, 195–196, 266 downfall, 72, 112, 190 drama, 35, 45, 69, 94–95, 186 drowned, 228 dynamism, 167 dysfunctional, 189, 191 Easter, 127 economic, 3, 5, 8–10, 12, 24, 31, 50, 52, 56, 68, 88, 103, 107, 167, 169, 185–186, 188, 191, 211, 217–219, 237 economy, 79, 82, 228–229, 231, 234, 237 edited, 13, 16–18 editor, 20, 99 education, 1, 4–5, 7, 11, 16, 31, 34–35, 49, 56, 58, 74, 94, 101, 103, 106, 115, 120–122, 159, 166, 169–170, 212, 214, 221, 231 educational tools, 213 educators, 10 efficacy, 99

Index Effok, 37, 39–40, 47 egotistical, 189 El Hadji, 102–104, 108, 165, 189–191, 255–256 elaborate, 19, 147 elite, 14, 21, 33, 55–57, 67, 81, 94–95, 98, 102–103, 111–112, 116, 120, 129, 131, 189, 252 elitist, 116 embattled mother, 121 emblem, 217 emboldens, 194 embrace, 8, 55, 138, 238 embryo, 228 Emitaï, 20–23, 25, 36–39, 41, 47–48, 201, 253 emotion, 43, 48 empire, 6, 21, 52, 96 empower, 74, 120, 215 endearment, 122 endure, 180 enemy, 47, 107, 136, 152 English, 14, 22, 42, 44, 55, 95, 113, 122 enracinement, 44, 49 enterprise, 4, 11, 30, 123 enthusiasm, 19, 127, 232 entrenched, 164 envy, 100 epic, 20, 66 equality, 164, 166, 172, 200, 218 equalizing, 209 Equinoxes, 24 Essai sur la problématique philosophique de l’Afrique actuelle, 42 Ethiopia, 24 ethnic, 1, 3, 5, 36, 54, 85, 93, 106, 130–131, 164, 166, 184, 201–202, 210, 265 ethnic resistance, 106

285 ethnolinguistic, 3 Etienne, 233–234 Euro-Christianity, 131 Europe, 5, 7, 14, 37, 40, 46–47, 65–66, 94, 109–110, 217–218, 222, 227–228 European productions, 213 evening class, 58 evidence, 21, 55, 101, 110, 219 evoke, 11, 23, 71 evolution, 6, 15, 19, 165 exchange, 10, 38, 49, 110, 118, 150–152, 155, 200, 210 exclusion, 33, 101, 171 exclusively, 13, 16, 18, 20–21, 53, 120 experience, 14, 56, 73, 98–99, 106, 117, 144, 181, 192, 255, 265 explain, 13, 20, 98, 192, 210, 215 exploitation, 21, 47, 81, 101, 112 exploitative, 39, 209 exposure, 69, 181, 215 extended families, 212 extradiegetic, 168, 224 failures, 171–172 false, 10, 21, 81 fanatical, 132 Fanon, Frantz, 5, 30, 94 fantasy, 180, 222, 224 father, 1, 17, 38, 66, 75, 84–86, 109, 119, 121, 143–144, 170–173, 175, 178, 184, 195–196, 202–204, 212, 214, 216–218, 220–221, 245, 247, 250, 253, 262–266 Faulkingham, Ralph H., 17 feature-length film, 2, 12, 113, 249 female circumcision, 8, 166, 197–199, 215–216, 265 feminist, 164 FEPACI, 4–5, 10

286

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

fertilization, 12 FESPACO, 141 fiction, 20 fictional African village, 191 fief, 68 fiery, 150–151 Fili, 196 film aesthetic, 100 filmmaker, 2, 4, 9, 14, 20, 23, 58–59, 68–69, 82–83, 116, 128, 199, 237 filmmaking, 7, 15, 23, 57–58, 111, 116, 119, 123, 237–239 filmography, 20, 22, 120 films, 2–5, 7–11, 13–25, 29–30, 58–59, 66–67, 74, 82, 89, 99–100, 104, 108, 111–112, 117–120, 123, 128–129, 159, 163–166, 173, 176, 178, 185, 197, 199, 201, 203–204, 211, 217, 223, 228, 237–240 financial, 2–3, 7, 14, 33, 35, 48, 57–58, 66, 72, 79, 83, 93, 95–96, 102, 107, 112, 120–121, 156, 167, 169–170, 188–191, 200, 210, 217, 227–230, 234, 238, 251, 255, 264 financially self-supporting, 121 first, 2, 6, 8, 12, 14, 18–19, 22, 24, 32–33, 35–37, 44, 50, 54, 66, 68, 70, 78–79, 98–100, 107, 111, 113, 115, 119, 122–123, 127, 132, 137, 139, 142–143, 156–157, 170, 173, 179, 189–190, 192–195, 198, 200–201, 213–214, 220–221, 225–226, 228, 233, 235, 245, 249, 252–253, 256, 263, 266 flogging, 194–195, 266 food, 3, 25, 75, 78, 84–85, 88–89, 108, 115, 147, 152, 185, 187, 189, 210–211, 229, 231, 233–234, 236–237, 261 force-feeding, 213 Ford, 55

