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  • Ousmane Sembene:La lutte continue! A Personal Tribute
  • Samba Gadjigo

In 1972, I was an eleventh-grade student at the Lycée Faidherbe, in the Senegalese city of Saint Louis, in northern Senegal. That year will remain deeply cast in my memory because it was the year a single book made me lose my political innocence and changed my worldview. God's Bits of Wood, acclaimed around the world as Sembene's masterpiece, was my first ever contact with "African" literature. Sembene's 1960 novel has an epic dimension, in that the 1947–1948 railroad workers' strike it dramatizes took place in a vast geographical area, along a railroad line that stretches over 1,287 kilometers from Dakar (Senegal), headquarters of Afrique occidentale française—AOF (French West Africa) on the Atlantic, all the way to Kayes and Bamako, on the banks of the Niger River. A myriad of peoples, cultures, histories, religions, and, of course, languages melt into each other in the heat of industrialization and urbanization generated by the Machine. God's Bits of Wood is a story about revival through struggle of millions of people, all compelled by a desire for change, reaching across all imagined lines, and, as Sembene himself would put it, "a demonstration that African unity can only be achieved when viewed from a Marxist viewpoint, on a political and economic basis."

Before that, my entire curriculum in literature had been confined to the French classics: Molière, Voltaire, and Hugo. No mention was ever made of African writers except in short excerpts. God's Bits of Wood thus opened my generation to a new way of seeing ourselves and the world around us. Sembene's book literally spoke to us. We knew the places, we had the same names as some of its characters. In this novel, we discovered a new Africa, an Africa whose men and women were fighting not only for higher wages but even more for freedom and a better tomorrow. In the heat of this political struggle, new songs were created on the fertile ground of old ones; old epics were unearthed with new meanings.

During all my years at Dakar University in the mid-seventies to the early eighties, in a French department again dominated by the French classics, I repeatedly wondered why Sembene's work was mentioned only in passing. Only in 1982, in Champaign-Urbana (of all places) did I discover Sembene's films, and I became intrigued that the Senegalese movie-going public had not seen them.

My first meeting with Ousmane Sembene happened in the summer of 1989. Having very easily convinced my colleagues in the Five Colleges African Studies Council to invite him to the Pioneer Valley for a one-month residence, I sent [End Page 1] Sembene a fax. His reply came quickly: "I have no time to spend with American academics; there is a lot to do here in Africa." Since artists and writers all over the world wished to come to the US for the "validation" of their work, I was very surprised by this resistance but not discouraged. Stubborn as a mule, I traveled to Dakar that summer in the hope of convincing him to come and help us promote African studies. I arrived early one afternoon at 36 Abdoukarim Bourgi, home of his Doomi Reew production company, and was introduced by his secretary, Angel Lopy. "Bonjour, Monsieur Sembene," I stammered, "my name is Samba Gadjigo and I traveled from the US to invite you to my university." He replied, "I think I have already replied to your invitation. I am not going to the US. If you are interested in African studies, my works are available; you read my books and watch my films. My person is not important, and I wish to remain anonymous, lost in the crowd." I had tears in my eyes, intimidated by what I perceived then as an abrupt, distant, and stone cold man whose works all speak of Africa but who would not give the time of day to a young person who also wanted to promote Africa. But he went on, "Well, give me that invitation of yours and we shall...

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