Ousmane Sembène, 84, Dies; Led Cinema’s Advance in Africa

By A. O. SCOTT

Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese filmmaker and writer who was a crucial figure in Africa’s postcolonial cultural awakening, has died at his home in Dakar, Senegal. His family, which announced his death on Sunday, said Mr. Sembène had been ill since December. He was 84.



Widely seen as the father of African cinema, Mr. Sembène took up filmmaking in the 1960s, in part because he believed that film could reach a wider and more diverse African audience than literature. “Black Girl” (1965), his debut feature, is commonly referred to as the first African film. Combining realistic narrative techniques with elements of traditional African storytelling, it tells of a young woman named Diouana who commits suicide after traveling to Europe with her French employers.

Diouana’s identity crisis foretold some of the central themes of Mr. Sembène’s later work — he directed 10 features and numerous shorts — and of the nascent African cinema more generally. The tensions between tradition and modernity and between newly independent African nations and their erstwhile colonial masters are sources of drama and comedy in his films, which are nonetheless focused on the lives of ordinary people, frequently women.

“Xala” (1974), which many critics consider his finest film, takes a humorous look at polygamy, traditional African medicine and the contrasts between urban and rural life. Neither mocking nor nostalgic in its treatment of traditions, it is as much driven by the personalities of its characters as by its ideas about African life. At the same time, the characters’ foibles are clearly symbols of political and social dysfunction.

A similar logic obtains in later films like “Guelwaar” (1993) and “Faat-Kiné” (2001). Writing about the latter movie in The New York Times, Elvis Mitchell noted that some of its scenes could have been “whipped up into a tempest of tear-jerking” but that Mr. Sembène’s “trademark empathy” and sense of detail served as antidotes to melodrama. Even when he addressed painful and controversial subjects — as in “Moolaadé” (2004) which chronicles a middle-aged woman’s campaign to halt the practice of female genital cutting in her village — Mr. Sembène tempered moral fervor with warmth and humor.

Ousmane Sembène was born on Jan. 1, 1923, in the Casamance region of southern Senegal. He left school at 14 and moved to Dakar. There and in France, he worked as a fisherman and an auto mechanic, among other jobs, before being drafted by the French Army in World War II. His experiences as a dockworker in Marseilles formed the basis of one of his novels, “The Black Docker.”

He studied film at Gorky Studio in Moscow, turning to the medium because, as he put it in 2005, “everything can be filmed and transported to the most remote village in Africa.” After making three short films, he submitted the script for “Black Girl” to the Film Bureau of the French Ministry of Cooperation, an agency set up by the government of Charles de Gaulle to assist African filmmakers. The script was rejected, and while Mr. Sembène was able to complete the film independently, some of his later films would run into trouble with both French and Senegalese authorities. “Mandabi” (“The Money Order,” 1968), was attacked in Africa for its portrayal of political corruption and economic devastation, and “Emitai” (1972) was suppressed in France for five years because of its harsh depiction of colonialism.

“He could criticize Africa, he could criticize racism and he could criticize colonialism,” said Manthia Diawara, professor of comparative literature and Africana studies at New York University, in a telephone interview on Sunday. “He never spared anybody.”

In spite of occasional controversy, Mr. Sembène’s mastery and originality were celebrated both in Africa, where he served as an inspiration for later filmmakers, and internationally. 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”). He was a founder, in 1969, of FESPACO, the biennial festival of film and television held in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Cheick Oumar Sissoko, a fellow filmmaker and the Malian minister of culture, said that with Mr. Sembène’s death, “African cinema has lost one of its lighthouses.”

Mr. Diawara added: “He really is the most important African filmmaker. The one that all subsequent filmmakers have to be measured against.”

The Sun has set on Ousmane Sembene

A Filmmaker Who Found Africa’s Voice

By A. O. SCOTT


Ousmane Sembène, by consensus the father of African cinema, was nearly 40 when he started making films. (He was 84 when he died over the weekend at his home in Dakar). By 1960, the year that Senegal, his native country, won its independence from France, he was already a novelist of some reputation in Francophone African circles.



He had also played a significant role in political and aesthetic debates that had gathered force as the postwar movement toward African decolonization accelerated. He took a radical, pro-independence line against what he took to be the assimilationist tendencies of proponents of Négritude, the more established literary movement associated with writers like Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor.

Senghor, a poet and scholar (and the first African elected to the Académie Française), went on to become Senegal’s first president. (He died in 2001.) Mr. Sembène, in his role as Africa’s leading filmmaker, would remain a thorn in Senghor’s side, as uncompromising a critic of Africa’s post-liberation regimes as he had been of French colonial domination.

In a 2004 interview with “L’Humanité,” the daily newspaper of the French Communist Party (which Mr. Sembène joined as a dockworker in Marseilles in the 1940s), he noted that “in more than 40 years since Senegal’s liberation we have killed more Africans than died from the start of the slave trade.”

In films like “Ceddo” and “Xala” he pointed an angry, often satirical finger at the failures and excesses of modern African governments, Senghor’s in particular, and his unsparing criticism made him a controversial figure.

