cinemas of the south

Ousmane Sembene: The Elder of Elders
By Baba Diop

It is not at 86 years of age that the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene is about to change his way of filming or throw his convictions to the wind. For 46 years he has been shaping and forming cinema in his own taste. His vision is clear: the seventh art for Africans has a duty to be 'night school' and not just a simple diversion. Cinema is a mirror getting heavier with the defects, the dysfunction and the foibles of society. The filmmaker is the one waking up conscience. Ousmane Sembene's conviction is sure: "I continue to say that the African filmmaker is a great political person who has a developed national conscience because the problems he raises concern the masses.", "The problems he raises are not the problems of individuals, but of society," he affirmed to me in an interview in 1991 when he had just received the award "Afrique en Création" for his body of work at the Pan African Film Festival in Ouagadougou (Fespaco) in Burkina Faso. Ousmane Sembene was fed both by communism and trade union activism and thus his work cannot be simply rooted in reality.

Ousmane Sembene on the set of Mooladé

Ousmane Sembene's office is a veritable museum, his own. The walls are covered with trophies of all kinds, witnesses of the aura surrounding him. He signs his official correspondence as "The Elder of Elders". Just in front of him is an enlarged drawing of a photo of him in traditional dress, the same one on publicity for Mooladé (2004), his last feature film and official selection at Cannes in 2004 in the section Un Certain Regard. Attached to his desk is the sceptre of Mah Compaoré, the doyenne of female circumcision in Mooladé, and it is not the only prop from this film in his office. What will happen to all of these keepsakes? Sembene responds: "I don't know what I'll do with them. I would have liked it if a national film museum existed, that would belong to all the people of Senegal and Africa , so I could leave them as a legacy to them."

Ousmane Sembene distrusts fame: "The risk in our profession is to think you are at the heights because there are no 'heights' in our profession. One thing I don't like is glory, fame, because all of that is ephemeral. I want to last for eternity and pursue my work among the people."

Apart from his failing eyesight, Ousmane Sembene is in excellent shape, his eternal pipe dangling from the corner of his mouth. For decades, he has kept the same ritual. He leaves his house Gaale Ceddo ("The house of the unsubdued") at the seaside in the fishing area of Yoff to go to his office in the centre of the city where he will spend the entire day in his office, whose entrance is far from being easily found since it is in the back wing of the former radio building on Republic Avenue in Dakar (Senegal). Like a solitary bear, he walks the deserted stages of the Senegalese cinema. Every day, he goes back over his work. He is always two screenplays ahead and has plenty of projects on his desk: "I only have cinema and literature," he confides, "I don't go out and when I return home after work, as if I had nothing else to do, I start my scratchings on paper. I write and I read."

Mooladé

If Ousmane Sembene were a cat, he would have had seven lives and a bonus one, which is how rich his life experiences have been, a manifestation of a fierce will to advance. Life has made him a ship's apprentice, a mechanic, a bricklayer, a scrap metal dealer, a dockworker, a staunch communist, a journalist in his national language, a writer and a filmmaker, although the doors of primary schools officially closed in front of him. His biographer and close friend Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, himself a pioneer of Sub-Saharan cinema with Afrique sur Seine and director of production on several of Sembene's films (Taw (1970) God of Thunder (Emitaï, 1971) reveals in his book Ousmane Sembéne cinéaste (Editions Présence Africaine, 1972) that, "Ousmane Sembene was born on the 8th of January 1923 in Ziguinchor. but in reality he was born on the 1st of January 1923. Thus his parents needed a week to think before registering him. For his father, a Lebou, this registration was practically obligatory because he had the privilege of taking French citizenship, as did his descendants, since he was born in what was one of the four cities of Senegal , namely Dakar , Gorée, Rufisque, Saint Louis." While very young, at the age of eight, he helped his father fish but he was no sailor-to-be. For him it was rather being shuffled around primary schools in Dakar and Marsassoum. An altercation in 1937 with one of the school principals, a Frenchman named Pierre Peraldi, would deprive the young Sembene of the joys and laughter of recreation time. He would be admitted to no other official school. He would take up a trade as they used to say.

