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In the ensuing cacophony of losing two great giants of world cinema [ Antonioni and Bergman ] and deservedly so, we seem to have forgotten that another one passed away very quietly just a few moons ago. On June 9th 2007 the first ever African Director to have made a feature film left us bereft of an authentic African voice.

Sembene had been on the jury of various prestigious film festivals over the years. Cannes [1967], Berlin [1977], Venice [1983]. Apart from being the first African Director to have given director’s lessons at Cannes he was also the grand old littérateur from Senegal giving voice to the marginalized African Woman. He was working on the “Brotherhood of Rats” when he passed away after a long illness.

In many countries in Africa, high schools, libraries, and amphitheaters bear his name. Even in Paris, where his work is far from meeting official approval, in 1998, a whole week was devoted to a retrospective of his work for being the first African director to confer value to African images.

In ‘Ousmane Sembène: The Life of a Revolutionary Artist’, Samba Gadjigo writes that “for Sembène, in both literature and film, the work of ‘art’ should not be a mere re-presentation of ‘reality,’ or ‘une pancarte,’ a political banner. In order to capture the imagination of the people they ’speak’ to and for, those symbols first must be intelligible to them. They must stem from and reflect their cultural universe. At work in Sembène’s art is to project a genuine African film language that also entertains a dialogical relationship with other world cultures.”

From the artiste himself:

“I have never tried to please my audience through the embellishment of reality. I am a participant and an observer of my society”

“The development of Africa will not happen without the effective participation of women. Our forefathers’ image of women must be buried once for all.”

“I benefited from a synthesis of values - in the house, the compound, the country and Koranic and French schools. We conserved our own culture; we had nightly gatherings with tales. Now I call it my own theater.”

OUSMANE SEMBENE [1923-2007]

After a viewing of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad, a documentary on the 1936 Munich Olympic games by one of Hitler’s favorite filmmakers , it dawned on him, both the necessity and desire to make movies - the technology and art of motion, color, and sound. Not escapist or melodramatic as in the Hollywood style but movies more as “école du soir” (night school) is what he called them. He aimed more at educating the people, following in the tradition of many African oral cultures where, at night, people gathered around a wood fire and listened to stories told by griots [traditional story tellers] Hence Sembene was nearly 40yrs old when he finally decided to take up film making. In 1962, Sembene spent a year learning cinematography at the Gorki Studios in Moscow, under the tutelage of Soviet director Marc Donskoï.

Ousmane Sembene started his artistic career as a poet, a short story writer, an essayist and a novelist. His first published work was Liberté (1956). Primarily self-taught, from the age of 15, he started earning his living as a fisherman. Sembene has also served as a bricklayer, a plumber, an apprentice mechanic, a dock worker and a trade unionist — jobs which seem incongruent with literary talents, but helped shape Sembene as the great writer and filmmaker he had become. In this respect, Ousmane maintained that his education was a result of a training he received in “the University of Life “. After World War II broke out, Sembene was also drafted into the French army.

Sembene’s work is usually a critique of the conflict ridden relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the state and the people, men and women, the rich and the poor, and the elders and the youth. Ousmane’s work constantly talks of the wrongs within his society. He thus indulged in the critical examination of post-colonial African societies without seeking to embellish or discredit them, but to depict a reality in which the critic objectively considers issues important to contemporary Africa.

MOOLADE

This is the first film of his that I had watched, little knowing that it would be his last. On further learning that the person behind the megaphone for this exceptionally sensitive, aesthetic and activist film was an 80 year old man, my admiration grew manifold. To think young and to fight for one’s beliefs through art, at an age where he could so easily have given up on the struggle was indeed humbling, what a man!!

At over eighty years of age, he created what is possibly his most powerful work: Moolaadé . It deals with the controversial practice of female circumcision — a difficult and painful subject, but Sembene also expands the film’s vision to include the plight of modern Africa itself.

“Of course, I faced a lot of pressure not to make this film, but I refused to kneel before that pressure. This is a very sensitive issue. Many in Africa say it is our culture. But what they’re saying is a way of escaping from reality. They are hiding behind the tradition. They don’t think of the reality of what is being done to women. To me it is butchery.”

“I think I would be a very bad artist if I refused to see and highlight the negative aspects in my own society. Before I even picked up a camera to work on this film I had to do two years of research – talking to women and women doctors.

Shot in Burkina Faso in the Bambara language [Mr.Sembene reverted to the native tongues of Wolof, Diola and Bambara after the initial foray into French and English], this second film in a triptych glorifies the strengths and struggles of the African Woman. Imbuing the film with methodical detail and great human interactions, he makes us feel almost at home in this far off land in sub-Saharan Africa.

Four young girls who don’t want to be cut run for help to a woman named Collé [Fatoumata Coulibaly] , known in the village as a rebel since she refuses to have her own daughter circumcised in the traditional ceremony. Collé invokes the tradition of “Moolaadé,” a spell of protection which cannot be broken, without incurring the retaliation by spirits. Tying a string of colored yarn across the entrance of her home to keep the girls safe within the precincts and the angry village elders and ceremonial followers outside, she incurs the wrath of everybody in the village, well almost.Thus starts a saga of ancient versus modern and who wins how.