foreign, 8, 21, 35–36, 100, 108, 116, 127, 129, 131, 147, 150–151, 181, 211–212, 226, 231–236, 261 foreign, 2–3, 8, 14, 21, 25, 35–38, 100, 108–109, 116, 127, 129, 131, 135, 147, 150–151, 165, 181, 185, 201, 210–214, 217, 226, 230–237, 261 formal education, 1, 7, 56, 115, 212 formative, 24, 29, 35, 56 forms, 13, 16, 23, 31, 67, 95, 128, 169, 218 foundation, 17, 30, 57, 157, 172 fragility, 84, 134 framework, 5, 15 Francophonie, 44, 46, 49–50, 52–56 free, 6, 34, 38, 46, 56, 59, 67, 74, 78, 141, 146, 159, 194, 201, 203, 210, 217, 227–229, 236–237, 246, 253, 257 French, 3, 10, 12, 14, 17, 23, 30–42, 44, 47–59, 83, 87, 94, 96–116, 118–123, 128, 131, 139, 159, 169, 171, 179–182, 195, 201, 203, 217–218, 220–221, 226, 228, 232, 235, 237, 247, 249–250, 252–255, 259 Frenchman, 224 friday prayer, 127, 187 friend, 18, 121, 170, 176, 262, 264 Fulani, 202 fusées, 51 future, 7, 35, 44, 67, 72, 166, 188, 209, 217, 233, 238, 240 Gadjigo, Samba, 13, 16–18, 21, 24 gap, 20, 81 gas station, 119, 152, 154, 169, 199, 228, 263–264 Gaye, 169–172, 263–264 gaze, 2, 8, 14, 20, 73, 86, 200

Index gender, 9–11, 39, 67, 112, 116, 138, 159, 163, 165, 167, 169, 171, 174–175, 177, 179–180, 189, 201–202, 222, 224, 227, 257 general secretary, 53 generation, 15–16, 31, 57, 82, 88, 171–172, 196, 201, 214, 221 gerontocratic, 8, 30, 35–36, 56, 67, 88, 133, 164, 214, 263 Ghana, 24, 238 gift, xv gigolo, 122 Gĩkũyũ, 58, 95 ginger, xiv, xv global, 7–9, 15, 22–25, 31, 53, 57, 69, 83, 108, 163, 165–166, 173, 176, 178, 189, 197, 201, 203, 209–211, 218–219, 223, 228, 235–238, 240 Gora, 110 government, 56, 58, 107–109, 123, 203, 232, 237, 252–253, 259 Gramsci, Antonio, 213 grandchildren, 213–214 grande mosquée mouride, 157 grandparents, 212, 214 graveyard, 108 greed, 83, 112, 189, 191 griot, 7, 20, 23, 35, 54, 58–59, 65–68, 70–77, 82–83, 85–89, 134, 174–175, 177, 215, 245–248, 258 ground zero, 32 groundnuts, 201 growth, 123, 128–129 Guelwaar, 2, 21–23, 25, 108–110, 117–118, 129, 142, 147–148, 150–152, 159, 176, 211, 217, 221, 227, 231, 261 Guèye, Guibril, 83, 85, 247–248 Gugler, Joseph, 14 Guinea, 52, 238 Guinea Bissau, 52, 238

287 guise, 210 gunshots, 39, 254 handicapped, 139–141 handouts, 224, 233 handyman, 99 Harrow, Kenneth, 15 harsh, 46, 71, 76, 85, 189 Hazoumé, Paul, 6 health hazards, 199 heartbreaking love affairs, 121 Hegel, Georg W. F., 42 hegemony, 53–55, 164, 213 heir, 133, 247 hemispheres, 217 hereditary, 66 heritage, 30, 56, 68, 95, 131, 148 Hermit Road, 179, 220, 222 heroine, 36, 215 heterogeneity, 130 hibiscus, xiv, xv hierarchy, 169, 173, 188, 192, 214, 218 high heels, 190, 219 historical, 3, 6, 9, 12–14, 18, 20, 29–30, 32, 37, 46, 66, 68, 72, 82, 203, 223, 257, 259 history, 8, 12–17, 21, 23–24, 29, 32, 35, 37, 41–42, 89, 96, 121, 128–129, 131, 225, 238, 261 hollywood, 4, 8, 66 homogeneity, 209 horizontal, 121, 190 horse, 75, 78, 81, 111, 174, 245 hostage, 38, 47, 179, 253, 259 hostility, 129, 155 Hountondji, Paulin, 34 housework, 219 Hugo, 6, 34–35 human migration, 211 hurdles, 14, 24, 166

288

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

hurtful words, 121 husband, 84, 120, 122, 174–178, 180, 184–186, 192, 195, 200, 204, 213–214, 235, 245–247, 250–251, 265–266 hustle, 177 hyenas, 13 iconic figure, 227 iconic of the neocolonial bourgeoisie, 123 idealism, 8 identity, 5, 15, 42, 67, 86, 93–94, 101, 110, 129, 138, 181–182, 222, 227, 251–252 ideologies, 7 ideophone, 122 ignorance, 81, 101, 150, 226 illegal migration, 228 illiteracy, 57–58, 109 illustration, 96, 159, 229 image, 10–11, 37, 45, 70, 79, 86, 111, 132, 140, 156, 165, 167, 181–182, 188, 203, 227, 230 imagery, 131, 211 imagination, 13–14, 175 imaginative narratives, 66 imagining, 14, 20 imam, 111, 132–138, 142–148, 157, 159, 215, 247, 251, 257–258, 261 IMF, 236 immemorial, 66 immigrants, 14, 221 immorality, 87 immune, 151, 155 impact, 2, 11, 24, 30–31, 56, 93, 107, 164, 173, 213, 239 impatient, 38, 121 imperialism, 5, 7, 42–43, 107, 211, 213 impertinent, 213

impetus, 82 implicitly, 68, 93 import tariffs, 236 imported grains of millet and wheat, 211 impotent, 102 impressive, 18 imprisonment, 224 impunity, 73–74, 83 incest, 83, 85, 247 incredulous, 66 inculcate, 212 independence, 2–3, 7, 14, 33, 35, 48, 57–58, 79, 83, 93, 95–96, 102, 112, 120–121, 156, 167, 169–170, 188–189, 217, 227, 234, 238, 255 Independence Square, 167, 169 indigenous, 1–3, 8, 14, 30–33, 36, 94, 100–101, 105, 123, 128–129, 131, 151, 202, 213, 232, 258 indignity, 84, 87, 151 indispensable, 123 individual, 2, 4, 17, 48, 72, 96, 110, 152, 184, 190, 228 individualism, 229 indoctrination, 33 indomitable, 121 inequality, 200 inescapable, 8, 211 inferiority complex, 47, 218, 220 influence, 4–5, 24–25, 53, 59, 79, 127, 131, 142, 155, 163, 211–213, 215–216, 257, 259 informal gatherings, 212 information, 4, 18, 20–21, 171, 191, 204, 210, 212, 215–216 initiation ceremonies, 212 injustice, 59, 140, 163, 200 innuendo, 175 insights, 11, 15 inspirational, 8, 100