Nonetheless, it is hard to overstate his importance, or his influence on African film and also, more generally, on African intellectual and cultural self-perception. Mr. Sembène was in many ways not only Senghor’s political and aesthetic antagonist but also his biographical and temperamental opposite. Senghor, who had received an elite education in metropolitan France, believed, at least in the 1950s, that Africans in territories ruled by France could carve out an identity for themselves within the larger cosmos of French language and civilization.

Mr. Sembène, whose formal schooling ended in the sixth grade, received his French education not at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, but rather on the Marseilles docks and in the radical trade union movement. Like Sékou Touré and Frantz Fanon, his allies in the radical wing of the anti-colonialist movement, he believed that Africans would experience true liberation when they threw off European models and discovered their own, homegrown versions of modernity.

“What was unique about Sembène was he began to challenge the dominant figure, Senghor,” recalled Manthia Diawara, a professor of Africana studies at New York University who grew up in Mali in the 1960s. “He valorized African languages over French. He began to say that independence had failed. He celebrated the equality of Africa with Europe. And it was very good for us to see a man who was self-taught, who did not come out of the French educational system, who went on to write these books.”

The books were quickly superseded by his films. “I came back to Dakar, and I made a tour of Africa,” Mr. Sembène told L’Humanité, reflecting on his return home in 1960 after nearly 20 years in France. “I wanted to know my own continent. I went everywhere, getting to know people, tribes, cultures. I was 40 years old, and I wanted to make movies. I wanted to give another impression of Africa. Since our culture is primarily oral, I wanted to depict reality through ritual, dance and performance.”

And so he developed a filmmaking style that was populist, didactic and sometimes propagandistic, at once modern in its techniques and accessible, at least in principle, to everyone. He frequently made use of nonprofessional actors and wrote dialogue in various African languages.

“The publication of a book written in French would only reach a minority,” he said. In contrast, he envisioned a “fairground cinema that allows you to argue with people.”

The arguments take place within his films as well as around them. In “Moolaadé” (2004), one of his last movies, a group of women rises up against the traditional practice of female genital mutilation, challenging the authority of the village elders as well as of the priestesses who perform the ritual. The film’s structure is antiphonal (given Mr. Sembène’s Marxist background, you might say dialectical), allowing the defenders and opponents of tradition to have their say before justice and enlightenment prevail.

Like all of Mr. Sembène’s films — he made 10 features in all — “Moolaadé” is grounded in African daily life. And yet, to a non-African viewer, it rarely feels exotic or strange. As an artist, Mr. Sembène was both a populist and a universalist.

“He showed us a way out of tribalism,” said Mr. Diawara, an expert on African cinema (and the co-director of a 1994 documentary about Mr. Sembène) in a recent telephone interview. “Sembène’s films are translatable. They’re never going to be blockbusters, but you can show one of them in China, in France, in Africa, in the United States, and people will know what it’s about.”

Mr. Sembène was thus a thoroughly African artist, one who achieved global stature by virtue of his concentration on local matters. He may, indeed, have found a bigger audience at international festivals outside Africa than he did at home. But that may have more to do with global conditions of distribution than with the movies themselves, which are lively, funny, pointed and true.

Mr. Diawara recalled a story that Mr. Sembène liked to tell about his travels across Africa in the ’60s. Mr. Sembene had finished showing his film “Money Order” in a small town in Cameroon when he was approached by a local policeman, whose attention made him a little nervous.

“Where did you get that story?” the officer wanted to know. Mr. Sembène replied that the plot, which chronicles the chaotic and corrupting effects of money from France on a Senegalese family, was his own invention. “But it happened to me,” the policeman said.

Fatiha (Part3)

When she woke up, she had the lower part of her body bind and couldn’t feel anything. Her eyes were dull and she was tired after a long battle between life and death. Fatiha's mother had circumcised her daughter as she was herself circumcised and as her own mother was. Nobody could blame her since she just followed traditions which were all she knew. She believed that circumcision was the best thing that could happen to her daughter and that without it her daughter would never fully be a woman. At an early age, she had learned to follow tradition and culture, to be submissive and suffer in silence so that she would be happy in this life and the next. She was feeling the pain of her daughter but she thought it was a necessary pain and a step that she had to take towards her life as a future woman.

After that episode, Fatiha never blew kisses to the wind for Mounir. Fatiha matured and grew up from night to day. She entered in the mutilator’s hut as a young innocent child and she exited as a woman. She was a child, with the body of a child and the eyes of a woman. From that day on, Fatiha never smiled. Some people say that when she grew old she would take long walks alone and look at the stars mumbling sentences that only she understood. She would repeat the word 'Mounir' with tears in her eyes. Those who knew her, say that she knew well the art of life and was an artist of nature.

God is without any doubt, the artist par excellence, the only black dot in his master-work was to create men who had the choice between being humans and being subhuman.

