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Sembčne, Ousmane (1923-2007) |
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Senegalese writer and film director, a modern griot, storyteller and chronicler, best-known for his historical-political works with strong social comment. Sembčne Ousmane turned several of his short stories and novels into films. The language of Sembčne's work was French, Wolof, or Diola. Considered one of the founders of the African realist tradition, Sembčne's image of sub-Saharan Africa was more self-critical, less romanticized than that of Léopold Sédar Senghor's, who more or less glorified the past. As a novelist, Sembčne made his international breakthroug with Les Bouts de bois de Dieu (1960, God's Bits of Wood), published in English translation by Heinemann Educational Books in the African Writers Series in 1970. In her time the young people undertook nothing without the advice of their elders, but now, alone, they were deciding on a strike. Did they even know what would happen? She, Niakoro, knew; she had seen one. A terrible strike, a savage memory for those who had lived through it; just one season of rains before the war. It had taken a husband and a son from her, but now no one even came to seek her advice. Were the ways of the old time gone forever? Ibrahim Bakayoko, her own son, had told her nothing! (from God's Bits of Wood by Sembčne Ousmane, translated by Francis Price, London: Black Star Books and Head of Zeus, 2024, p. 2; original title: Les Bouts de bois Dieu, 1960) Ousmane Sembčne (often cited as Sembčne Ousmane) was born in
Zinguinchor-Casamange region of Senegal
in the colonial French West Africa. His father, Moussa Sembčne, a
Wolof fisherman, was a Frech citizen, born in Dakar. Due to his
bluntness and freethinking mind, he had the reputation of being an
eccentric troublemaker. A headstrong freethinker, he
often was up against everybody: "Either I'm right or I'm wrong. It
can't be 'Moussa you're right, but . . .'" Sembčne got seasick easily
and did not continue in his father's trade. He seldom talked about his
father, occasionally, Sembčne could make a remark like: "My father was
definitely crazier than I am." (Ousmane Sembčne: The Making of a Militant
Artist by Samba Gadjigo, translated by Moustapha Diop, 2010, p.
9) Sembčne was mostly self-educated. In 1931 he entered primary school at Ecole Escale in Ziguinchor but was expelled in 1938 for striking back at his French teacher who had slapped him. After a period in Dakar at Ecole de la Rue de Thiong, Sembčne turned to various occupations in order to support his family. He worked as a plumber, bricklayer, apprentice mechanic. During the World War II he served in the French army in Europe – Sembčne was a forced enlistee. He received basic training at Camp Militaire des Mamelles, and then landed with the Sixth Colonial Infantry Regiment in France in 1944. After
the war Sembčne returned to Senegal, where completed his
compulsory military service and joined the union of construction
workers. He participated in the historical Dakar-Niger railway
strike, which lasted from October 1947 to March 1948. Later he returned
to France, where he worked as a docker in Marseilles. A work
accident left him with a fractured backbone. After his
convalescence, Sembčne found work as a switchman. He joined the
French Communist Party (PCF) in 1950, and taught himself to read and
write in French
in the CGT union libraries. His reading list consisted of writers such
as Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, and Pablo Neruda. After leaving PCF
he joined Africa's first Marxist-Leninist party, the Parti Africain de
l'Indépendance (PAI). The party was banned in 1960 and its leaders were
put into prison or sent into exile. Sembčne first novel, Le Docker Noir (1956, The Black
Docker), drew from his own experiences in France. The
protagonist is Diaw Falla, a young black longshoreman. He accidentally
kills a white woman editor who has published his manuscript of
novel under her of own name. Following a trial, Diaw is sentenced to a
life of hard labor. The story has been compared to Albert Camus's novel
The Stranger from 1942 –
both writers depicted a system in which outsiders are punished by
unjust laws. There are major differences too, beginning with the fact
that Sembčne's novel is narrated in the third-person, Camus uses
first-person narrative. Le Docker Noir
was born quite accidentally. Sembčne was forced to leave work for
several months, during which time he wrote down his personal
experiences on the docks of Marseille. With the half-Maoist Ô pays, mon
beau peuple! (1957) Sembčne moved his setting from Europe to
a small fishing village in Senegal. This novel launched his international fame, but the confusion surrounding his name was not