Index instigators of social change, 165 instinct, 43, 114 institutions, 54, 105, 230 instrumental, 50, 128 insult, 45, 144, 148, 170, 190, 204, 233 integral, 58, 212 intellectual, 2, 22, 29–30, 35, 41, 47, 50, 59, 98–99, 103, 231, 237 intelligentsia, 6, 95 interconnectedness, 210 interconnection, 210 interests, 8, 52, 74, 87, 116, 135, 151, 165, 210, 229 internalization, 234 international, 19, 25, 69, 108, 230, 237, 261 interviews, 9, 18–19, 22, 24 intolerant, 121, 132 intrusion, 10, 212, 254 invasive, 131, 216 invisible, 35, 80, 116, 137, 176 invocation, 132 invulnerable, 214 Iran, 158 Iraq, 158 ironically, 70, 102, 189, 259 irreverent, 131–132, 142 Islam, 1, 23–24, 79–80, 85, 127–129, 131–134, 137, 139, 141–142, 148, 150–151, 153, 158–159, 178, 183–184, 189, 191, 204, 215, 257 Islamic laws, 133–134 Islamization, 130, 158 Ismaïla, 144–146, 148, 262 Israël, 150, 158 issues, 7–9, 15, 53, 57, 69, 83, 108, 163, 165–166, 173, 176, 189, 197, 203, 209, 219, 240 Japanese, 55

289 Jerusalem, 150 joblessness, 79 Joloff kingdom, 129 journal, 7, 17, 41, 105–107 journalist, 209, 239 Julakan, 130 junk products, 235 justification, 46–47, 119, 185, 215, 224 Kaboré, Gaston, 4 Kaddu, 105–108 Kandé, Fatou, 237 Kane, Abdoulaye, 230 Kassé, Amy, 121 Keïta, Sunjata, 194 Kembel, 141 Kenya, 59, 95 Kerssen, Tanya, 210 Kesteloot, Lilyan, 6 Keur Baye Ali, 110, 261–262 kilometers, 127 Kimber, Charlie, 166 Kiné, Faat, 15, 22–23, 25, 117, 119–122, 129, 139–141, 152, 154–155, 159, 165–173, 196–199, 211, 213, 215, 217, 220, 227–231, 237–238, 263–264 knowledge, 31–32, 34, 66–68, 120, 134, 147, 210, 212, 215 kola nut, 69, 75, 79, 174, 187, 245 Konaté, 228 Koran, 128, 132–133, 139, 151 Kouyatés, 66 L’Aventure ambiguë, 33 L’Etudiant noir, 41 la Francophonie, 44, 46, 49–50, 52–56 la Grande Royale, 34

290

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

La Noire de, 2, 12, 14, 19, 22–23, 25, 113, 121, 178–179, 205, 211, 217–218, 222–225, 227, 238, 249 La Religion face au pouvoir: la laïcité en danger, 158 language matters, 93, 122 Layène brotherhood, 139 Le Cri du Cœur, 14 Le Docker Noir, 57, 99 Le Monde, 209 leadership, 134, 171, 194, 224, 234 Lebanon, 158 leftovers, 103, 224 legacy, 4, 16, 18, 23, 95, 240 Les bouts de bois de Dieu, 57 lethargy, 170 liberate, 1–5, 7–21, 23–25, 30–32, 35–40, 42–43, 45–47, 51, 54–59, 66–69, 71, 74, 76, 81–83, 85–86, 89, 93–96, 98, 100, 102, 105–106, 108–109, 111, 113, 119–123, 127–128, 131, 133, 135–136, 138, 142–143, 145–152, 156–159, 163–173, 176–179, 181, 183–184, 186–189, 191–194, 196–205, 211–217, 219, 221–223, 225–227, 229–231, 233–234, 236–238, 240, 245–246, 249, 251–255, 257, 259, 263, 265–266 liberation, 2–7, 24, 30, 35, 37, 46, 48, 56–58, 96, 106, 108, 120, 159, 166, 169, 173, 238, 240 Libya, 158 linkage, 18, 233 literacy, 3, 65, 106, 116 literature, 6, 12–14, 16, 19–20, 22–24, 29, 56–58, 65, 95–96, 118 Literature and Film Quarterly, 24

living, 35, 56–57, 67, 69, 71–72, 74, 111–114, 128–129, 148, 177–178, 183, 185–186, 188, 196–197, 201–202, 204, 212, 218–219, 222, 224, 226, 245, 249, 266 local, 1–4, 11, 23–24, 31, 33, 40, 44, 48–49, 51, 54–55, 58–59, 65, 69, 93–95, 100–101, 103–108, 110–112, 116, 119–120, 123, 127–128, 130–131, 135–137, 150, 157, 189, 191, 210, 213, 219, 221, 228, 232–233, 236, 238, 251, 254–255 long-held values, 215 looting, 32 loss, 53, 83, 178, 212, 231–232 loud-mouthed, 170 low-income, 185 lucid, 188 luggage, 227, 245 Lumumba, Patrice, 226, 238 Lusophone, 15 Ly, Boubakar, 85 Lyombe, Eko, 213 lyricism, 20 maccuɓe, 130 machete, 143, 193 Madagascar, 37 Mag, Goor, 110–111, 144–148, 151–152, 159, 262 Magassouba 161 maladapted tradition, 200 Malcolm X, 203 male, 2, 8, 14, 20, 47, 73, 86, 120, 159, 164–165, 167, 169, 178, 181, 184–185, 196, 200, 213, 249–250 Mali, 24, 66, 198, 237 Mami, 154–155, 159, 171–172, 213–214, 264

