Ousmane Sembene: A Memorial Tribute

When African filmmaker Ousmane Sembene died at 84 in Dakar, Senegal, on June 9, 2007, the world duly took note. Sembene had lived a remarkable life that spanned most of the twentieth century and beyond, and his ten feature films, four short films, five novels, and five collections of short stories engage the challenges and contradictions that have energized and often fractured our times. Sembene was one of my heroes for his spirited and tough portrayals of conflicts about identity and belief that galvanized Africa in its long and painful struggle toward modernity. As his films suggest, he was a man of remarkable vision, one who had experienced and resisted colonial exploitation in many forms, and who refused to be patronized.

Growing up in a French West African colonial milieu in the earlier twentieth century was surely a visceral introduction to the vicissitudes of colonialism. The story of how Sembene, raised in Ziguinchor, in the Casamance region of southern Senegal, was expelled from a French middle school as a young boy is legendary: when his French teacher slapped him for perceived insolence, he struck back. It had to have been the birth of his political conscience. From that time on Sembene educated himself. As his biographer Samba Gadjigo notes, Sembene often asserted the need to "apprendre à l'école de la vie" 'learn in the school of life.'¹ And Sembene's years in the 1950s as a dock worker, trade union activist, and dedicated member of the French Communist Party in Marseille were an autodidactic forum.

Sembene came to prominence as a novelist writing in the grand tradition of French nineteenth-century realist fiction, but part of his visionary courage was to abandon the novel, although he continued to write and publish stories and screenplays. He dissented from and sharply criticized the Négritude movement led by his countryman Senghor, and the Paris-based Modernism of the Présence Africaine group, dedicated to literature at a time when many Africans could neither read, afford books, nor get access to them. Seeking an alternative form that would awaken Africans to the need for collective transformation beyond official independence, in 1962 Sembene was awarded a scholarship to film school in Moscow. There, under the tutelage of Mark Donskoi, he was exposed to the great Russian silent cinema—Eisenstein's revolutionary dramas, such as Potemkin and Ten Days That Shook the World, and Vertov's self-referential documentaries that used cinematic montage to dramatize ideological conflicts and crystallize the historical context in which individuals are embedded, whether or not they recognize it. A style of dialectical montage and a focus on social inequity would remain hallmarks of Sembene's films.

When Sembene returned to Dakar in the early sixties to begin making films, he vowed to represent Africa to and for Africans, something that had not yet happened in the history of the world (as readers of Conrad's Heart of Darkness can attest). One of his early feature films, Mandabi (The Money Order, 1968), was released with two sound tracks, in Wolof for African circulation, and in French for international distribution. One of the ironies of Sembene's long and brilliant career as a film writer, director, and producer, however, is that West Africa, specifically Senegal, remains a difficult place to view his films—except at the university or in a French Cultural Center festival. Even though his 1976 film Ceddo ("rebel," the name he also gave his villa) was banned in Senegal for its portrayal of early Islam as a religious system contending with Euro-Christianity that triumphed through brutal repression, it never became the cult classic one might expect, given its notoriety (see the excellent discussion in Cham's "Official History, Popular Memory").

Sembene was admittedly feisty and a bit protective about intellectual property rights, and it would be fair to say that he didn't suffer fools gladly. Determined not to lose control after he had painstakingly raised funds to make his films, he negotiated strict contracts with New Yorker Films that can make his films expensive to rent or purchase and hard to see in the American heartland...