Ousmane Sembène at 100: a tribute to Senegal’s ‘father of African cinema’

1 January 2023 marked the centenary of the beginning of Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese novelist and filmmaker hailed because the “father of African cinema”. Over the course of 5 a long time Sembène printed 10 books and directed 12 movies throughout three distinct intervals. He has been celebrated for his superbly crafted political works, which vary in fashion from the psychological realism of Black Girl in 1966 to the biting satire of Xala (The Curse) in 1974.

Since his demise in 2007, Sembène’s standing as a pioneer has been additional cemented. However the sheer selection and richness of his work, his means to reinvent himself as an artist, has typically been ignored. On the event of his centenary, it’s price taking a look at what made him such a outstanding artistic presence.

The novelist: 1956-1960

Not like a lot of his literary friends, Sembène didn’t come to writing through the colonial schooling system. In actual fact, he left faculty early and was largely self-educated. He was born into the minority Lebou neighborhood within the southern Senegalese area of Casamance. His father was a fisherman. He later moved to the colonial capital of Dakar.

After serving within the French Military within the Second World Conflict, he moved to France in 1946. Employed as a dockworker in Marseilles within the Fifties, he developed a love of literature via the library of the communist-affiliated commerce union, the Confédération Générale du Travail. His first novel, The Black Docker (1956), self-consciously explores the difficulties confronted by a working-class black author searching for to change into a broadcast writer.

Sembène’s most celebrated novel, God’s Bits of Wood (1960), is a fictionalised account of the 1947-1948 railway strike in colonial French West Africa. A sweeping epic, set throughout three completely different areas with a bunch of characters, the guide illustrates Sembène’s Marxist, pan-Africanist imaginative and prescient of anti-colonialism. He believed the overthrow of colonial powers might greatest be achieved via alliances between employees throughout nationwide and ethnic divides.

God’s Bits of Wooden is commonly described because the traditional Sembène textual content, politically dedicated and realist in fashion. Nevertheless, it proved to be the excessive water mark of his exploration of literary realism.

In 1960, he returned to Africa after greater than a decade in Europe to tour a continent rising from colonial domination. He famously acknowledged that, sitting on the banks of the Congo River watching the teeming plenty, most of whom couldn’t learn or write, he skilled an epiphany. If his novels have been inaccessible to many Africans, cinema was the reply. He set about turning into a filmmaker.

Novelist and filmmaker: 1962-1976

After learning cinema in Moscow, Sembène directed his first brief movie, Borom Sarret (The Wagoner), in 1962. A day within the lifetime of a lowly cart driver, the movie supplies a stinging critique of the failures of independence in Senegal, forged because the switch of energy from one ruling elite to a different. Like most Francophone African international locations, Senegal had gained its independence in 1960. It will be ruled for the following 20 years by the Socialist Celebration, led by the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, who sought to take care of shut political and cultural ties to France.

Between 1962 and 1976, Sembène printed 4 books and directed eight movies, works of an unimaginable aesthetic variety. Certainly, this may increasingly rank as the only richest interval of creative productiveness of any African author or director within the postcolonial period. Sembène chalked up a sequence of pioneering firsts by a black African director: first movie made in Africa (Borom Sarret), first characteristic movie (Black Lady), first movie in an African language (Mandabi).

He started to achieve worldwide renown however there was little alternative to see his work from home. Mandabi (The Cash Order), for instance, gained a prize on the Venice Movie Competition however was not launched in Senegal, the place it was criticised by the federal government for presenting a detrimental imaginative and prescient of the nation.

Between 1971 and 1976, Sembène made his most formidable trilogy of movies: Emitaï, Xala and Ceddo. They have been pushed by robust storylines. However most essential to Sembène was a movie’s means to condense social, political and historic realities right into a sequence of searing photos. These typically blurred the boundaries of area and time.

In Ceddo he collapsed a number of centuries of historical past into the life of 1 Senegalese village, resulting in a wrestle for energy between animism, Christianity and Islam. The latter asserts its dominance via the barrel of a gun, a controversial stance in a rustic that was over 90% Muslim by then. Ceddo was banned by Sembène’s arch-enemy, Senghor. He wouldn’t make one other movie for over a decade.

Wilderness years to a late flowering: 1976-2004

After a decade spent largely within the artistic wilderness, Sembène skilled a late flowering from the top of the Nineteen Eighties onwards. This noticed him attain a brand new technology of audiences. His later works have been much less formidable aesthetically however no much less highly effective.

His masterpiece Moolaadé (2004) was a scathing denunciation of feminine genital mutilation in rural West Africa. In it, the forces of change oppose conservative, patriarchal authority. The photographs of the ladies’s radios being burned by the lads in entrance of the village mosque are a stark visible illustration of this battle. As in his earlier movies, what issues is key energy relationships, not a intently noticed realism that depicts the world as it’s however can’t think about change it.

Sembène immediately

Since Sembène’s demise, we have now realized extra about his life and profession via the painstaking work of his biographer Samba Gadjigo, who additionally co-created the documentary Sembène! (2015). Generally what the Senegalese author and tutorial realized has been detrimental – not least Sembène’s “theft” of the thought for the movie Camp de Thiaroye (1988) from two younger Senegalese creators. However that’s a obligatory a part of overcoming the overly reverential accounts that generally move for dialogue of Sembène’s profession.

The current opening of the Sembène archive on the College of Indiana affords students additional alternative to deepen their understanding of his life and work.

These unfamiliar with Sembène ought to seize a replica of God’s Bits of Wooden or discover current DVD editions of traditional movies similar to Black Lady or Xala (whose opening sequence is, for my part, among the many greatest 5 minutes in all of African cinema). My private favorite is his tragi-comedy Mandabi, lately re-released in a newly restored print. Underneath the guise of a easy story a few poor man making an attempt to money a cash order, Sembène weaves an excellent critique of capitalism and the ability of cash to undermine social and household bonds.

In Paris, the Cinémathèque Française is marking the centenary of Sembène’s beginning with a retrospective of his movies.

Sembène’s movies nonetheless matter immediately not solely due to the continued relevance of lots of the social and political points they handled. But in addition as a result of he was capable of create a movie language that spoke powerfully to audiences around the globe.

He cast a profession that lasted 5 a long time when a lot of his contemporaries struggled to make greater than a handful of movies. That creativity and longevity helped to form African cinema in complicated methods: up to date administrators could comply with in Sembène’s footsteps or select to reject his politically dedicated fashion – however his legacy can’t be ignored.