The Afrocentric Paradigm and Womanist Agendas in Ousmane Sembene's Faat Kine (2001)

The heroines of African films by filmmakers such as Cameroonian Jean-Marie Teno, Togolese Anne-Laure Folly, and Senegalese Ousmane Sembène, Safi Faye, and Moussa Sène Absa reflect a "transformation of consciousness" that depicts them as "genuinely free to forge new combinations of personality traits . . . without the need . . . to imitate the model of the European" or dwell on traditional mores and customs that have hindered their active agency in contemporary African societies. This cinematographic transformation of consciousness posits a new Africana womanism that encourages women to recognize that "African women's reality has been inscribed from the West or by men" and must be reconfigured.¹ Africana womanism relies on the "specificity" of the Africana woman's condition. Africana scholars such as Clenora Hudson-Weems, Nah Dov, and Mary E. Modupe Kolawole build an-Other feminism that expresses "African women's yearning [for new conceptions of themselves] as opposed to an imposed or dogmatic position."² This yearning for change is grounded in the idea of Social Transformation Including Women in Africa (STIWA), as scholar Molara Ogundipe-Leslie explains. The STIWA model allows one to "bypass the combative discourses that ensue whenever one raises the issue of feminism in Africa."³ Within the scope of the STIWA model, "African women [construct] a society in which they can assert their innate resourcefulness by rejecting the fetters of tradition and any aspect of socialization that puts them at a disadvantage."⁴

Since the 1980s Africanist scholars have "introduced fundamental referential changes in the African community" that reflect the cumulative theories, ideologies, and philosophies of almost a century of revolutionary thought.⁵ From Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor to Cheikh Anta Diop and Molefi Asante, Africanist revolutionary thought has become "a formidable Pan-African development," an African gnosis as promoted in The Invention of Africa by V. Y. Mudimbé.⁶ The tenets of Afrocentric thought support an "epistemological centeredness" that Asante proclaims provides "a frame of reference wherein phenomena are viewed from the perspective of the African person. . . . As an intellectual theory, Afrocentricity is the study of the ideas and events from the standpoint of Africans as the key players rather than victims. . . . It is Africa asserting itself intellectually and psychologically, breaking the bonds of Western domination in the mind as an analogue for breaking those bonds in every other field."⁷ Ama Mazama, who suggests that the Afrocentric idea is essential because it is the "assertion of the primacy of the African experience [aiming to] give us our African, victorious consciousness back," also maintains that Afrocentricity is a paradigm because it "acts as an encapsulating unit, or framework, within which the more restricted, or higher-order structures develop."⁸ The paradigm encompasses the sum total of Africanist ideology, and for scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Molefi Asante, and many others, it represents the pinnacle of a "perspective" that places emphasis on the essentiality of community, tradition, spirituality, respect for the natural environment, selfhood, and also a "veneration of ancestors and the unity of being."⁹ For Mazama, Diop, and Asante, Afrocentricity is a new form of nationalism that places primary importance on cultural space as the determinate factor of identity.¹⁰

It is within the Afrocentric paradigm that African women have formulated a unique feminism that pertains to the specificity of African life. Women scholars such as Nah Dov, Mary E. Modupe Kolawole, and Clenora Hudson-Weems maintain that what is essential to an Africana woman's identity and agency is very different from what white Western European and American feminists have struggled for since the inception of the Western feminist movement. Africana women, a term encompassing not only the issues of African women but also their sisters of color throughout the African diaspora, seek to promote the interests of women in their own societies along the lines of sociocultural and political domains implicit within these societies. They maintain that their particular issues extend beyond gender-specific debates to encompass the many influences on and conundrums within Africana women's daily lives...