By turn he was an apprentice mechanic, then apprentice bricklayer and collector of scrap metal. With a band of friends, he attended evening courses to quench his thirst for knowledge and soothe his frustrations. As an adolescent, he became acquainted with labour union activists, who made him realise the importance of the struggle to defend the interests of workers. In 1942 he was called into service for France in World War II, serving in Europe . When he returned home, he took up the cause of the great strike of railroad workers on the Dakar-Niger line in 1947, which mobilised practically all of francophone West Africa and would become the subject of his famous novel, Les Bouts de bois de dieu. Unlike his novels Le Mandat and Xala, Sembene did not transpose this novel to film.

After World War II, Ousmane Sembene returned to France as an illegal immigrant. He was in turn a dockworker in Marseille, a factory worker at the Citroën factory in Paris, and then began to frequent the staff of the review Présence Africaine, a melting pot of African and Caribbean intellectuals, as well as the famous publishing house of the same name, where he would be published many years later with: Voltaïque (1962), L'Harmattan (1964), The Money Order (Le Mandat, 1966), The Curse (Xala, 1973) and Niiwam (1987). Sembene was a member of the Communist Party and went to the party school where he has since published ten novels and short stories.

Ousmane Sembene

It was at the age of 40 that Ousmane Sembene decided to make his approach to cinema. He recalls, "When I returned to Africa at the beginning of the 60's, I toured the continent. After eight months of travel, and having been impregnated with many things, I returned to Senegal and told Paulin S. Vieyra that I wanted to make films. The Actualités Sénégalaises that he headed at the time was located near the Kermel market. He looked at me and said 'Go on, I'm waiting.'" Did Paulin light the sacred fire of film in him? The two men were equally engaged in life and in work. Sembene spent a year (1962) in the Soviet Union to study film in the Gorky studios under the tutelage of the great masters Donskoi and Gerasinov: "In one year, I learned a fair amount. Souleymane Cissé and Costa Diagne knew that I was working 24 hours a day. I was writing my screenplays, filming them, editing them, mixing them. In order to do all of this one had to have been bitten by the bug." Sembene Ousmane left his school projects there. Of all the films of that time, the one he is most proud of is the historical journey of the Senegalese Prime Minister Mamadou Dia, who he put on film all by himself, like a one-man band. That was the first time that a Senegalese political figure set foot on Soviet territory so soon after independence while his country did not claim to adhere to Marxist principles in the middle of the Cold War.

In his approach to cinema, Ousmane Sembene intended to make historical films. He realised that the history of Africa had been written by Europeans and not by Africans: "I said to myself, why not make a film about Samory Touré and when I asked for a grant, it was to make a film about him, but I didn't know that it was so difficult because I had to do research, visit various places that he had visited, consult the oral storytellers and the archives. I had to go to France , England , and Germany to get documentation. Thus I can say that it was Samory who led me into cinema." Unfortunately, the film project that had so caught his attention was never made. But when he was filming Guelwaar (1992), he had made use of the opportunity to try out a part of the team that was going to follow the traces of Almamy Samory. The main actor had been chosen and a model of the sets had been built.