Using non-professional actors, steeped in the very same tradition that he is depicting through his film, he uses local song and rhythm to gently guide us into the village power struggles and face offs. By the time we come to the actual circumcision which is not shown at all, we are at the end of our tether and of course frantic with worry. Rather than showing the ritual cutting itself, Sembene leaves that to his viewer’s imagination, one does however see the results of the excision on Colle’s body – genital tearing after intercourse evident in the red bathwater she soaks in later on.

The color palettes, the art work, the sweeping cinematography, the ethnic wear and the unique architectural landscapes all add to this intensely emotional drama, which won the Prix Un Certain Regard in 2004 at Cannes. To produce this and other films of the trilogy, he took the route of a horizontal, inter-African (South-South axis) cooperation instead of a vertical North –South model. The film is a co-production between companies from several Francophone nations: Senegal , France, Burkina Faso , Cameroon, Morocco and Tunisia.

Of course he had to deal with same Third World vagaries of low budget and erratic distribution like his peers but he refused to be cowed down into resorting to heavy melodrama or dumbing down to pander to the illiterate masses.Therein lies his genius.

His other work also aimed at promoting freedom, social justice, and at restoring pride and dignity to the African people. To reach such a goal, Sembene sought first to “indigenize” the medium by resorting to the use of African languages, secondly, this primary emphasis on language allowed him to specify his public: ” Africa is my “audience” while the West and the “rest” are only targeted as “markets”. Thirdly, he borrowed from the rich heritage of African oral narratives, handed down by the griots and rejecting a mere imitation of Hollywood’s narrative techniques.

“We will never be Arabs or Europeans; we are African”, Sembene liked to philosophize.

Finally, bent on educating and liberating the disenfranchised, Sembene’s cinema used the tools provided by Marxist analysis and the passion of a visionary who profoundly believed in, “A call to action”.

He has thus given voice to the millions of marginalized and voiceless African peasantry, its workers, women, and children, while often putting himself at odds with his countries powerful. Most of Sembene’s films had been either banned or censored during former President Leopold Senghor’s regime.

From RAY PRIDE’s interview for CINEMA SCOPE.

Scope: How do you strike the balance between pageantry and politics, of being an intellectual aware of Brechtian staging but also of folklore, dealing with a subject as stirring and disturbing as this, yet told in a manner that takes the form of a beautiful entertainment?

Sembène: I think that is the role cinema should play. The cinema can advocate political goals, but it should not be a political banner. That is my conception of cinema. I think people ought to be entertained, laugh a little, and also relax. And even sometimes, maybe, identify with the characters. When I first showed the film at Cannes, many people came out of the room crying. I did not understand why they were crying. In New York, women left the theatre crying. I did not understand why. Because people are more sensitive to certain things? Around us, there are more violent things happening.

Scope: You’re capturing the more intimate forms of violence, but in an entertaining fashion.

Sembène: In the cinema you have two hours to tell your story—and people become sensitive. The African public is very, very talkative. You have to keep them quiet for the first ten minutes of the film. Then you have to capture and hold their attention. Sometimes have some comic relief and then come back to your story. But that is the classic, tested way. If you take the Brechtian approach, you do have to distance yourself from the story sometimes. The Italian cineastes, like Pasolini, who I met when I was making Mandabi in 1968, were able to strike that balance. But I learned from everyone. I do think in Africa , we have to always invent a new writing. But I also take something from other cultures.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Le docker noir. 1956

O Pays, mon beau peuple! 1957.

Les bouts de bois de dieu. 1960. Published in English as God’s Bits of Wood.

Voltaoque. 1962. Published in English as Tribal Scars and Other Stories.

L’Harmattan 1964.

Véhi-Ciosane ou Blanche Genese, suivi du Mandat 1965. Published in English as The Money Order and White Genesis .

Xala. 1974. Published in English as Xala.

Le dernier de l’empire (two volumes). 1981. Published in English as The Last of the Empire.

Niiwam suivi de Taaw. 1987. Published in English as Niiwam and Taaw.

FILMOGRAPHY:

Borom Sarret (1963)

La noire de… (1966). [Black Girl. In French with English subtitles]

Mandabi (1968). [The Money Order. In Wolof and in French]

Taaw (1970). [In Wolof with English subtitles]

Emitai (1971). [God of Thunder. In Diola and French with English subtitles.]

Xala (1974). [In Wolof and French with English subtitles]

Ceddo (1976). [In Wolof with English subtitles]

Camp de Thiaroye (1988). [In Wolof and French with English subtitles]

Guelwaar (1992). [Guelwaar: An African Legend for the 21st Century. In Wolof and French with English subtitles]

Followed by FAAT KINE [ 2000 ] and MOOLADE [ 2004 ]

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