Djibril Diop Mambety: A Retrospective

Cinema has to be put in the service of self-knowledge.

--Djibril Diop Mambety

Djibril Diop Mambety (1945-98) observed that "life is always in three stages: small, big, old. Life is a drama and a drama is always in three acts: prologue, story, epilogue. I see myself in between the small and big stages of life's trilogy" (Mambety 31). Mambety's comments provide a context within which to frame his work, for he conceived of most of his films as trilogies. Born in Dakar, Senegal, Mambety believed that the role of the filmmaker was that of a griot--more than a storyteller, the griot is "a messenger of one's time, a visionary and the creator of the future" (31).

Mambety began his career as a screen griot with the critically acclaimed short film Contras City (A City of Contrasts, 1969). In 1970, he released Badou Boy, a short film that won the Silver Tanit at the 1970 Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia. The films that followed were planned as parallel trilogies. ¹ The first series explores power and insanity (Touki Bouki, Hyènes, and the projected third part, Malaika), while the second trilogy focuses on ordinary people (Le franc, La petite vendeuse de Soleil, and the planned third part, La tailleuse de pierre ² ).

Touki Bouki (The Hyena's Journey, 1973), Mambety's first feature-length film, won the Special Jury Award at the Moscow Film Festival and the International Critics Award at Cannes. Considered a classic by film scholars, Touki Bouki follows the journey of a Senegalese couple (Anta and Mory) who run away from their families and try to acquire enough money for boat tickets to France. "Anta and Mory do not dream of building castles in Africa; they dream of finding some sort of Atlantis overseas" (Mambety qtd. in Ukadike 3). Mambety said that in his second feature-length film, Hyènes (Hyenas, 1992) ³ the main characters from Touki Bouki reappear; Anta (who leaves Africa and crosses the Atlantic alone) is Linguere Ramatou, and Mory (who stays in Africa "as if he has betrayed her") is Draman Drameh. ⁴

In Hyènes, Linguere Ramatou returns to the town of Colobane a rich woman after an absence of thirty years. She promises the townspeople 100,000 million francs (half of which they can share among themselves) if they will kill her former lover Draman Drameh. She tells the people who initially reject her proposal, "Either you get blood on your hands or you stay poor forever." When she was seventeen and Draman was twenty, she was pregnant with his child. Rather than acknowledge the child, Draman paid two men to testify that they had sexual relationships with Linguere so that she would seem promiscuous. She left the town in disgrace and was forced into prostitution; the child, whose name was Goudi ("star"), lived one year. Linguere's sole purpose in returning to Colobane is to take revenge on the man who abandoned and humiliated her and on the townspeople who put her on trial and deserted her. Mambety's goal in Hyènes was to create a continental film that crosses boundaries:

To make Hyènes even more continental, we borrowed elephants from the Masai of Kenya, hyenas from Uganda, and people from Senegal. And to make it global, we borrowed somebody from Japan, and carnival scenes from the annual Carnival of Humanity of the French Communist Party in Paris. All of these are intended to open the horizons, to make the film universal. [. . .] My task was to identify the enemy of humankind: money, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank (Mambety qtd. in Ukadike 3).

Following Hyènes, he began a trilogy of short films about ordinary people in which, Mambety noted, the individual defeats money. Le franc (The Franc, 1994), the first in the series, focuses on Marigo, a poor man who dreams of being a famous musician. He owns the...