Index Manda bi, 12–13, 15, 21–23, 25, 54, 100–101, 119, 123, 178, 185–186, 188, 191, 193, 200, 217, 224, 227, 251 Mande languages, 130 Mandela, Nelson, 203, 238 Mandingo, 94, 130, 202 manipulate, 23, 35, 72, 89 marginalized, 102, 165 marketing, 66, 235 marriage, 8, 67, 102, 104, 155, 189, 191, 196–197, 201, 255 Marseilles, 2, 24, 58 Martinican, 41 masculine, 173, 188 mask, 19, 180–182, 227, 239, 249 mass media, 25 Master Sergeant Diatta, 39–40, 259 matrilineal system, 132, 204 Maty, 185–186, 252 meaning, 2, 11–12, 19–20, 43, 52, 70, 72, 97, 108, 110, 129–131, 151, 175, 184, 191, 209, 214–215 Médoune, 84, 87–88, 247–248 Memmi, Albert, 95 memory, 3, 13, 18, 29, 66, 68, 72, 82, 203, 223 menfolk, 194 mentality, 21, 130, 141 Mercenaire, 193–196, 215, 228, 234–237, 266 metaphors, 134 métissage, 4, 44, 50, 52 middle-aged man, 152–155, 185 Midiohouan, Guy Ossito, 51 migration, 14, 25, 211, 217, 223, 227–228, 234 millet, 201, 211, 236 minaret, 79, 154, 217 mindset, 117 Minh-Ha, Trinh, 58, 95

291 mise-en-scène, 11, 20, 22, 48, 129, 134, 137, 142, 152, 155, 159 misogyny, 188 mission, 5, 30, 89, 134, 232 models, 5, 15, 82, 220, 226 modern, 1–5, 7–8, 10–20, 23–25, 30–32, 35, 39–40, 42–43, 45–47, 51, 54–59, 65–67, 69, 72, 76, 79, 82, 86, 89, 93–96, 98, 100–101, 105, 110–111, 113, 123, 127–129, 131, 135–136, 138, 143, 145–152, 159, 164–170, 173, 178, 181–183, 188–189, 191, 193–194, 197, 199–201, 203–204, 211–213, 217, 221–222, 227, 229–231, 234, 236–238, 240, 251–253, 259, 265 Moitt, Bernard, 13 monarchies, 128, 134 Mongo-Mboussa, Boniface, 17 monogamy, 201 Moolaade, 2, 22–23, 25, 164–166, 185, 191, 193–195, 197–200, 211, 215, 217, 221, 227–228, 234–235, 237, 265–266 Moore, Carrie Dailey, 16, 19, 58 Mor, 109, 143, 150, 262 Moral, 83–87, 108, 120, 170, 172–173, 178, 247 mosque, 78–79, 150, 154–155, 157, 159, 217 mouthpiece, 77, 173, 198 moving cinemas, 199 Mr. Thiam, 199–200, 228–229, 231, 264 MRDS, 157 muezzin, 79 multifaceted, 16–17, 164 multilayered, 18 murder, 84, 87, 140, 247 Murphy, David, 15–16, 20, 58, 165, 201

292

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

Muslim, 3, 65, 103, 108, 110, 127–131, 133–135, 138, 141, 143–145, 147–150, 152–158, 167, 178, 183–184, 187, 200, 230, 233, 257, 261–262 mystify, 47, 134, 164, 186 naïveté, 71, 226 nanny, 113, 249 narrative, 4, 8, 11, 14, 17, 19, 75–76, 83, 123, 186, 211, 224, 240 national, 3–8, 12, 14, 16–17, 20, 23, 34, 36, 42, 44–47, 49–50, 54, 56–58, 68, 72, 88–89, 93–96, 101–108, 111, 115–117, 119, 122–123, 137, 181, 187–188, 199, 210, 213, 221, 223, 226–227, 233, 237–238, 240 native, 2–4, 6, 23–24, 33, 44, 51, 54–55, 58–59, 65, 93–96, 100–101, 104–108, 111, 116, 119–120, 123, 130, 198, 202, 210–211, 218, 220–221, 234, 236 natural lighting, 19 Ndoffène, 150, 262 neediness, 77 negligence, 211 Negritude, 7, 21, 41–42, 44–49, 55–56, 165 negro, 96, 110, 179, 218 neocolonialism, 20–21, 46, 49, 55, 58, 228–229 nephew, 100, 133, 137, 185, 224, 251–252, 258

new, 11–12, 15–16, 31, 34, 38, 42, 57, 69–71, 77–78, 80, 82, 84–88, 93–94, 100, 102, 104, 112, 115, 119, 127, 129, 133–134, 137–139, 165, 168, 171–173, 176, 182, 189–190, 197, 209–211, 213, 215, 218, 229, 233, 235, 245, 255, 259, 263 New Year’s Eve, 127 Ní Chréacháin, Firinne, 212 Niang, Sada, 13, 16–18, 55, 164 Niaye, 2, 23, 25, 83, 85–86, 89, 178, 247 Nice, 222–223, 249 Niger, 50, 97, 150 Nkrumah, Kwame, 238 nonliterate, 100, 119–120, 123 nonlocal products, 213 nonrational, 42 nonverbal symbol, 180 north, 15, 19, 128, 217 North Africa, 15 North America, 19, 217 notable, 16, 190, 211 noteworthy, 128, 140 novel, 2, 13, 21, 33–34, 57–58, 98–99, 158–159 number, 13, 16, 37, 52, 106, 109, 143, 184 nyeeñɓe, 130 Nzabatsinda, Anthère, 16 Ô pays, mon beau peuple, 57 obligation, 46, 183–184, 191, 240 observations, 21 obsolete, 44, 212, 229 oeuvre, 16 official language, 52, 106, 116 off-screen, 69, 138, 153 offshoots, 2, 58, 79 old-fashioned feminism, 165

