Ousmane Sembene (1923–2007)

Ousmane Sembene was born in 1923 in Casamance, in southern Senegal. Expelled from school in the sixth grade, he was, at age 14, sent to Dakar where, while working as a laborer, he discovered literature, comic books, and movies. In 1944, Sembene was drafted into the French colonial infantry unit, an experience that broadened his horizons (he served in the Niger and the North African front), deepened his understanding of colonization, and served as the basis of his feature films Emitaï (SN, 1971) and Camp de Thiaroye (SN, 1988). After World War II, Sembene moved to Marseilles, where he found employment as a dockworker (a story he fictionalized in his first novel Black Docker [1956]) and soon became a forceful spokesperson within the radical arts and political movements of the region. A member of the French Communist Party and of the trade union Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), and a reader who studied Marx, Lenin, Neruda, Jack London, Birago Diop, Richard Wright, and Hemingway, the self-taught Sembene published his first poem in 1956, and before returning to Africa in 1960 published three successful novels. During a 1961 tour of Africa, then exploding with revolutionary fervor, creative possibility, and postcolonial backlash, this laborer-turned-writer recognized that African people could not be effectively reached through written literature in any language. Cinema, however, could tell the essential stories of Africa to the African people. Sembene chose to devote his energies to creating emancipating and restorative images for the African people. He enrolled in a filmmaking program at Moscow's Gorki Studios, returned to Dakar with a Soviet camera, and, in 1963, premiered the short Borom Sarret (SN, 1963), a film that transformed Africa from a continent of media consumers into one with the potential to produce them. This was no historical accident; through the next forty years, Sembene remained keenly aware of these entwined roles as artist and revolutionary, working tirelessly to create powerful works infused with his deep sense of responsibility.

After his first, award-winning feature La Noire de …/Black Girl (SN/FR, 1966), Sembene began building the literary and cinematographic legacy that today situates him as the "father of African cinema." Sembene was among the first filmmakers to "indigenize" cinema, forgoing Hollywood-style moviemaking for African narrative structures and aesthetics. He created his own production company, working independently of the European system that continues to dictate filmmaking practices in Africa today.

Made under impossible circumstances using limited resources, Sembene's works, including Faat Kiné (SN, 2001) and Guelwaar (FR/DE/SN/US, 1993), won awards at festivals in Venice, Moscow, Los Angeles, Tunis, and Karlovy Vary. All of his feature films and major literary works have been translated into English, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese. "Africa is my audience," Sembene said, "while the West is my market." Sembene's introduction of genuinely African film aesthetics informed cinematic practice both in Africa and around the world, offering inspiration for other marginalized societies, whose members began to pick up cameras and tell their own stories.

Sembene's career culminated with Moolaadé (SN/BF/MA/TN/CM/FR, 2004), an award-winner at the 2004 Cannes film festival. In addition to his film work, Sembene was one of Africa's most prolific and recognized writers, with seven of his ten published literary works, including God's Bits of Wood, translated into English and introduced to the curricula of high schools and universities throughout Africa. His literary and cinematic output leaves Sembene as perhaps one the most important figures of twentieth-century Africa, a folk hero and contemporary artist who, more than any other, succeeded both in capturing the complexities of African cultures and in looking forward to a more equitable society, and his forty years of creative output blazed a trail for generations of African, African-American, and African European writers, filmmakers, and scholars. "We will never be Arabs or Europeans," Sembene said. "We are Africans."