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OUSMANE SEMBENE: THE LIFE OF A REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST
By:
Samba Gadjigo, Mount Holyoke College
(an introductory outline of the forthcoming authorized biography of Ousmane
Sembene of the same title)
"Of all African film directors, Sembene is the first to confer value to images."
(Med Hondo)
Crossing the geographical and national borders of his native Senegal, Ousmane
Sembene's literary and cinematographic output places him today as the "father"
of African films and as one of the most prolific "French-speaking"African
writers in this first century of "creative" writing in francophone
Africa. From the publication of his first poem in Marseilles in 1956, at age
thirty three, to Guelwaar (1996), his lastest published novel, Sembene has produced
five novels, five collections of short stories, and directed numerous films,
four shorts, nine features, and four documentaries He has granted hundreds of
interviews to teachers, researchers, students, and to dozens of film and literary
critics from around the world. Scholarly articles on his work have appeared
in scores of international journals. Particularly here, in the US, publications
and invitations to university and college campuses almost equal those of Wole
Soyinka, and Chinua Achebe. Of Sembene's ten published literary works, seven
have been translated into English, and all of his films are subtitled in English,
French, German, Japanese, and Chinese. In American universities, the attraction
to Sembene's work crosses disciplinary boundaries. His literary work has entered
the curricula of many high schools and universities throughout Africa. Tens
of Mémoires de maîtrise ( MA dissertations) and doctoral theses
have been devoted to Sembene's literary and film work.
Undoubtedly, in Africa, more ostensibly in Burkina Faso (the African capital
of motion pictures), Ousmane Sembene's name has also captured the "popular"
imagination. Some five years ago, while attending a festival in Ouagadougou,
I discovered a restaurant menu labeled "Ousmane Sembene", and I smiled
at a green and black-painted taxi cab self baptized Le docker noir (1956), the
original title of Sembene's first published novel (published in English as The
Black Docker in, 1987). In the US, in 1996, his literary and film work also
inspired Florence Ladd, then director of Radcliffe College's Bunting Institute
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her novel Sarah's Psalm, recognized by Boston
Magazine as " a story (that) has the making of a modern myth. (Emphasis
mine). Set in the 1960's in Cambridge and in Dakar Senegal ( that space sometimes
expanding to Europe, and the French Riviera), Sarah's Psalm tells the story
of Sarah Stewart, a young black Harvard graduate during the bourgeoning of the
Civil Rights Movement and the first re-discovery of Africa by many African American
intellectuals and cultural elites. Although Ms. Ladd warned that all characters
in her novel were fictional, for her main character, the yearning to go to Africa,
was a journey of self discovery, and arose from reading and viewing the work
of a character named Ibrahim Mangane, a Sembene prototype.
Not only has Sembene's work provided the African American Diaspora with an "alternative"
knowledge of Africa, he is also among the most sought after African artists
in the Caribbean. The University of the West Indies, at Cave Hill, Barbados
was honored by his presence in the fall of 2000. I helped arrange for that event
in the course of my one-year tenure at UWI, in 1999-2000. During my last visit
to Guadeloupe in the Spring of 2000, I was happy to hear from the owner- managers
of Librairie Jasor, the main literary outlet in the French West Indies, that
they want to host Ousmane Sembene and to screen his work. During a literary
conference organized by the University of Guyana, in Georgetown in the Spring
of 2000, when I showed Black Girl (the film that first introduced Sembene to
an international audience of writers and artists attending the 1966 Festival
Mondiale des arts Nègres held in Dakar), the overflow audience asked
for and was granted a second showing, for the same night. 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 Sembene's work, masterminded and organized
by Mauritanian film maker Med Hondo who once told me that "Sembene is the
first African director to confer value to African images." In 1996, a week-long
screening of Sembene's work at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia,
brought together fervent crowds of students, film critics, and other cultural
workers. Sembene is also arguably the most interviewed Senegalese and African
film director on the globe.
