Father of African Cinema

In early 1930, Ousmane Sembene was expelled from the French primary school. This was when he started going fishing with his father who was a professional fisherman. His father would give him a coin to go to the movies. His father always showed great amazement at his regular attendance at cinema halls. For his father, it was a white man’s business. His father never attended any flm show. When by chance he passed in front of a flm poster, he never stopped. What is more, he refused to be photographed and so did his mother. It is only shortly before she died that she allowed his son Sembene to photograph her.

Ousmane Sembène the Senegalese writer and filmmaker was born 1923 at Ziguinchor in the southern region of Casamance in colonial French West Africa, now Senegal. He is one of Africa’s great contemporary novelists and known as the father of African cinema. He has a great concern for ordinary decent people who are victimized by repressive governments and bureaucracies. Several of his films have been censored in Senegal because of their political criticism. Among Francophone African writers, he was unique because of his working-class background and limited primary school education. Originally a fisherman in Casamance, he worked in Dakar as a plumber, bricklayer, and mechanic. In 1939-45 fought with the French in Italy and Germany and then participated in the liberation of France. He settled in Marseilles, where he worked on the piers and became the leader of the long-shore men’s union. His wrote first novel in1956, Le Docker noir which was translated into English in 1981 as The Black Docker. It’s is about his experiences during this period.

He returned to Senegal a few years before it gained independence in 1960 and turned to writing full-time.. He became an astute writer about the political scene and wrote a number of books about developing national consciousness. In “Oh pays, mon beau peuple!” he writes about the plight of a developing country under colonialism. “God’s Bits of Wood” (1960) recounts the developing sense of self and group consciousness among railway workers in French West Africa during a strike. “L’Harmattan” (1964) focuses upon the difficulty of creating a popular government and the corruption of unresponsive politicians who postpone the arrival of independence.

In the early ‘60s, Sembène studied film at the Gorki Studios in Moscow. He turned to make movies about and for the 90 percent of the population of his country that could not read. Sembène soon gained an international reputation by directing movies based on his novels.

He made 20-minute feature film, “Borom Sarat” about a day in the miserable life of a Dakar cart-driver. It was the first movie made by an African on a fictional subject to be widely distributed outside Africa. It is remarkable for the cleavages Sembène revealed in contemporary African society between the masses of the poor and the new African governing class who stepped into the positions of dominance left by the white colonialist.

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His breakthrough cinema was “Black Girl” the first African movie shown at the exalted Cannes Film Festival. It tells the story of a Senegalese woman who is lured from her homeland by the promise of prosperity and goes astray in a morass of loneliness and selfishness. Sembène’s prize-winning work “Mandabi” (The Money Order) (1968) shows what happens to an unemployed illiterate when he tries to cash a large money order from his Parisian nephew; he is crushed by an oppressive bureaucracy and unsympathetic officials. It was a humorist show of a traditional tribal world lost in a contemporary protocol of government beauracracy. It was the first of Sembène’s films to be produced in the native Wolof language and targeted at a broader Senegalese audience. Sembène was the first directors to have his characters speak an African language.

Many of Sembène’s films, including “Xala” (1974) and “Ceddo” (The Outsiders; 1976), were temporarily banned by Senegal’s government because of their powerful social and political messages. His 1971 movie “Emitai” centered on a wartime French force’s blockade of a desert tribe, the Diola.  Xala is a comic, satiric analysis of the greed of the post-independence Senegalese upper class. “Ceddo” is set in the 17th century and depicts the conflicts in a village between adherents to the ancient tribal religion and Muslims who are trying to stamp out paganism.

After more than 30 years of writing, directing and producing films, Sembène still was making low cost movies, finding actors and settings as he moved across his poor country. Sembène’s 1987 film “The Camp” at Thiarove depicted a colonial massacre in 1944 in Africa. It was the first African movie produced completely without European technological aid or investment. In Sembène produced “Guelwaar”, a story about the twisted politics, religious squabbles and system of government surrounding a man’s burial 1992. The case of the missing body was a means of raising bigger issue that Sembène believed are leading Senegal to fratricidal devastation. His satirical observation of his country as it struggles for national moral fiber and solvency resounds with hilarity tinged with deep resentment. It was bend forward and articulate masterwork in movie making and writing.

Sembène’s straightforward storytelling possesses a natural-born conviction in the seriousness of actions, articulated by means of slapdash performances. Camera movement is rare, close-ups even rarer, and many of the metaphors have the vanishing, overexposed shade of aging home movies. Sembène’s contemporary folk ability has all the authority and magnificence of Old Testament legends, while casting a chilled modern-day judgment at the socioeconomic tarpit of African nation’s power struggle with their pristine self-government and the crippling reverb of imposing power.