straighteded out at the same time. He was called Sembéne Ousmane
"according to the inversion that French colonization had imposed upon
the people." ('Black African Diasporic Cinemas:
Identities and the Challenge of Complexity' by Daniela Ricci, in Racism, Ethnicity and the Media in Africa:
Mediating Conflict in the Twenty Century, edited by Winston
Mano, 2015, p. 287) However, Ousmane was his first name. Sembčne
always wanted to turn his name around. Les Bouts de bois de Dieu
(1960, God's Bits of Wood) is generally considered Sembčne's
masterpiece. The multidimensional story, a fictionalized account of a
strike between the years 1947 and
1948 in the Dakar-Nigeria railway, is seen
through the eyes of the workers, their family members, and directors of
the railway company. The conflict takes the form of a class struggle,
racial issues are less central. And in the optimistic tradition of
socialist realism,
the strike ends in the victory of the proletariat. Ibrahima Bakayoko,
the leader of the strikers, don't enter the scene until the final third of the
novel. Les Bouts de bois de Dieu drew heavily on
Marxist–Leninist ideology. Wole Soyinka
praised in an address Sembčne's criticism of Islam and Islamic
influence in Senegal. An Imam warns the faithful in his audience
against evil influences from "abroad". However, critics
have often cited Oumar Faye's character as Sembéne's fictional
mouthpiece. At one point he says: "I believe in God, and fear him. When
I am alone, big questions haunt my mind. I know that God must exist
somewhere." ('Critical (Mis)Readings of Sembčne Ousmane,' in Islam and the West African Novel: The Politics of Representation by Ahmed S. Bangura, 2000, pp. 55-80) When the Soviet version of Marxism lost its appeal to Sembčne, his interest shifted to the complex relationship between the individual and the state. L'Harmattan (1963) suggested in the footsteps of Frantz Fanon that independence alone cannot bring genuine freedom. Le Dernier de l'Empire (1981, The Last of the Empire) is a satire about the various rivaling political groups in postcolonial Senegal. Sembčne denied that there is any connection between the characters of his book and real-life persons. In the 1980s appeared also the novellas Niiwam and Taaw, which were published together in the English translation. Along with his activities as a writer and film director, Sembčne was the founder and editor of the first Wolof language monthly, Kaddu. In the 1960s Sembčne developed an interest in the cinema and went to the Gorki Institute in Moscow to study film production. His thesis film under Mark Donskoi and Sergei Gerasimov, The Songhai Empire, has never been distributed. Sembčne got into filmmaking because his book were little read in his own country. "Personally, I prefer to read because I learned from reading. But I think the cinema is culturally more important, and for us in Africa it is an absolute necessity," he said in an interview in 1972. ('Ousmane Sembčne,' interview by Gearld Peary and Patrick McGilligan, in Mavericks: Interviews with the World's Iconoclast Filmmakers by Gerald Peary, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2024) Sembčne shot his films on 35mm for the city theaters, but presented them in 16mm film format in the rural areas. La Noire de...
(1966, The Black Girl from...) was the first full-lenght film (actually
60 minutes in length) ever produced by
African filmmaker. Based on a story from Voltaďgue
(1962), it told of a
girl, Diouna, who leaves his own family to become a
housemaid in Antibes, France. Alone and humiliated by her French
"masters", she commits suicide by cutting her veins in the bathtub. The
film won the Jean Vigo at the Cannes Film Festival. In the fall of
1972, Sembčne toured the United States to rise funds for his film
project. Ceddo (1977), dealing with the subject of African cooperation in supplying slaves to western slave traders, was banned in Senegal, mostly because of its antireligious themes. The score was written by the Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango; his 'Soul Makossa' (1972) had been an international hit. Guel Waar (1992) had only a limited release in France. Sembčne's open hostility toward foreigners, religious leaders, and the African bourgeoisie pitted him against President Senghor the one-party system. The concept of negritude, launched by Senghor and others, was for Sembčne idle talk by African elites and had little meaning in real life. Sembčne used Wolof (the language most widely spoken in
Senegal) in the development of film scripts such as Taaw
(1970), and Ceddo, or in mixtures of the two such as Le
Mandat (1968, Mandabi), black Africa's first full-length feature
film in color, and Xala (1974),