Born in 1923 in Casamance, southern Senegal, where his "crazy" fisherman
father had migrated from Dakar around 1900, Ousmane Sembene has, from a marginalized
and a very modest beginning, inscribed his name in world history. Expelled from
school in 1936 for indiscipline, his formal education would never go beyond
middle school. Also unable to take on his father's trade because he was always
seasick, in 1938 he was sent to his father's relatives in Dakar, headquarters
of the territories of French West Africa. From 1938 to 1944 he worked as an
apprentice mechanic and a bricklayer. Although he was denied an opportunity
of a formal education, Sembene developed a love of reading - mostly comics -
and discovered cinema in the segregated movie houses of Dakar. He spent his
days at work as a manual laborer and his after work hours either reading, watching
movies or, along with his neighborhood mates, attending evenings of story telling,
wrestling, and other "traditional" Senegalese cultural events . As
a French citizen, in 1944, like many young Africans of his generation, he was
called to active duty to liberate France from German occupation and subsequently
was dispatched to the colony of Niger as a chauffeur in the 6th colonial infantry
unit. Upon being discharged in 1946 at the end of the war, he went back to Dakar
in the midst of charged social and political activism. That same year, for the
first time, he took membership in the construction worker's trade union and
witnessed the first general workers' strike that paralyzed the colonial economy
for a month and ushered in the nationalist struggle in French Africa.
In 1947, unemployed in the thick of a war-ravaged colonial economy, Sembene
left Dakar in search of a better living and also for the opportunity to feed
his unquenchable thirst for learning- "apprendre à l'école
de la vie."(to learn in the school of life), as he put it many times. He
migrated to France and lived in the Mediterranean city of Marseilles until 1960,
the year Senegal was granted its political independence. As an black African
docker who "knows" how to read and write, in Cold War Marseilles,
he was soon identified by labor union leader Victor Gagnère ("papa
Gagnere", as Sembene affectionately referred to him) and enrolled in the
CGT ( Confederation generale des travailleurs ), the largest and most powerful
left wing workers' union in post-war France. After back-breaking work unloading
ships during the day (containers did not exist then), at night and on weekends
Sembene enthusiastically attended seminars and workshops on Marxism, joined
the French Communist Party in 1950, and the MOURAP (Movement against racism,
anti Semitism and peace) in 1951, a political organization born of the resistence
movement during WWII. The same year, while unloading a ship, Ousmane Sembene
broke his backbone. After a long recovery and now unable to sustain the physical
effort required by the work of a docker, with the support of his comrades, he
was assigned a post as (aiguilleur), a switchman. A new opportunity was opened
to Sembene to rise from a laborer who could read and hardly write, into a well-rounded
intellectual, an exceptionally cultured humanist. As his comrade and friend
Bernard Worms put it: "He rose to the status of the intellectual aristocracy
of the labor movement; he become "un honnête homme." He spent
most of his free time roaming public libraries, museums, theater halls, and
tirelessly attending seminars on Marxism and Communism. He read everything:
literature on Marxist ideology, political economy, political science, works
of fiction, and history. During those Marseilles years with the passion and
obsession of a convert to a new religion, Sembene also participated in the protest
movements organized by the French Communist Party against the colonial war in
Indochina (1953) and the Korean war(1950-1953). He also openly supported (and
later wrote about) the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in its struggle
for independence from France (1954-1962), and he vehemently protested against
the Rosenberg trial and execution in the United States in 1953. Dreaming of
the universal freedom and brotherhood mirrored by communist ideology, Ousmane
Sembene also worked to educate and liberate the community of mostly illiterate
and "apolitical" African workers shipwrecked at the margins of French
society.
