The Films of Ousmane Sembène: Discourse, Politics, and Culture by Amadou Fofana (review)

In 1956, while working as a laborer at the rough docks of Marseilles, the Senegalese laborer Ousmane Sembène wrote his first poem, entitled “Liberté”:

I pay tribute … to our undivided Africa, to our country, our legends, our myths… / This land is ours … / We will seek its poets, we shall find its philosophers, we shall exploit its virgin land. / We shall erect monuments to honor its heroes. … / We shall shape in the mold of violence and commitment, a nation.

Those words served as a statement of purpose, resonating through Sembène’s work for the next fifty years. By the time of his death in 2007, Sembène had built one of history’s most remarkable artistic careers. Through decades of tireless creativity, Sembène’s output—nine feature films, five short films, ten novels and novellas, the founding and editing of a Wolof-language literary magazine, along with poems, essays, and foundational work on key cultural institutions—remained focused on building a free and progressive Africa. It left enough substance for several generations of scholars to explore.

Several outstanding works have been published on Sembène: David Murphy’s Sembène: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction (2001); A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembène (1996), edited by Sheila Petty; Francois Pfaff‘s The Cinema of Ousmane Sembène, A Pioneer of African Film (1984); several collections of interviews; and Samba Gadjigo’s biography Ousmane Sembène: Making of a Militant Artist (2010), along with numerous dissertations and scholarly articles in English and French. Because Sembène was a major and visionary political artist—one who, shockingly, remains at risk of being forgotten—his legacy deserves still more examination. And so it is gratifying to discover Amadou T. Fofana’s The Films of Ousmane Sembène: Discourse, Politics, and Culture, a thoughtful, well-argued, and admirably accessible introduction to the groundbreaking works by “the father of African cinema.” A professor of French at Willamette College in Salem, Oregon, Fofana has created an overview that illuminates key themes and contexts through a close reading of Sembène’s works. Though his book’s ostensible focus is cinema, Fofana has crafted a broader examination of history, politics, and culture that will be of particular interest to students in African studies and film studies programs, and to a general audience with an interest in Black cinema and art and resistance movements.

The book avoids the theoretical framing that might have alienated readers new to the subject. Instead, Fofana weaves useful descriptions of West African tradition and its evolution during the colonial and neocolonial periods into his essays, and illuminates the key literary and ideological movements that informed Sembène. His descriptions of Sembène’s personal life and the history of the region offer a clear and straightforward context for the tumultuous sociopolitical and cultural eras Sembène’s work traversed. Sembène, who insisted on making works that could be understood by a broad population, and often waved off biographers with lines like “If you want to know me, study my works,” would likely have been pleased.

In his introduction, Fofana offers context on African filmmaking, framing Sembène’s project with a quote from the Martinique-born philosopher and psychologist Frantz Fanon: “A national culture in underdeveloped countries should … take its place at the very heart of the struggle for freedom, which these countries are carrying on” (Wretched of the Earth, 1963). As such, Fofana writes, Sembène’s films “focus on microcosmic social relations and day-to-day politics … breed[ing] provocative commentary on social, historical, political, economic, linguistic, religious and gender issues relevant to Senegalese society. … Sembène targeted the common people whose voices are seldom or never heard” (9).

The book is then divided into six parts. In the first, “Contextualizing Ousmane Sembène,” Fofana outlines the colonial imperative which he argues included a systemic, continuous push towards assimilation of the indigenous populations. That necessitated the...