Tribute to Sembene Ousmane

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/309/Xala_42074.jpgIn October 2003, at the opening of the Africa at the Picture film festival in London, veteran Senegalese film director Ousmane Sembène screened Faat Kine, the first of what had hoped to be a trilogy on the African heroism and with each film, strong female characters.

In Faat Kine, Djip of the son of female protagonist Faat Kine - a feisty single, unwed mother of two young adults and a businesswoman - publicly questions the authority of elders, as he refuses to show the customary respect to his absentee father. In this scene between father and son, Sembène pays homage to Pan-Africanism, as mural images of fallen heroes such as Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) feature within the background of the frame.

During an interview immediately following the screening, Sembène, commonly referred to as the 'father of African film', gave his take on the African brain drain, the exodus of Africa’s young people to the West, as he recognised the degree of individual freedom African youth experience in America and Europe as oppose to the restrictions traditionally placed on young people in Africa. Then, age 80, Sembène also identified the generational gap between himself and the young people of his native country of Senegal. He went on to acknowledge the work and struggles of a new brand of Senegalese filmmakers including Moussa Sene Absa, director of Madame Brouette.

Despite, his assertion of a generational gap, Sembène’s films continue to resonant with African audiences, both young and older, because they challenge the prevailing notions of traditional African society and give voice to the far too often unheard masses.

From the beginning of his journey as a filmmaker, Sembène’s focus has been on speaking to his people. In his own words, in a 2005 interview with The Independent, he states: 'I create to talk to my people, my country. The priority is that my people can understand me. Africa needs to see its own reflection. A society progresses by asking questions of itself, so I want to be an artist who questions his people.'

In one of his earliest work, Borom Sarret, Sembène does just that, as the short drama follows a day in the life of a horse-cart driver. In this film, Sembène questions both the practice of the traditional, as the horse-cart driver struggles to decide whether to pay a griot for praise-singing, and the repressive nature of neo-colonialism, as the driver goes through a trencherous misadventure while he takes a passenger to the white section of the Dakar. Through Borom Sarret, Sembène critically examines the social and economic challenges of the working poor in Dakar, through the horse-cart driver who comes home from work empty handed and is left with the baby while his wife goes out to find money, perhaps resorting to prostitution.

In 1975, Sembène directed a film adaptation of his 1973 novel, Xala, in which he again tackles the frustrations and disillusionment with a neo-colonialist Senegal. Xala is a satirical look at the state of post-independence Africa, drawing a creative parallel between Senegal’s struggle for self-governance and the sexual impotence of the film’s main character El Hadji, a member of the newly constituted Chamber of Commerce. El Hadji uses his new position to launder money in order to pay for his elaborated wedding to his third wife.

Like many of Sembène’s films, Xala features strong females and gives a voice of wisdom and progression to younger characters that question the judgement of their elders. In a subtle yet prolific scene, Rama, El Hadji’s eldest daughter challenges her father’s preoccupation with western consumerism and his use of the former colonizers’ language as she answers all of her father’s questions in Wolof despite El Hadji having posed his questions in French. The use of indigenous language in Sembène’s work is an important characteristic that differentiates him from other African directors, as he was the first to rely on indigenous languages for film dialogue, reminiscent of Ngugi’s arguments on the use of language in African literature.

Beyond the dependence on Western culture, Rama also challenges traditional customs that for her, appear to be outdated such as her father’s polygamous marriages. Out all of the female characters in Xala, Françoise Pfaff asserts that Rama symbolises Sembène’s Marxist ideology as African liberation is directly mirrored by African women’s social and political emancipation, as represented in his films. According to Pfaff, 'with the winged swiftness and freedom of a modern day Amazon…Rama is a positive and refreshing counterpart to her father who represents the corrupted bourgeoisie who robs the masses and perpetuates the French neocolonial presence in Africa'.

By the end of the film, Rama along with her mother Awa, El Hadji’s first wife, witness the ultimate humiliation of El Hadji, as he is stripped naked and spat upon by 'human trash', the disable and refuge of the society, as a means for breaking the 'curse' of his sexual impotence. Here again, Sembène gives agency to the seemingly disadvantaged thereby challenging conventional notions of power.

In his last film, Moolaadé, Sembène once again portrays strong women as he takes on the highly controversial subject of female circumcision in Africa. In a small village in Burkina Faso, Collé the second wife of one of the villagers relies on the tradition of moolaadé, 'magical protection', a sanctuary to protect several young girls from the practice of 'purification' or female circumcision. Sembène addresses the subject of female circumcision brilliantly in this film, as he examines various aspects of the debate, recognising the central role that women play in maintaining the tradition as well as the role of men, in ignoring the politics of the practice, relegating the matter to women’s business.

In Moolaadé, Sembène also takes on the even larger question of the intersection between the so-called traditional and modern, as the son of a village elder returns from Paris for an arranged marriage to an uncircumcised bride. In this aspect of the plot, Sembène identifies the position the young men in either perpetuating or deterring female circumcision since it is believed that an eligible man will not marry a woman who is deemed to be uncircumcised and therefore unclean. In a poignant scene exploring the intrusion of modern-day life, the men of the village, afraid that the radio programmes frequently listened to by the women, may be to blame for the recent protest against the tradition of circumcision, gather all the transmitter radios from every home and place them in a large pile in the centre of the village thereby cutting the woman off from the rest of the world.

By the end of the film, when one of the village women takes her daughter out of the protection of Collé, to be circumcised and subsequently the woman’s daughter dies from the procedure, the intense social and spiritual bond of African womanhood is cinematically represented as Collé presents the grieving mother is an infant girl to care for and raise as her own daughter.

Throughout his life through activism, writing and later in filmmaking, Sembène worked diligently to not only reflect but to challenge his people and his country. In so doing he infused his own political ideology, tackling both the dependency on Western neo-colonialism and blind adherence to so-called tradition. Both were fair game for critical interrogation in Sembène’s films as he represented power in those deemed as powerless.

In Sembène’s female characters, one sees the embodiment of self-determination and strength as evident in Rama and Collé - the types of Africa women who are frequently overlooked within Western feminist discourse on Africa. Further, Sembène remained hopefully as reflected in his work, on the state of young people in Africa, believing that African youth would be the ones to move forward and transform the continent.

According to Sembène, cinema is the 'night school' of his people and he sough to educate within this medium, elevating the style and language of film in order to serve the needs of African audiences. Sembène was drawn to filmmaking not simply for art sake - for self-indulgent exploits, like that of the Italian neo-realists or the French new wave, but to use cinema as a libratory practice, compelling his audience to do more - to do more than simply sit in a dark room, staring at a glowing screen. Rather, through his films, Sembène asked of his African audiences to challenge, to innovate, to progress.

* Montré Aza Missouri is a filmmaker and PhD Candidate in the Centre for Media and Film Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

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