Sembène Ousmane, the "elders' elder"

by Catherine Ruelle

Article published on the 2009-02-25 Latest update 2009-02-26 10:50 TU

The Senegalese director Sembène Ousmane in Ouagadougou for the 19th Fespaco
(Photo: Denis Chastel/RFI)

The man who put African cinema on an international map will be missed when the 2009 Fespaco kicks off - the 2007 festival was the only one he didn't attend. That was the year he died. Sembène Ousmane was born on New Year's Day in 1923 in Ziguinchor, Senegal, and died at his home in Dakar in June 2007. He had a multitude of lives and several careers: docker, writer, filmmaker.

 

From his childhood, Sembène Ousmane had a taste for rebellion, generally against the "masters", from his time in the French and Senegalese military. He also carried with him an understanding of injustice, after his time as a docker in the port of Marseille.

In 1956 he published his first novel, Le Docker noir (The black docker), which recounted his own experience and in 1957 he published Ô pays, mon beau peuple (Oh my country, my beautiful people). These were followed, in 1960, by another novel, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu (God's bit of wood) which told the story of the 1947-48 railworkers' strike on the Dakar-Bamako line.

With independence in 1960, Ousmane travelled across Africa and, somehwere on the Congo river, he got his first insight into the importance of cinematic images and of the power of the medium as "a night school".

By then aged over 40, he started from scratch and took off to study cinema at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow.

The rest, as they say, is history, in this case of the international impact of his first films, Borrom Sarret and La Noire de…. It was the start of a career which would only come to an end with the magnificent Mooladé, in 2003.

Cinema, however, only took up part of Sembène’s life. From his time on the docks and in politics he never lost touch with the marginalised, seeking to defend them, and to give a voice to people who often didn't have one.

His œuvre documents contemporary problems in African societies – corruption, nepotism, the abuse of tradition (Le Mandat, Xalam) and tells the history of his continent (Emitaï, Ceddo, Camp de Thiaroye) and of the fight against colonialism and neo-colonialism.

With Faat Kiné in 2000, he began a triptych on “minor heroism” and the condition of women in Africa. In the second part, Mooladé (2003), he tackled the question of female excision.

He died at the age of 84, after months of illness, on 9 June 2007 while in the middle of preparations for the third instalment, La confrérie des rats. In 30 years of filmmaking, the one project he never finished, was the story he held dearest, that of the 19th-century anti-colonialist, Almamy Samory Touré.