Index open-ended, 11, 175, 179, 240 oppression, 7, 95, 221, 234 oppressor language, 106 oral tradition, 4, 20, 23–24, 67, 72 orality, 17, 65–66, 95 orature, 14, 96 Organization of African Unity, 54 organizational, 16 ostracized, 85, 194 Ouagadougou Ouédraogo, Idrissa, 14 Oumy, 189–190, 256 Ouolof, 54–55, 85, 94, 100, 103–111, 116, 118–120, 122–123, 130, 134, 137, 148, 169, 187, 219, 231, 245, 261 out of place, 71, 188, 200 outside observer, 188 overseas, 210 pacing, 4 pagan, 133 Palestine, 158 Pan African, 4, 54, 221, 237–238 Pan-Africanism, 221, 237–238 paradigm, 15, 164 Paré, Joseph, 13 Paris, 24, 69, 224 partisan artists, 9 passive victims, 164 pass-key, 209 past, 7, 20, 32–33, 36, 43, 46–48, 65, 67–68, 70–73, 76, 85, 138, 163, 166, 185, 187, 191, 196, 199, 212, 226, 238 Pastor, 144–148, 262 paternal brutality, 121 Pathé, 139–141 patriarch, 48, 254, 262 patriarchy, 188 patrilineal system, 132

293 patrilocal, 184 patron, 45, 75, 112, 245 Payane, Boubacar Omar, 169–172, 214, 220–221, 229, 263–264 Peace Corps volunteers peanuts, 234 Peary, Gerald, 37 peasant, 121, 123, 128, 234 peasant women, 121 Peck, Raoul, 227 pepper gas, 121 perception, 4, 23, 96, 98–99, 116 performance, 70, 76, 117, 134, 224 pernicious, 5, 53 personal greed, 189 perspectives, 14, 18 pessimistic, 21 pestle, 104, 174 Petty, Sheila, 12–13, 16, 165 Pfaff, Françoise, 13, 16–17, 20, 113, 164, 174 PhD, 12, 16, 19 philistine, 170 philosopher, 34, 42 philosophical quandaries, 7, 234 physical violence, 196 pidgin, 96 pieces, 16, 109, 265 pilgrimage, 150 pioneering, 15–16, 123 plastic containers, 234 plasticity, 52 plausible, 175 podium, 232–233 point-of-view shots, 19 police, 75, 81, 104, 109, 112, 149, 189, 233, 246, 261

294

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

political, 3–5, 7–10, 12, 14–17, 20–21, 24, 31, 43–44, 46, 50, 52, 54–59, 69, 72, 74, 88, 93–97, 106–111, 116, 120, 122, 129, 134, 151, 155, 157–159, 199, 210, 213, 225–226, 232–234, 237–239, 261 polygamous, 8, 67, 102, 104, 121, 155, 166–167, 169, 183–185, 187–191, 196–197, 199–201, 255 polyphony, 155 poor, 7, 40, 71, 81, 102, 120, 164–165, 167, 185, 188, 213, 218, 220, 222, 231, 245, 251–252 popular socio-financial arrangements, 230 Portuguese, 36, 52 positive outlook on migration, 227 postcolonial, 2, 8, 12, 15, 21, 30, 56, 67, 69, 93, 95, 129, 165, 177, 214 postcoloniality, 15 postindependence, 74 postmodernism, 15 power, 5–7, 10–11, 33, 35, 44, 48–49, 57–59, 69, 80–81, 83, 87–89, 93, 95, 101–103, 110–111, 120, 123, 129, 131–133, 142, 147, 155–156, 164, 167, 169–170, 188, 193–194, 196, 203, 209, 211, 213, 215, 218–219, 232, 252, 255 pragmatic, 12 pragmatism, 99 praxis, 15 prayer, 79, 81, 88, 127, 132, 144, 152–155, 159, 187 preach, 3, 170 pre-Christian holidays, 127 pre-Christian values, 129, 151 precolonial, 32 predominant religions, 127, 142 pre-Islamic values, 1, 127, 129, 147, 151, 204

prejudice, 4, 146, 152, 155, 261 prerogative, 187 Présence Africaine, 98–99 present, 7, 37, 46, 67–68, 71–73, 76, 93, 110, 120, 180, 209, 233, 238 president, 44, 50, 56, 98, 141, 156–158, 189, 211, 221, 255–256 press conference, 198 pride, 5, 67–68, 76, 83–84, 108, 151, 171, 175, 185, 221, 231–232, 238, 259 priest, 38–39, 47–48, 233, 254 princes, 66 prison, 140, 195, 263 privacy, 10, 121, 146 privileges, 31, 102, 115, 120, 143 problem, 118, 136, 142, 148 problematize, 8 process, 12, 32–33, 44, 74, 93, 95, 144, 213, 237, 261 producer, 2, 20 producers, 236 production, 4, 12–13, 15–16, 18, 57, 213, 236, 238 professionals, 18, 118, 203 profiteering, 71, 251 project, 5, 117, 137 prominence, 12 prophet, 133 prose, 21 prosthetic arm, 141 prostitute, 175–176, 179, 262 protagonist, 75, 79, 81, 100–101, 108, 111–112, 177, 185–186, 191, 215, 224, 252, 266 protection, 48, 75, 80–81, 191–192, 265–266 proverbial gag, 120 provocative, 9–11, 74, 132, 153, 209, 240 prudish, 121