It was also in the midst of such an intense political activism that Sembene
discovered other communist artists and writers: Richard Wright, John Roderigo
(Dos Pasos), Ricardo Neftali Reyes (aka Pablo Néruda), Ernest Hemingway,
Nazim Hikmet (Turkey), the works of French Communist writer and resistance organizer
Paul Eluart, and, Jean Bruller (Vercors) co-founder of Les Editions de minuit
(devoted to the publication of works dealing with resistance), and author of
the classic work about the German Occupation and the Resistance, Le silence
de la mer (1942) (Silence of the Sea). He also came into contact with the works
of the Jamaican Communist writer Claude McKay (whose 1929 novel Banjo would
influence his first novel) and the novels of Jacques Roumain, another Communist
writer from Haiti and author of the classic Masters of the Dew (1947). Master's
of the Dew 's communist vision provided most of the powerful images in Sembene's
O pays, mon beau peuple (1957). In Marseilles he also became involved with the
international Communist youth organization Les Auberges de jeunesses (Youth
Hostels) and discovered the Communist theater, Le Theâtre Rouge.
However, as Sembene struggled with millions of others for revolutionary change
at the international level, he also felt alienated by the quasi absence of "revolutionary"
artists and writers from Africa, the voices of the masses of workers, women,
and all those exploited and silenced by the combined external forces of colonialism
and the internal yoke of African "tradition". Through activism, Sembene
proved that he was deeply aware of the urgent need for political and social
change in Africa, but unlike many of his generation ( Sékou Touré
in Guinée, Patrice Lumumba in Belgian Congo, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana,
and Amilcar Cabral in Bissau Guinea who chose the political arena) he, like
Palestinian writer Edward Said, strongly believed and still believes that the
struggle against colonialism is not solely a fight over who should own the land
but it also a contest over who should have the right to represent whom. In the
historical context and contest against colonization, for Sembene , the terrain
of art and cultural representation are a sine qua none for the freedom and revival
of African societies. "L'Afrique d'hier me fascine, L'Afrique de demain
m'exalte" ("The Africa of the past fascinates me; the future Africa
excites me") says Sembene. The need to invest in Africa, to contribute
to a better self-awareness of the past, present, and future Africa became a
passion for him. Africa became what Albert Camus called "Une valeur",
that which transcends one's own life; that for which one is ready to give his/her
life, like South Africa's Nelson Mandela who once stated: "Democracy is
a value I live for, and if need be, for which I am prepared to die."
Thus, since 1956, while still a dock worker, and upon his return to an independent
Senegal in 1960 until today, Sembene's daily life has been devoted to the production
and dissemination of emancipating and restorative images for those Frantz Fanon
named the "the Wretched of the Earth", those Africans disenfranchised
and marginalized in their own society, but also whose unsung struggles are a
Daily Heroism (The title of Sembene's latest trilogy of films.) Yet for Sembene,
in both literature and film, the work of "art" should not be a mere
re-presentation of "reality" "une pancarte" (a political
banner), as Sembene terms it. It is a work of art, a symbolic form of representation.
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. What is at work in Sembene's literary and
film creation is an endeavor to capture and project a genuine African film language
and aesthetics, that would also entertain a "dialogical" relationship
with other world cultures.
Sembene the writer:
Nowadays, in the United States and around the world, Sembene is best known
as a filmmaker. However, it should be clear that even Sembene's use of cinema
is nothing but a compromise gesture to bring home what the widespread illiteracy
in the continent would not allow him to accomplish in his literary work. It
is through literature (or rather, it is because he failed to communicate with
African "masses" through literature) that Sembene came to film making,
as a last resort. Indeed, most of his film works (except Xala, 1973, and Guelwaar,
1993) are adaptations of earlier novels or short stories. Xala and Guelwaar
are rather a re-writing of the original film script's political, social, and
cultural affirmation.