Mooladé

In his approach to film, Ousmane Sembene relies on two registers, the "old" and the "new". The old concerns updating the historical heritage of the resistance faced with colonial conquest and exploitation. The new is the view that Sembene takes on Senegalese society after independence. Sembene began his career with the short film The Sonhrai Empire (L'Empire Sonhraiin, 1963), a black and white film of 20 minutes produced by Mali , but which was never distributed or sold. God of Thunder sublimates the resistance of women to colonialist France that forces the colonised country, using Senegalese gunmen and organising abductions, to contribute men and food to the effort against Germany . This was France under the rule of Pétain and then de Gaulle, causing distress to those called up. The final scene, with this horde of women in wigs made of rice sheafs, is one of the most physically beautiful scenes in his filmography. Honour and the steadfast feelings of the Diolas (inhabitants of Casamance) are at the heart of this story. In this film, made in the south of Senegal , man and nature are as one. The spirits of the dead and the living cohabit the same space. Sembene combines the wide shot and the close-up to celebrate nature. Outsiders (Ceddo, 1977), whose story takes place in the seventeenth century, traces the life of a village firmly rooted in African spiritualism. This film places Christianity and Islam back to back, two imported religions that sought to erase animism in Africa . Sembene presents here an imam of formidable intelligence who tries to break the resistance of the Ceddo ("the unsubdued") through humiliation by shaving their heads and removing their traditional dress, a sacred link between them and their ancestors. In this film, different musical themes are treated differently that evoke, suggest, announce and accentuate the dream of the priest. The Camp at Thiaroye (Camp de Thiaroye, 1987) retraces the painful history of demobilised soldiers at the end of the world war who find themselves in the transit camp of Thiaroye, waiting to collect money promised to them so they can return to their families. However, the pride of having fought alongside the French and other nationalities against the Germans reveals the bitterness of broken promises that unleashes a mutiny in the camp. Sembene is emphasising the ingratitude of the old colonial power that is France towards the men, which helped it remove itself from the grip of Nazism. The question of pensions for old combatants still poisons relations between France and its old colonies. This film is based on real facts. For the film Sembene cast well known faces from show business (Ismael Lo, Marthe Mercadier), the theatre (Sidjiri Bakaba), film (Jean Daniel Simon) and even from the press. The main character, Ibrahima Sané, known from radio and television, made his film debut in this work. Sembene would use him again in Faat Kiné (2000). But The Camp at Thiaroye was not the sensation that one might have expected given the cast and the story of the revolt of these shooters. With Guelwaar, Sembene goes even further into realism in regard to his filming style and dialog. There are two stories in this film. The first is the clash of a Christian and a Muslim community, which was due to the switching of corpses, and the second advocates the refusal to extend one's hand, and is a parable denouncing the deception of food aid that creates dependence. The discourse here is radical. For Guelwaar as for The Camp at Thiaroye, Sembene bases his stories on real facts to announce his convictions, but does not want to make a 'propaganda' film that would be awkwardly militant.

Faat Kiné

Sembene as a great observer of society excels more in those films that pass a fine toothcomb over the changes in Senegalese society. The Charettier (Borom Sarret, 1966) can be read as a guided trip into the society of the little people through the eyes of a cart driver who ends up being unemployed because his horse was confiscated. In this film Sembene throws out themes like little white stones that he will return to and develop later. In Niiwam , the cart transformed into a hearse becomes an urban bus/hearse in an adaptation of Sembene's novel by his faithful assistant Clarence Delgado. The fake burial certificate creating problems for the illiterate citizen with the government will be more fully developed in The Money Order and the beggar considered to be no more than a fly by a cart drivers will get his revenge in Xala, while the determined wife of the cart driver will put on the clothes of Faat Kiné at the end of the eponymous film.

Surprisingly, women are the motor of change in Ousmane Sembene's films. Whether it is a prostitute as in Guelwaar, a respected traditional woman (Mooladé), a company director (Faat Kiné), a housekeeper (Black Girl (La Noire de., 1966) and The Charettier), they retain their dignity and take charge of their destiny. They are all model women. The final one is Collé Ardo in Mooladé, the muse of the struggle against female circumcision.

Currently, Sembene is putting the finishing touches on his screenplay entitled La République des Rats, adapted from his two-volume novel Le Dernier de l'Empire, written in 1981, and whose themes include nepotism, the abuse of power and incompetence with its share of coups d'état in an Africa that is struggling to emerge from underdevelopment.

Baba Diop
© FIPRESCI 2006

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