Index psychological, 2, 11, 24, 30–31, 56, 93–95, 107, 137, 164, 173, 211, 213, 233, 239 public, 1, 5, 7, 15, 20, 37, 72–73, 108, 113, 116, 120, 122–123, 138, 144, 151, 159, 165, 168, 170, 176, 197–199, 231, 233, 240, 250–251, 266 publication, 12, 16–17, 57, 99 Pulaar, 94, 130–131, 191, 265 pump attendant, 152–155 purist, 98 purity, 66–67 purpose, 9, 74, 99, 179, 189, 213 purposely, 11, 120 push-and-pull factors, 218 quarterly, 24 queen, 122 quotations, 19 race, 13, 57, 179 racism, 36, 41, 58, 226 radio, 213, 215–216 Rama, 103–104, 164, 256 Ramadan, 127 rapacious claws, 230, 234 razors, 234–235 readership, 106–107, 119 realism, 8, 16, 19, 169 realistic, 169, 175 reality, 7, 20, 23, 42, 46, 70–71, 85, 89, 137, 154, 171, 180, 214, 223–224 reason, 4, 11, 42–43, 52, 54, 59, 66–67, 107, 111–112, 119, 141–142, 183, 224, 229 rebuke, 108, 189, 232 recognition, 2, 41, 165–166 reconstruction, 129 records, 32, 259

295 redress, 140 refusal, 30, 36, 93, 99, 104, 109, 141 refuse, 29, 37–38, 98, 103–104, 131, 163, 233, 258 rejection, 123 relational paradigm, 164 relics, 3, 7, 58 religion, 1, 23, 79, 127–128, 131, 144, 150–152, 155–156, 158–160, 187, 215 religious, 1, 4, 8–9, 24, 87, 110, 128–129, 132–133, 139, 142, 146, 151–160, 183–184, 189, 191, 199, 261 remain, 9, 35, 55, 116, 127, 146, 160, 164, 184–185, 224, 230, 239 remarriages, 201 remembrance, 7 remittances, 222 renaming, 138 renegade, 147, 221 representation of women, 13, 20–21, 164–165 repression, 5, 164 resistance, 13, 16, 21, 31, 36–37, 104, 106, 108, 114, 131, 141–142, 148, 151, 177, 183, 196, 203, 233, 254, 265 resource-poor states, 209 respect, 67, 88, 101, 127, 129, 136, 141, 156, 172, 185, 200, 266 retrospect, 119 review, 2, 13–14, 17, 24, 105 revolutionary, 7, 133 rhythm, 4 rice, 37–39, 101, 186, 201–202, 210, 223, 236, 251, 253–254 ridiculous, 104, 141 rights, 133, 166, 170–171 rimɓe, 130 Robert, Anne-Cecile, 209, 211

296

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

Romania, 52 ronier, 136–137 roots, 1, 44, 136–137, 150, 220 Rosen, Philip, 17 rotating savings and credit associations, 230 routine, 76, 79 Ruelle, Catherine, 164 rural, 37, 164, 167, 178, 184–185, 200, 204, 212, 215, 217, 230, 234 rural exodus, 217 Rwanda, 3 sabotage, 54 sacrificial lamb, 195 Sahara, 15, 128, 218, 228 sahel regions, 128 salindana, 193 same-sex marriage, 201 Sankara, Thomas, 211, 238 santhiaba, 202 sardonically, 102 Sarr, Diouana, 223–224 satire, 20–21, 123, 261, 263 Saudi Arabia, 150 Saxewaar, 137 scarf, 145–146 scathing, 21, 99, 108, 232 scene, 11, 20, 22, 38–39, 48, 69, 71, 79, 83, 102, 115–116, 122, 129, 134–135, 137–138, 140, 142, 144, 146–147, 152, 154–155, 159, 167, 169–171, 173–174, 179, 192–196, 200, 214, 217, 224–226, 228, 230–231, 233, 235, 249–250 Scheinfeigel, Maxime, 175 Scheub, Harold, 66 scholars, 15, 17–18, 20–22, 32, 49, 58, 83, 128, 152 school education, 106, 121 Scottish, 141

screen griot, 59, 65, 89 scriptwriter, 20 sculpture, 180 Seɓɓe, 130 secularism, 158–159 secure funding, 14 self-defeating, 33 self-esteem, 189 self-gratifying, 189, 191 selfhood, 93, 95 self-reliance, 229 self-serving, 102, 109, 116, 129, 170, 189, 191 sell, 78, 194, 210, 235–236, 266 Sembène, Ousmane, 1, 13, 17–23, 29, 65, 67–68, 238 Senegal, 1–2, 8–10, 17–18, 20–21, 24–25, 30, 33, 35–37, 40, 42, 44–46, 50, 54–59, 67–69, 71–72, 74, 76, 81, 83, 85, 94, 96, 100, 102, 104–111, 113, 119–120, 122–123, 127–131, 138, 140–142, 148, 150–152, 155–160, 164, 166, 168–169, 172, 176–177, 179–181, 183–189, 198, 200–203, 213–214, 217, 219, 221–223, 225–227, 230–234, 236–238, 240, 245–246, 249, 251–253, 255, 257, 259, 261, 263 Senghor, 7, 21, 42–46, 49–52, 54–56, 98–99, 107, 112, 123, 141, 156 sensibility, 9, 42 sententious, 3 Serceau, Daniel, 16–17, 175 Sereer, 1, 94, 108, 168, 223, 231 Servility, 95–96 seventh heaven, 121 sex, 122, 190, 201 Shaka, Femi Okiremuete, 15 Shakespeare, 6 sharia law, 132–133