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),
a long poem in which after an extended panegyric on the a vast inventory of
human accomplishment in the area of art, the poet also launched into a heartbreaking
lament over his estrangement from universal beauty. The long poem closes on
a dream of a free Africa whose children will redirect rivers and build monuments
to its beauty. This "programmatic" poem published in Cahiers du sud,
a Marseilles-based left-wing review then directed by André Gaillard,
also contains the contour of Sembene's future work.. His novels and short stories
since 1956 are: Le docker noir (1956) (The Black Docker), his loosely reconstructed
experiences as an black African dockworker in Marseilles; O pays, mon beau peuple
(1957) is almost, thematically, a sequel to the 1956 novel. Here the former
soldier, after experiencing the war and sojourning through Europe, returns to
his native Casamance and in a manner reminiscent of Romanian Communism, spearheaded
an agrarian reform (following the model of the Kokhoze, in Soviet Union, but
here directed and controlled by farmers themselves) in order to promote economic,
political, and social change for the farmers. Les bouts de bois de dieu (1960)
(God's Bits of Wood) is a masterpiece of fictionalized history, conceived from
Marxist ideology and yet Sembene's first genuinely "African" story.
It was a move away from the canons of the European bourgeois novel of the nineteenth
century. This third novel, a fictional recreation of the second and most comprehensive
French West African railroad workers strike against their colonial bosses in
1947 was followed in 1962 by Voltaïque (Tribal Scares), a collection of
short stories. In 1963, he released L'harmattan ( a political epic of the later
years of the 50's, in the final struggle against colonial occupation). Le mandat
suivi de blanche genèse (1966) (The Money Order with White Genesis),
was, to be sure, a first presentation of the post-colonial situation in Senegal.
Afterwards came Xala (1973), a sarcastic satire of the new and "impotent"
Senegalese bourgeoisie, and Le dernier de l'empire (1981) (The Last of the Empire)
which laid bare the internal contradictions and subsequent demise of an impotent
and narcissistic political leadership. In 1992, a collection of two stories
Niiwam et Taaw explored the despair of the Senegalese peasantry and urban youth.
Guelwaar (1996), Sembene's latest novel, an adaption of a 1993 feature film
(reversing the relationship between literature and film), warned against the
dangers of religious fundamentalism while showing the ironies and humiliations
if a nation relies on international aid for its own economic survival .
In Sembene's own life, reading and writing took center stage. There has been
a long love affair (literally, and figuratively) between Sembene and literature.
He once fell in love and married a literary scholar who specialized in his work.
Sembene's rich literary imagination fed on a vast knowledge of world literature
and its masterpieces. The success of his literary work around the world flows
from his own phenomenal love of reading. In addition to Sembene's ten published
volumes, there are also dozens of manuscripts, some waiting for that spark that
will bring them to the public's attention and thus to life. Sembene also has
this infuriating and deliberate habit of burning many of his papers.
Sembene the film director
Yet, since 1962, upon returning to Senegal and having visited many other countries
in the region, Sembene had to face the endemic level of illiteracy among his
intended audience and the paralyzing effect it was having on the dissemination
of his work. Already in 1938, when movie going had started to become his passion,
Ousmane Sembene realized the magical power of cinema in conveying messages.
Ironically, the spark came from the viewing of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympiad,
a documentary on the 1936 Munich Olympic games by one of Hitler's favorite filmmakers.
Touring the continent in 1961, at the moment he was sailing along the Congo
River, and in the middle of the short-lived vitality of the Patrice Lumumba
era, Sembene is said to have had a vision: landscapes, people, movements and
sounds to which no written document could do justice. Then it dawned on him
the necessity and desire to make movies - the technology and art of motion,
color, and sound. He was not thinking of movies for escapism and dream making
in the Hollywood model and paradigm, but movies as "école du soir"
(night school). His efforts became aimed at educating the people, in the language
of the people, following in the millennia-long tradition of many African oral
cultures where, at night, people gathered around a wood fire and listened to
stories told by either the griot (a professional storyteller) or by the elders.
Although to this day Sembene has a strong personal preference for literature,
he also sees motion picture combined with synchronized sound as a necessity,
the only medium that could reconcile the African artist with the millions of
peasants, workers, and women, whom Aimé Césaire called "les
bouches qui n'ont pas bouches" (those mouths without a mouth).