The End

Notes:

Sahel: a part of Africa
Touareg: African ethnic group

An estimated 85 million to 110 million women and girls alive today have undergone Female Genital Mutilation

Female Genital Mutilation is the term used for removal of all or just part of the external parts of the female genitalia

Fatiha (Part2)

Fatiha was a girl of the Desert and like most girls of the desert, she was used to leaving loved ones behind. However, sometimes, there are people who come into our life and make us feel so unique, people with who we have so much in common and love so much that losing them breaks our heart.

Fatiha was only 10 years old when Mounir left but she cried as she had never cried before. She cried for the loss of her friend, the loss of her fiancé and the loss of her confident. Tired of crying, the thought that one day she would meet Mounir again made her feel better. After that day, Fatiha smiled less. Each night, she would look at the stars on the sky and think that wherever he was, Mounir was seeing the same sky and the same stars. Every night, she blew kisses to the wind and begged the desert wind to bring them to Mounir. From where he was, Mounir was feeling the wind and reminiscing the days he spent with Fatiha. Every day, the wind blew kisses to him, soft and sweet.

One day, Fatiha woke up in the middle of the night and saw her mother next to her. She told her “Wake up Fatiha, we have to go somewhere”.
Years later, when she thought about that night, she told herself that it would have been better to just run. But because we do not know the meaning of things unless they happen, at the moment they’re happening, destiny makes itself. It is in those moments, that without knowing it, our destiny is shaped because we all have appointments with her. Appointments that cannot be missed because Lady Destiny knows exactly where and how to find us when the time is right.

That night, Fatiha followed her mother and they went to a hut around the camp. Without knowing it, she had an appointment with destiny. Inside the hut was a very old woman with no teeth. A long scarf was covering her head from her hair to her shoulders and of her face, only her eyes were visible. Big, round, red, scary, sharp, her eyes were similar to those of an owl. With her wrinkled and shriveled skin, the old lady looked like an ugly, shapeless portrait compared to Fatiha's beauty and youthfulness.
Fatiha's mum and the old lady exchanged elusive words and Fatiha's mother asked her to get undressed and lay down. Fatiha didn’t know it yet, but she has just encountered the one who genitally mutilates girls, the nightmare of every young girl and the killer of womanhood. The old woman had in her hands a blade that still carried blood spots. She looked at Fatiha with her owl eyes, a big smile on her face. Her toothless mouth was enraptured, widely opened and gave an image of a black hole. At that point, Fatiha was really scarred and ran behind her mother. The mother put her down and put a piece of wood in her mouth. The old lady opened Fatiha's legs and Fatiha struggled violently. However, with a strength that was surprising due to her old age, the old lady kept Fatiha on the floor. Fatiha heard the sound of the blade between her legs. She felt the pain of the human flesh being cut. The blade was going up and down depriving her of her womanhood. A stream of blood was flowing between her legs. She wanted to scream her lungs out but not a sound came out of her mouth. Then it was a complete blackout, Fatiha passed out...

(To Be continued)

Fatiha ( Part 1)

I will share with you a short story that I wrote. Here is Part 1

She is six years old and loves to listen to stories on the moonlight. Pure and innocent daughter of the Sahel, she loves to play with her friends on evenings and help milk the cows in the morning. Knee high, the only type of life she knows is happy-go-lucky. Fatiha was her given name in remembrance of Arabs who came to visit her land years ago and with whom her dad has kept a friendly and strong bond. Her skin, shiny and light was common to the Tuareg girls and some say explains the beauty and delicacy of her features.

Very traditional, the Tuaregs are fond of milk and dry meat. Nomad by nature, they move where the water is very mild to their herd. This is how, at the age of six, Fatiha had alredy lived in different places. In those areas, the landscape was always the same, only the people were different. The landscape was always similar, every part of it reminding the visitor of the one he just left. On that land, bonds and relationships never lasted. Sometimes right after meeting somebody, you realize that they have to go on their separate ways. People are leaving on a daily basis and wishing each other good luck and saying to each other: 'May Allah guides you'. Most times, they hope that destiny would reunite them somehow, somewhere, some day in a similar place, in an identical scenery.

It was during one of the numerous trips that Fatiha met Mounir. Mounir was eight years old but he was already thinking of himself as the head of his family. Because he was the eldest of his siblings and the only boy, he held a lot of responsibilities. Every morning, he milked the cows and one morning he was walking his flock near Fatiha's. Very quickly, they became inseparable. A strong bond grew between them and they made promises to each other while their only witnesses were cows whose only worry was where to find a greener grass. Despite their youth the two of them thought they knew everything they needed to know about love and swore faithfulness to each other. They exchanged rings, made by themselves and were secretly engaged. They kept their secret from everybody, not wanting to share those stolen moments of happiness.

As inevitable as it was, three months later, Mounir's parents thought that the grass was greener in the east and decided to migrate east while Fatiha's parents decided to go west. Fatiha and Mounir had to go their separate ways. Fatiha watched as Mounir and his parents went east. Just the day before, they swore their love to each other and promised that they will reunite one day when they were older. They planned to then get married and have lots of children, hundreds of children...

( To Be Continued)