Index shelter, 136 shirking of responsibility shock, 10, 74, 144 shoot, 39 shot-reverse-shot, 134, 150 shrine, 38, 254 significance, 12, 30, 49, 54, 129, 180, 211, 240 significant, 2, 14, 19–20, 35, 123, 131, 139, 142, 158, 169, 187–188, 226 silence, 144, 163, 197, 232 sine qua non, 166 skirts, 219 slum, 177–178 social, 1, 7–12, 14, 16, 19–21, 23, 31, 40, 42, 46, 54, 56–57, 66–73, 77, 83–85, 88–89, 101, 104, 106, 112, 128, 130, 137, 140–142, 152, 154, 157–159, 163–169, 171, 173, 176, 178, 180, 183–184, 186–189, 197, 200–202, 209, 212, 214, 217–218, 222–224, 229–231, 239, 252, 257, 259, 263 socialized, 163 socially acceptable roles, 163 societies, 5, 25, 31, 122, 128, 151, 165, 169, 183–184, 210–212 socioeconomic, 4, 8, 14, 24, 33–34, 54, 72, 100, 102, 112, 116, 190, 212, 217–218 sociopolitical, 23–24, 29, 59, 85, 239 soldiers, 37–41, 96, 201, 215, 253–254, 257, 259 solidarity, 48, 101, 185, 193, 222, 229–231 Soma, Ardiouma Somalia, 3 Sonata, 215 Sondé, Amadou, xiv, xxii Soninke, 94

297 sophistication, 69, 225 sorghum, 201 sorrowful, 71 soul, 18, 42, 46, 181, 195 soundtrack, 20 South Africa, 24, 238 south American, 213 south of the Sahara, 15 southeast Asia, 236 Sow, Thierno Faty, 96 space limitations, 212 Spanish, 52 speech, 44, 72, 108, 122, 150–151, 187, 194, 232–233, 261–262 spheres, 2, 5–6, 8, 30–33, 53, 55–56, 59, 65, 72, 83–88, 94, 96, 100–102, 129, 131, 146–147, 151, 159, 163, 168, 172–173, 175, 187–188, 190, 196–197, 204, 212–215, 222, 227, 229, 237 spirit shrines, 48, 136–137 spiritual beliefs, 159 sponsors, 123 spread, 123, 128, 257 stage director, 117 stale bread, 235–236 staple, 38, 185, 201, 210–211, 234, 236 status quo, 130, 141, 150, 170, 215 stillborn, 55 stories, 2, 7, 18, 59, 68, 71, 74–75, 82, 89, 99, 107, 197, 199, 212, 221, 240 storyline, 12 storyteller, 24, 66, 89 storytelling, 66–67, 74, 212 straddle, 104 stratification, 67 strike, 57, 148

298

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

strong, 1, 3, 9, 25, 29–30, 34, 38, 46–49, 54–55, 59, 71, 74, 77, 79, 81, 85, 87–88, 98–99, 107, 113–114, 116, 127–128, 131–133, 137, 140, 143–144, 148, 151, 155, 157, 159–160, 163–164, 166, 169–170, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180, 185–186, 188, 191–197, 200–202, 211–212, 218, 220–221, 223, 226–227, 230, 235, 238–239, 245, 247, 254, 261, 265 structural, 3, 25, 76, 79, 212–214, 231, 236 struggle, 5–7, 35, 57, 59, 69, 95, 123, 131, 194, 203, 218 study, 11, 13, 15, 20, 22–24, 106, 165, 221 subclass, 130 subjective shot, 225 subjectivities, 93 subjectivity, 15 subjugation, 35, 95, 131, 224 sub-Saharan, 3–4, 7–8, 10, 13–15, 20–21, 23–24, 30, 36–37, 42, 44, 46, 49–50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 65–66, 68, 76, 82, 93, 95, 100, 110, 127–128, 130–131, 147, 151, 159, 163–164, 166, 171–172, 183–184, 189, 197, 200–201, 203–204, 210–212, 234, 236–238, 253, 259, 263 subsistence, 185, 210–211, 233–234, 236 subtheme, 152, 188, 191, 217 subtlety, 121 subvert, 140 success, 55, 79, 88, 167, 191, 202, 223, 227 successive divorces, 201 suicide, 84–85, 87, 113, 163, 178, 181–183, 222–224, 249

Sundiata, an Epic of Old Mali, 66 superficial values, 190 sutura, 187 symbolism, 19–20, 22 symptomatic, 120 synonymous, 210 synopses, 25 tackle, 8, 20 Tanor, 83–84, 86, 247 Tapsoba, Clement, xiv, xxi tarnish, 123 taste, 211 technicians, 18, 24, 237–238 techniques, 17, 57, 59 television, 3, 17, 25, 122, 141, 196–198, 212–217, 231, 236 tensions, 12, 41, 128–129, 144, 158–159, 167, 257 terrible experiences, 121 testimonies, 18–19 Thackway, Melissa, 14 the art of winning, 34 the cart driver, 71, 75–79, 81, 111–112, 173–174, 177, 246 the chief, 107, 110, 144, 195–196, 215–216, 227, 229, 235, 254, 266 the father figure, 173 the French Riviera, 113, 179, 217, 220, 249 the Limpopo, 150 The Money Order, 100, 251 the Niger, 150 the Nile, 150 the skin of a goat devoured by a hyena is useless, 136–137 the worm is in the fruit, 136 theatre, 10, 45, 58, 117 Théâtre National, 45, 117 themes, 5, 8, 13–17, 20, 22, 25, 83, 173, 228

Index theoretical explorations, 15 theory, 3, 5, 14, 137, 237 Thiandoum, Ngoné War, 83, 86–87, 178, 247 Thiès, 109, 117–118, 261 Thioune, Pierre Henry, 231, 261–262 thought-provoking, 8, 175 threat, 55–56, 134, 175, 209, 233 timeless, xvi Tine, Alioune, 13 Tirailleurs Sénégalais, 40 tolerance, 24, 183, 231 tontine, 230 Toorooɓe, 130 Total headquarters, 199, 231 Toucouleur, 85 Touré, Samory, 203, 238 Touré, Sékou, 54 Toyota, 55 trade, 56, 68, 210, 224, 234 trade freedom tradition, 4, 20, 23–24, 31–32, 36, 38, 66–67, 72, 85, 101, 130–132, 137, 144, 150, 169, 178, 189, 196, 200, 216, 231 traditional, 1–2, 7, 13–14, 23–24, 30–32, 35–36, 38, 44, 54, 65–66, 68, 72, 74–76, 82–83, 85, 88–89, 100, 102–104, 108, 113, 119, 128, 131, 133, 135, 146–147, 150–151, 167–169, 172–173, 175, 177, 183, 185, 187, 189, 191, 197, 201, 210–213, 217, 219, 223, 226, 228–229, 232, 234, 236, 238–239, 249, 251, 253–255, 257, 259, 261, 263 trajectory, 13, 17, 19 transformative, 215, 235 transit, 40, 127, 259–260 transitional generation, 172