Sembene was nearly 40 when he decided to seek scholarships and go back to Europe
and learn the technique of film making. In the context of the Cold War, the
Soviet Union (hoping to extend its influence over Africa) was eager to oblige.
Thus, in 1962, Sembene spent a year learning cinematography at the Gorki Studios
in Moscow, under the tutelage of Soviet director Marc Donskoï. At the end
of 1962, he returned to Senegal with his knowledge and an old Soviet camera.
In 1963, with Borom Saret , his first short, Sembene ushered Senegal and Africa
into the landscape of world cinema, albeit 68 years after the invention of cinematography,
and 63 years after the first Lumiere brother's L'arroseur arrosé was
screened in Senegal. His film work would transform Africa from a mere consumer
of images made elsewhere to that of a "producer" of its own images.
As Borom Saret shows, Sembene was urgently concerned with pointing his camera
on the present day, post colonial Senegalese society whose spatial mapping reflects
the internal conflicts between the old and the new, between the powerful and
the powerless, the changing of the old markers of identity. In 1964, Niaye (an
adaptation of the short story White Genesis) a story of incest in a village
noble family documented the withering of old moral values. These first two shorts
were followed by La noire de... (Black Girl) in 1966, a first and prize-winning
feature that put Africa on the map of world cinema. However, it was with Mandabi
(The Money Order) in 1968, that Sembene's dream to reconnect with Africa's masses
came through. For the first time, indeed, an African filmmaker was experimenting
by using an African language (Wolof, the dominant language in Senegal), hence
setting a new trend which would be followed by all film makers on the continent.
In 1969 he released two shorts: Taumatisme de la femme face à la polygamie
(Women and the Trauma of Polygamy), and Les dérives du chômage
(the Afflictions of Unemployment). Two years later, in 1971 Sembene would adapt
the short story Tauw and direct Emitaï, his first historical film, a dramatization
of the forced conscription of Senegalese soldiers during WWII, followed by Basket
Africain aux jeux olympiques de Munich, RFA (African Basketball in the Munich
Olympic Games) in 1972, and L'Afrique aux Olympiades (Africa at the Olympic
Games) in 1973. In 1974, Xala, an adaptation of his earlier 1973 novella would
be released, followed by a controversial and internationally acclaimed historical
film Ceddo, a re-writing of the history of Islam in Senegal. Camp de Thiaroye
(1988) a sequel to Emitaï, centers around the massacre by French authorities
of returning African soldiers from WWII.The award winning Guelwaar, une légende
du 21 ème siècle (Guelwaar, a Legend of the 21st Century) would
be released in 1993. Sembene would close the century with two films devoted
to the struggle of African women: Héroisme au quotidien (Daily Heroism)
in 1999, and Faat Kine in 2000 and open the new century with Moolaade in 2003
a crusade against a century-old practice of female circumcision which still
plagues more than twenty-five out of the fifty -four African states recognized
by the United Nations.
Importance of Sembene's film work
As can be seen from this brief presentation, Ousmane Sembene's forty year film
work bears an unparalleled social and artistic significance in the context of
both world and African cinema. At the international level, Sembene has been
unequivocally recognized as the father of African cinema and his has received
countless awards and distinctions. His images are intended not only for entertainment
and profit (Sembene adheres to Lenin's prescription that "An artist must
make money in order to live and work, but not live and work in order to make
money"), but rather as an educational tool. His work is aimed at promoting
freedom, social justice, and at restoring pride and dignity to African people.
To reach such a goal, Sembene seeks first to "indigenize" the medium
by resorting first to the use of African languages (Wolof and Diola, two Senegalese
languages, and Bambara, a language spoken in Eastern Senegal, in Mauritania,
Mali, Burkina, and Côte d'Ivoire in Moolaade) 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 borrows from the rich heritage of African oral narratives, handed
down by the griots and rejecting a mere imitation of Hollywood's narrative techniques,
Sembene's cinema ushered in a genuinely African film aesthetics. "We will
never be Arabs or Europeans; we are African", Sembene likes to philosophize.
