Ousmane Sembene, unruly progenitor of the new African cinema, was born in 1923 in the sleepy provincial port of Ziguinchor, Casamance, the southernmost province of French-run Senegal. His background was Muslim, Wolof-speaking, proletarian—his father a fisherman, who had left his ancestral village near Dakar for the south; prone to seasickness, Ousmane showed little aptitude for the family trade. It was a turbulent childhood. His parents split up early, and the boy—strong-minded and full of energy—was bundled from one set of relatives to another, ending up with his mother’s brother, Abdou Ramane Diop. A devout rural schoolteacher, Diop was an important influence, introducing Ousmane to the world of books and encouraging his questions.
This favourite uncle died when Sembene was just thirteen. He moved to Dakar, staying with other relations, and enrolled for the certificat d’études, passport for clerical jobs open to Africans. But wilful and irreverent, Sembene was never the sort for the colonial administration. He was expelled from school, allegedly for raising his hand against a teacher, and ran through a series of manual jobs—mechanic, stonemason. His spare time was spent at the movies, or hanging out with friends in the central marketplace in Dakar, where the griots or gewels, the storytellers, spun their tales. Gewels ranked low in the Wolof caste hierarchy, but had traditional licence to depict and comment on all ranks, from king to beggar; the best had mastered the insights of xamxam, historical and social knowledge—a formative influence in Sembene’s later work, as were the structuring tensions of African trickster stories: the narrative quest, the reversal of fortunes, the springing traps of power relations.footnote1
Sembene was seventeen when Senegal’s colonial masters capitulated to Hitler, and was witness to the seamless reincarnation of Governor-General Boisson’s administration as an outpost of Vichy. An attempt by de Gaulle to claim the city for the Free French, supported by the inaccurate bombardment of the British Navy, ended in failure. But when the Allies landed in North Africa two years later, Boisson switched sides. US troops were stationed in Dakar for the duration of the War, and the local youth recruited into the French-officered tirailleurs sénégalais. Sembene, aged nineteen, saw action in North Africa and Germany—black soldiers notoriously sent forward for the worst assaults. The War brought a broader education in the ways of the world: in his 1988 movie Camp de Thiaroye Sembene would depict the urbane Senegalese NCO Diatta being taken for an American GI by the girls at Le Coq Hardi, a French-run Dakar brothel: ‘Hey, buy me a whisky, Joe?’ Panic ensues when it turns out he is an African—‘Horreur!’—and the bouncers throw him out.
Demobbed and back in Senegal, Sembene got a job on the railways and was caught up in the mass strike of 1947—twenty-thousand workers downing tools across French West Africa, from Dakar to Abidjan, when the colonial administration backed down on wartime promises of an integrated pay structure. The strike lasted five months. Looking back, thirteen years later, Sembene would write of the railway workers: ‘They began to understand that the machine was making of them a whole new breed of men.’footnote2 Their leaders counselled passive resistance, refusing to endorse more militant mobilizations, and a compromise was struck. The following year, aged twenty-five, Sembene quit Senegal for the docks of Marseilles. In that harsh and poverty-stricken environment he joined the Communist-led CGT, and resumed his education in the Confédération’s local library—Marxist classics, and the French literary canon. It was here that he began to write: Le Docker noir, published in 1956, described the crushing defeat of a black worker–writer by white power structures; a second novel, O Pays, mon beau peuple!, is set in Casamance; in 1960, God’s Bits of Wood revisited the great Dakar–Niger railway strike.
Returning to Senegal in 1960 after Independence Sembene was scathing about the new elite, still enthralled to the same old masters. The pompous, dwarfish Léopold Senghor, philosopher of Negritude, would be ensconced as their pro-consul for the next twenty years.footnote3 Africa was still emerging—a partial and bloody rebirth—from colonial rule, through the assassination of Lumumba, war in Algeria, resistance movements across French, British and Portuguese territories. Sembene travelled widely throughout West Africa and along the Congo, assessing for himself the realities of decolonization and the political tasks that lay ahead. He has spoken of an epiphanic moment, sitting in a boat on the Congo River: a vision of a new sort of cinema that would both communicate and describe; an evening school for radical mass education. (Later, he would tour his films round the remote villages of Senegal, setting up the screen in the open air and holding discussions with the audience until late into the night.) He fired off applications for film-making apprenticeships abroad, and was taken on at the Gorkii studios to work with Mark Donskoi.footnote4
Popular narratives, world war, Marxism and Modernism, Khrushchev’s Moscow, African working-class life: a rich education for any artist. Over four decades of film-making, Sembene has deployed this formation to extraordinary effect. If he has focused consistently on the social relations of Africa’s distorted development, the sheer breadth of his aesthetic—the disorientating combination of African ritual and modes of speech with expressionist set-pieces, domestic naturalism, epic choreography, social satire, sexual comedy or farce—projects his work on to a broader, more universal canvas. The complexity of his films eschews surface slickness: narrative realism can be undercut by jarring moments of melodrama, flashbacks, non-professional acting; which yet contribute, as in Brecht, to an epic sense. There is no dogmatic closure in Sembene’s work: elements of didacticism are undermined by the revelation of fresh complexities, endings are characteristically freeze frame, the final outcome still unsure. Contested relationships remain open—as in the trickster tales: Brer Rabbit’s forerunner Leuk the Hare may get away this time; but that doesn’t mean he’s safe.
Sembene’s first film, a mere 19 minutes long, contains many of the elements—though not the humour—that would characterize his future work. Borom Sarret (1962) sees Dakar through the eyes of a cart driver—the bonhomme charette of the film’s title—who narrates the voice-over, in French. Starting off from the crowded working-class quarter, he is hired to take a well-dressed passenger up to the deserted, tree-lined streets of the Plateau, where carts like his are banned. The stark, black-and-white documentary style, reminiscent of Italian neo-realism, is heightened to a more melodramatic register by the effect of non-professional actors and the use of post-synchronous sound. The sense of excess—of anti-realism—is intensified by the soundtrack, the music of the traditional xalam giving way to the strings of Salzburg as we reach the Plateau.