which won the Karlovy Vary Special Prize. Mandabi was honoured in Dakar with an official state gala premiere and Sembéne appeared in the front page of the newspaper Dakar-Matin with Senghor and the French ambassador. When the French praised the film for its realistic portrayal of poverty, Sembčne's own countrymen considered it as a caricature of Senegalese people and way of life. In spite of mixed reviews, the dark comedy drew crowds to the cinemas all over the country. Sembéne composed the music for the film. Emitaď (1971) received the Golden Bear at the Moscow Film Festival. Set during the years of World War II, it showed the old patriarchal culture and European pressures, under which young men become faceless mercenaries. The film was suppressed for five years in Francophone Africa – in Senegal it was shown only after a year of protests. During the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, Sembčne shot material about African sports, but due to the events of Black September, the footage was not released. Xala was a farce about polygamy and the downfall of a corrupt businessman, who experiences xala, impotence during his wedding night. Behind his troubles is a beggar whom he has ruined. Camp de Thiaroye (1988), Sembčne's semi-autobiographical film on the Thiaroye transit camp massacre in 1944, won five awards at the 45th Venice Film Festival. Sembčne was one of the first African male writers and directors to give in his works a serious attention to women characters and female issues, among others in Moolaadé (2004), the second in a projected trilogy devoted to "heroism in daily life." The film, shot in a small village in Burkina Faso (with "no running water or electricity, just mosquitoes"), told about female genital mutilation (clitoradectomy), which is practiced in a number of African countries. A Muslim who emphasized that he is not against Islam but the misuse of its doctrines, the director ended his story in the victory of a heroic woman, who stands against this brutal, old practice. "While he does not minimize pain and cruelty, neither does Mr. Sembene traffic in harshness or despair," wrote A.O. Scott in his review. "And while this film is troubling, it is also infused with a remarkable buoyancy of spirit." (The New York Times, October 13, 2004). In
reply to the question why he has remained single all the years,
Sembčbe said in an interview that "I'm married with the creative
process. I have female friends and they understand the life I live,
that I want to stay independent . . . I tell my friends, an artist is
not a good husband – he may be an excellent lover." ('Still, The Fire in the Belly: The Confessions of Ousmane
Sembene' by Mamadou Niang, in Ousmane
Sembčbe: Interviews, edited by Annett Busch and Max Annas, 2008,
p. 187) Moolaadé was Sembčne's last film. He died after
a long illness on June 9, 2007, in Dakar. Samory, a big-budget production of
Samori Touré, the Mandingo Chief who united West Africa, was never
realized. For further reading: Sembčne Ousmane et l'esthétique du roman négro-africain by Martin T. Bestman (1981); The Cinema of Ousmane Sembéne, A Pioneer of African Film by Francoise Pfaff (1984); Ousmane Sembéne: Dialogues with Critics and Writers, ed. by Samba Gadjigo and Ralph Faulkingham (1993); African Independence from Francophone and Anglophone Voices by Clara Tsabedze (1994); A Call for Action by Sheila Petty (1996); Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film & Fiction by David Murphy (2003); Ousmane Sembčne: Interviews, edited by Annett Busch and Max Annas (2008); 'Sembčne, Ousmane' by David Yosté, in The Facts on File Companion to the World Novel: 1900 to the Present, edited by Michael Sollars (2008); Ousmane Sembčne: The Making of a Militant Artist by Samba Gadjigo, translated by Moustapha Diop (2010); 'Sembène Ousmane (Ousmane Sembène) (1923-2007),' in Contemporary African Writers, edited by Tanure Ojaide (2011); The Films of Sembène Ousmane: Discourse, Culture, and Politics by Amadou Fofana (2012); Ousmane Sembène and the Politics of Culture, edited by Lifongo Vetinde and Amadou T. Fofana (2015); Ousmane Sembene: Writer, Filmmaker, and Revolutionary Artist, edited by Ernest Cole and Oumar Cherif Diop (2016); World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance by Joel Nickels (2018); African Film Studies: an Introduction by Boukary Sawadogo (2019); Sembène Ousmane (1923-2007): un homme debout: écrivain, cinéaste et humaniste by Valérie Berty (2019); Cinema, Black Suffering, and Theodicy: Modern God by Shayne Lee (2022); L'écriture d'Ousmane Sembène dans Niiwam, sous la direction de Jean-Dominique Pénel (2023); 'Ousmane Sembčne,' interview by Gearld Peary and Patrick McGilligan, in Mavericks: Interviews with the World's Iconoclast Filmmakers by Gerald Peary (2024) Selected works:
Films:
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