Finally, bent on educating and on liberating the disenfranchised, Sembene's
cinema uses the tools provided by Marxist analysis and the passion of a visionary
who profoundly believes, like Antoine de Saint-Exupery's character, Riviere,
( Vol de nuit ; Night Flight) that only creation gives meaning to life. Counter
to the hegemonic"official" history of Senegal, produced by its local
elite, Sembene's filmography, which critics have perceived as "A call to
action" has given voice to the millions of marginalized and voiceless African
peasantry, its workers, women, and children, while often putting him at odds
with his country's powerful. Indeed, most of Sembene's films have been either
banned or censored by former president Leopold Senghor's regime.
Moreover, since Camp Thiaroye (1988), through Guelwaar (1993), Faat Kine (2000),
and Moolaade (2003), Sembene's film work has taken on and fulfilled a manifold
objective that, symbolically, goes well beyond the strict realm of art as symbolic
representation. Indeed since 1957, with the independence of Nkrumah's Ghana,
and the creation of The Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa in
1963 by thirty newly independent states (and the fifty-three nations making
up the current African Union), Africa's political leaders have failed to reach
the triple objective of putting an end to its "balkanization" by political
unity, of performing its economic integration, nor of ending its technological
dependence on the West.
Indeed, for the financing of Camp Thiaroye, Sembene, without giving up on the
vertical model of cooperation with Europe (North-South axis), took the fresh
approach of a hitherto uncharted model of a horizontal, inter-African (South-South
axis) cooperation. For the financing of the film Sembene performed a symbolic
"economic integration" through a co-production budget between SNPC
(Senegal), ENAPROC (Algeria), SATPEC (Tunisia), and his own production company
(Filmi Domireew/Filmi Kajoor). For the first time, Sembene also called on the
services of a Tunisian lab for post-production of his film. Moreover, a film
about a colonial massacre (the killing by French officers of African soldiers
who returned from WWII, Camp Thiaroye ) also offers a unified approach to African
history by also echoing the 1954 Setif colonial massacre that heralded the war
of independence in Algeria. Although Guelwaar (1993) is a co-production with
Galatee-Films, a French production company, its post-production was also done
in Morocco. As for Faat Kine, the production was the result of a truly international
cooperation (France, Germany, Switzerland, USA, Cameroon, and Senegal) and the
post-production was again done in Morocco. With Moolaade, for the first time,
Sembene has made a film outside Senegal's national borders, in Burkina Faso,
seventeen kms, east of the border with Côte d'Ivoire, and in Bambara (a
language spoken in eastern Senegal, in Mali, southern Mauritania, and, of course
Burkina Faso). The technical crew was French (camera, sound, lighting), the
set designer was from Benin, the production managers were from Burkina Faso
and some machinists were from Senegal. The cast was selected by Casting Sud
in Burkina Faso and includes Malians and Burkinabe as well as actors from Côte
d'Ivoire. Thus, in his project as an artist-film maker, Ousmane Sembene realized
the dream of a unified Africa, which its political leaders still have yet to
produce.
Sembene's Filmography
1963 - BOROM SARET - short
1964 - NIAYE - short
1966 - LA NOIRE DE
(BLACK GIRL) - feature
1968 - MANDABI (THE MONEY ORDER) -feature
1969 - TAUMATISME DE LA FEMME FACE A LA POLYGAME - documentary
1969 - LES DERIVES DU CHOMAGE - documentary
1971 - TAUW - short
1971 - EMITAI - feature
1972 - BASKET AFRICAIN AUX JEUX OLYMPIADES - documentary
1973 - L'AFRIQUE AUX OLYMPIADES -documentary
1974 - XALA - feature
1976 - CEDDO - feature
1988 - CAMP DE THIAROYE - feature
1993 - GUELWAAR - feature
1999 - HEROISME AU QUOITIEN - short
2000 - FAAT KINE - feature
2003 - MOOLAADE - feature