In a 1990 interview published in Africa Report, Sembène recounted how he organized “traveling picture shows”—going to a village to show a movie and then moderating a discussion about it. “In colonial times, the cinema was a form of entertainment for foreigners,” he said. “Now, however, African filmmakers are raising real issues…. People are thus slowly starting to identify with their history and the cinema is becoming something real.” Over the years, Sembène’s films have questioned colonialists, fundamentalists, peasants, and the new bourgeoisie. “It’s not me, it’s my people that evolve,” Sembène said. “I live among them; I’m like the thermometer.”

Sembène in an interview recounted how he organized traveling picture show of travelling from village to village to show a movie and then moderate discussions about it. The cinema was a form of entertainment for foreigners in colonial times but now African filmmakers are raising real issues that expose white supremacy and African politicians’ outrageous corruption. Africans are identifying with their history and the cinema is becoming something genuine.

Sembène’s movies are questioning colonialists, fundamentalists, peasants, and the new bourgeoisie African class of politicians.

Sembène once said “It’s my people that are evolving and I live among them; I’m their thermometer.”

CAMP DE THIAROYE

African writer/directors Ousmane Sembene and Thiermo Faty Sow base this powerful larger-than-life opinionated tragedy on their own experiences. Sembene was a soldier during WW II fighting along with French soldiers. It’s a fact-based inspiration of a chronicle that deals with prejudice, double standards, colonialism, racial discrimination and a mass execution with an Eisenstein-like massacre on the Odessa Steps having nothing on this film’s slaughter of soldiers by their own. Novelist-turned-filmmaker Ousmane Sembene has created a stunningly brilliant motion picture that shows the white repression resuming again as the population return from the European warfront; where they faced bereavement every day for their mother country only to now face indignities and racial discrimination from the French they just liberated from totalitarianism.

Returning to African soil for the first time in five years, a supportive group of Senegalese infantrymen together since 1939 are lauded as brave liberators by the white French officers in Dakar. They are stationed in November 1944 in a transit camp called Camp De Thiaroye that is more like a POW camp than an army barracks with barbed wire barriers to separate the whites from the blacks. They are waiting to be discharged and paid, but feel slighted when served stinking chow without meat while the white French soldiers are served meat and fresh food. After going on a hunger strike, the uprising is quelled quietly by the chauvinistic white officers as the men get their own meat in town. When their easygoing Senegalese leader, Sergeant Major Aloise Diatta (Ibrahima Sane), an avid reader of serious European authors, a classical music and jazz lover, an introspective intellectual who has studied in France and speaks a perfect Wolof, French and English, and is married to a white French woman (who remains in Paris with their daughter, goes into Dakar to get a drink in a brothel–he’s given the boot when told no blacks allowed. On the Dakar streets, wearing an American khaki uniform that was given to his group because the French couldn’t supply them with new uniforms, he’s mistaken for an American thief and roughed up by the American MPs who are greatly negligent in their inquiring techniques. When Diatta doesn’t return to the barracks that night, his loyal black soldiers kidnap the next day an American GI sergeant and hold him overnight until their man is returned the next morning–albeit with a broken arm courtesy of a black MP from Detroit. But things get even more hairy when the Senegalese troops discover that they’re about to be cheated out of half their back pay and kidnap the commanding general, demanding their just pay before releasing him.

Unfortunately too many of the characters are representation, such as the one good French officer (Jean-Daniel Simon) among all the other evil ones maybe because that’s the way it has to be in order to be real! There’s also an African soldier named Pays (Sijiri Bakaba, who survived a concentration camp and is now touched in the head, mute and used as a symbol for the culturally downtrodden who can still feel the pain of everyone who was humiliated and tortured. But fortunately the film overcomes its contrivances and moralistic moments, and is rationally honest, genuine and fervent. Obviously in sympathy with the Senegalese victims of racial discrimination, the tragic events at Camp De Thiaroye serve as a powerful condemnation of colonialism.

This blog is written by Abasseno Uko; who graduated from the Stage Group Theater at Union Square in San Francisco in 1978, where he studied acting with Wendell Philips, Keith Philips, and Jean Shelton. He is an actor, writer, director, experienced movie producer and Africa’s Topmost screenplay writer.

After working as a stage actor, theater director, theater producer and theater manager Abasseno went on to study film making at the San Francisco Art Institute; graduating in 1983 with a Bachelor of Fine Art degree. He directed the movies BLOOD MONEY, BLIND TRUST, RETURN TO KAZONDIA, DOMITILLA and produced MAITASINE in Africa. He is the CEO of Filmagic Africa Ltd, and an expert coordinator of productions for foreign production companies shooting movies anywhere in Africa!