299 translation, 66, 110, 122, 171 translator, 19 transmission, 31, 72, 212 transnational migration, 217 transportation, 113, 236 trendy term, 209 tribulations, 8 tribute, 8, 17, 40, 164, 167, 259 trilogy, 165 trophy, 183, 191 truckload, 228 trust, 101, 117, 156 tubaabs, 219–220 tumultuous, 35 Tunis, 4 Tunisia, 50 tuxedos, 102, 116, 189 uhuru, 227 Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank, 17, 88 un perno, 40 uncompromising, 18, 89 unconsciously, 213 underrated, 55 uneducated, 102–103, 120, 235, 249 unequivocal, 199–200 uneven, 18, 99 unfairness, 200 unheard of, 122, 148, 197 United Nations, 195 United States, 24, 53, 65–66, 236 universal, 22, 44, 51, 54, 69 university, 24, 36, 158, 220–221, 229, 256 unreal, 71 unschooled, 111, 179, 219, 251 upbringing, 23, 30, 213, 221 urban, 17, 22, 111, 129, 164, 167, 178, 184–185, 187–188, 191, 200, 211–212, 217, 224, 230, 234–236, 259

300

The Films of Ousmane Sembène

usurp, 132 Utopies et Prospectives, 221 valuable, 16, 228 values, 2, 8, 30–32, 53, 65, 72, 83–88, 94, 96, 101–102, 129, 131, 146–147, 151, 159, 172–173, 175, 187–188, 190, 196–197, 212–215, 227, 229 variety, 18, 21 vehicle, 4, 105 vengeful, 121 verbally, 85, 89 Verlaine, 6 version, 118, 123 viatique, 18 vibrancy, 167 vicious, 189, 191, 236 vicissitudes, 13 viewers, 7, 10–11, 39, 71, 74, 76, 80, 84, 123, 134, 139–140, 142, 144–145, 149–150, 152, 155, 159, 173–178, 181, 185–187, 190–191, 194–195, 197, 200, 215, 218, 222, 225–229, 233, 235, 265 Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou, 16, 18 village, 37–39, 47–49, 73, 83–88, 109–110, 142–144, 149–150, 178, 191–192, 194–197, 199, 215–217, 223, 227, 233–236, 247, 252–254, 258, 261–262, 265–266 violence, 3, 41, 158, 196 virility, 189–190 visible, 43, 66, 84, 127, 137, 192, 197, 227, 231, 240 vision, 3, 10 voice, 5, 59, 69, 74, 79, 82–83, 104, 111–113, 116, 118, 120, 163, 165–166, 173, 176–177, 183, 191, 224, 238, 257

volume, 2, 11–18, 22–25, 234, 240, 250 vulgarity, 121, 263 vulnerable, 140, 196, 213 vulture, 152 wa Thiong’o, Ngugi, 95 Wade, 156–158 Wane, Samba, 45, 117–118 wealth, 88, 102, 104, 184, 189, 228 weight, 95, 166, 190 west Africa, 15, 24, 130, 236–237 West Africa Review, 24 Western, 3, 5–8, 12, 17, 20, 31–32, 34, 42, 44–47, 49–50, 53–55, 65, 68, 72, 82, 88–89, 94–96, 102–105, 108, 120, 164, 169, 181, 187–188, 197, 209, 213, 219, 223, 230, 233, 240 wheat, 210–211, 236 whores, 122 wife, 69, 75, 79, 102, 112, 122, 142, 173–177, 183–187, 189–194, 204, 213–214, 245–247, 250, 252, 255–256, 266 wigs, 219, 223 Willey, Ann Elizabeth, 17 Williams, Patrick, 15 Wolof, 54–55, 94, 100, 103–111, 116, 118–120, 122–123, 130, 134, 137, 148, 169, 187, 219, 231, 245, 261 Wolofization, 130 womanhood, 168, 197 women, 8, 13, 20–21, 23–24, 36–39, 47, 105, 120–122, 133, 149, 163–169, 171–173, 177–178, 186, 188, 192–194, 196–205, 215–217, 238, 253–254, 265–266 wood, 19, 57, 81, 117, 135, 143, 180–182, 212, 227, 239, 249 workers, 57, 112, 218

Index working class, 68, 112, 177 world, 8, 10, 22, 37, 40, 44–45, 49–50, 53, 56, 83–88, 94–96, 100–101, 109, 113, 128–129, 133–134, 146, 151, 167, 171, 178, 180, 182, 190, 195, 201, 209–211, 214, 216–217, 219–220, 222–223, 225–226, 228–230, 236, 247–248, 253–254, 257, 259 worldviews, 94–95, 212–215 worship, 23, 128, 203 writer, 2, 16, 19, 41, 43, 57, 99, 116, 250–251

301 writings, 10, 16–17, 58, 99, 106, 239 Xala, 14–15, 21–23, 25, 102–103, 107–108, 164–165, 185, 189, 191, 200, 219, 238, 255 Yamar, 149–150, 262 Yaméogo, Guy Désiré yield, 37–38, 51, 211 younger generations, 72, 212 Zenani, Nongenile Masithathu, 66 Ziguinchor, 1, 36, 202