Ousmane Sembene: African revolutionary artist

Ousmane Sembène, widely considered the parent of African cinema and an artist of worldwide renown, died in Dakar, Senegal, on June 9 at the age of 84. His films were original and masterful. He won prizes at the Venice Film Festival in 1968 for “Mandabi” and 1988 for “Camp de Thiaroye,” and at Cannes in 2004 for “Moolaadé.” However, Sembène really was a novelist who used films to reach his people of Senegal and West Africa who had little or no access to books.

Sembène’s message came from his experience. He was the son of a fisher, born in Ziguinchor, a city in the Casamance, the southern section of Senegal. He went to Dakar, the capital of Senegal, in his mid-teens, laying bricks and doing manual labor, after he was expelled from school for indiscipline. He was drafted into the French army in 1944, came back to Dakar a few years later, joined a construction union and took part in one of the general strikes that were shaking French colonial rule at the time.

Having trouble finding work, Sembène stowed away on a ship bound for Marseilles, France. He stayed there for 10 years, loading and unloading ships—heavy, backbreaking labor before the use of containers. The dockworkers’ union was part of the CGT (General Confederation of Workers), closely allied with the Communist Party, which he soon joined.

Sembène joined MOURAP (Workers’ Movement against Racism, Anti-Semitism and Peace) in 1951, and protested against the colonial war in Indochina (1953) and the Korean War (1950-1953). He also protested the Rosenbergs’ trial and execution in the United States in 1953. He openly supported the Algerian National Liberation Front in its struggle for independence from France (1954-1962), in opposition to the French CP’s official line.

In 1956 his first novel was published. “The Black Docker” examined how issues of race played out in a strike he had participated in on the Marseilles waterfront. He published another novel and then “God’s Bits of Wood,” a recreation of the tremendous struggle the Senegalese people waged against their French colonial master in 1947-48.

This tremendous novel, which should be compared to Maxim Gorky’s “The Mother,” shows how the Senegalese people supported the African workers who were striking against a railroad to gain the same rights as the French who worked for it. The railroad linked Dakar to Bamako, Mali, moving the cotton and peanuts of French West Africa to market. “God’s bits” were the small pieces of wood track workers used in laying rails, a term which they ironically applied to themselves.

Sembène shows how women took up the challenge and sparked the struggle; how French attempts to divide and manipulate the people were countered; and the corrosive effects of racism, imperialism and colonial domination on the French themselves as well as on the colonized.

While Sembène’s politics are plain, his characters come alive and the reader sees how the class struggle raging in Senegal is reflected in the characters’ lives and interactions, as well as how they change. It is a moving, illuminating and emotionally engaging book. Every high school student in Francophone Africa is exposed to it.

While the strike was a major incident in the struggle to get France to end its direct colonial rule, the struggle over the railroad still continues, now over neocolonial foreign owners who are running it for their own profits in a way that does not help the economies of Senegal and Mali.

After “God’s Bits of Wood” was published, Sembène returned home and began to travel widely in Francophone Africa. It was during his travels he came up with his ideas on reaching the masses of Africa through film. He got a scholarship to the Gorky Film Institute in Moscow in 1962, returned home a year later with a used Soviet camera and began to make films.

Until “The Black Girl” in 1966—his first feature film—he made socially conscious, short black-and-white films. “The Black Girl” examines the story of Diouana, a Senegalese maid taken to the Riviera by her employers, who learns what living in France means for an African: She is no longer Diouana but “the black girl.”

In 1969, Ousmane Sembène, Timite Bassori, Oumarou Ganda and others organized a festival of cinema and television in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, which grew into the PanAfrican Festival of Cinema and Television, held every two years. It has become a major venue for African films, both from Africa and the Diaspora.

Sembène could have made many more films but he had trouble financing them, given both his politics and the economic underdevelopment of Africa. “Mandabi” (1968) is a Kafkaesque film on the travails of a poor resident of Dakar trying to cash a money order. Other films like “Xala” (1974) dealt with social issues inside Senegalese society; it was censored in Senegal for five years. “Ceddo” (1976) is a historical film about the resistance to Muslim and Christian missionaries.

“Camp de Thiaroye” (1989) recreates the fate of African soldiers captured by the Nazis and put in a military camp in Senegal before they returned home. They belonged to the same unit Sembène had served in but had fought in Europe. They had mutinied to get the bonuses promised to all French soldiers who wound up in Nazi concentration camps, which had only been paid to the white soldiers. On Dec. 1, 1944, the French army ordered the camp destroyed with heavy artillery and tanks. This film is such a searing indictment of a French colonial massacre that it couldn’t be shown in France for years.

Sembène was an African who wrote and made films for an African audience. But his artistic output was so strong, so true to the struggle of poor and working people in the continent of his origin, that people throughout the world have learned from and appreciated it.

E-mail: gdunkel@workers.org