Still the Fire in the Belly: The Confessions of Ousmane Sembene

THE CON FESSI ON S OF OUSM AN E SEM BEN E T he meeting has been under way for well over two hours, and the seven participants do not seem exhausted after strings of passionate exchanges. The scene could have been ripped from a chapter of Sembene Ousmane's fifth novel God's Bits of Wood, in which the women deliberate their plan of attack against the oppressive and brutal foreign railroad overlords of the Dakar-Niger line; it is also reminiscent of the scene in Guelwaar, where Baye Ali, the village chief summoned the Muslim elders M A M A D (Kilife) to discuss the grotesque profanity caused by the burial of Pierre-Henri Thioune, a Christian, in a Muslim cemetery. But we are at Sembene Ousmane's quarters, and the novelist-filmmaker is presiding over this strategic meeting of Senegalese filmmakers to chart solutions for the most enduring conundrum facing African filmmakers: how to show the films they make at their home theaters, and at theaters elsewhere in the region, so that African audiences can see them. Like the protagonists in his films and his novels, Sembene Ousmane takes on issues like these with the same intensity and a tenacious sense of mission. The problem of distribution —reaching African audiences— has been his life-long struggle. Sembene's offices are located in a busy commercial street in downtown Dakar, where he converted a single family house into a spacious work space, allowing collaborators and strapped colleagues a place they can call office. A well kept flower garden sits in the middle of the courtyard, opposite a zinc roofed conference area. Most of the filmmakers seated around the table are veteran Senegalese directors and screenwriters little-known internationally. But they're part of this group Sembene calls "waa ker gee," a Ouolof expression meaning the "family." Fifteen years ago, they formed the African Filmmakers Committee, a regional organization which includes more that twenty notable directors from neighboring countries. They're discussing the perennial issues of inadequate and insufficient production resources, and to find new creative ways to address the failure of African government's cultural policies to support a thriving film community. Sembene Ousmane has just reached his seventy fourth birthday, and as he puts it "I am an old youngster with the faith of an adolescent." Perhaps he feels this way because his career did not start until he was well over forty. First, a novelist before making films, Sembene's urge to write was fueled by the rage to tell and enlighten about the oppressive nature of the colonial state and its dialectical relationship with injustice. A perpetual activist since his working days at a Marseilles shipyard, an experience that inspired his first novel, Le Docker Noir, he took up the daunting task to make films in a place with no moviemaking equipment, no labs, and only with a handful of theaters tightly controlled by a European network of distribution which packed them with Hollywood action films and Indian melodramas . Since he completed Borom Sarret, his first feature in 1963, he began a stubborn attempt to break the lock. He found temporary solace by making the rounds of remote villages on a bicycle showing the film at nightfall to enthusiastic crowds. These personal encounters convinced him that film is a N I A N G potent educational tool. In all his tales, but his first film, L'Empire Sonhrai, a story about African resistance to colonialism shot in Timbuktu, Sembene tells about the paradoxes bedeviling Senegalese society. He believes his artistic generation has an immense role to play in the political process; their work should inform about the transformation of our post-colonial societies; they must be tools for empowerment and enlightenment. The stories Sembene tells have this conspicuous political edge which confronts the African audience to own up to the unfinished business of decolonization, be it a satire on the quirks of the Senegalese political class and bureaucrats (Xala,) or a scathing commentary on religious evangelists, Christians or Muslims, helped by African surrogates (Ceddo.) But they are told with a pointed wit; he is a brilliant story teller with a commanding art at elevating the...