Ousmane Sembène, Emitäi, 1971.

In his vision of Senegal’s future Ousmane Sembène imagines an economy that would provide for all Africans and where labor would be respected and fairly rewarded. In considering God’s Bits of Wood, David Murphy comments that Sembène suggests “Africa’s future would be in the industrialized, urban world […] and that it is the birth of the proletariat, aware of its power to exploit the industrial and technological developments introduced by the West, that lies behind his vision of the city.”¹ Guelwaar, Sembène’s 1992 film, argues against a dependent economy for African countries and as Frank Ukadike points out “his critique speaks loud and clear of Third World empowerment and self-sufficiency through economic restructuring, not in the IMF way, but as a collectivized political economy geared toward enabling individual people and nations to regain control over their own destinies.”² Neither the advances through technology nor the empowered proletariat, however, emerged in postcolonial Senegal, and Sembène’s films portray the continuing struggle of workers for power and economic justice. Exposing the injustices and exploitation of the postcolonial regime, Sembène’s cinematic critique centers on the resistance Senegalese people carry out. But all of his films celebrate the worker and offer images that testify to the centrality of labor in both urban and rural settings. I would argue that even though Senegal was never enriched through the power of labor unions or experienced the social justice such an economy would provide, Sembène’s films foreground labor and its importance for the community and for the individual worker. 

His own history as a laborer informs his vibrant portrayals of labor and “helped him understand the noble values inherent in work.”³ Gadjigo argues that Sembène’s own description of his work points to his sense of advancing the wellbeing of the community: “Yes, I have been a construction helper in this city, and to this day when I pass by the houses I helped build I sometimes wonder if the people who live in them are happy.”⁴ In an interview with Guy Hennebelle he suggests the range and variety of his work as an active laborer: “I am a fisherman, mason, mechanic, docker at the harbor of Marseille.”⁵ Beyond celebrating the quotidian world of workers in slow, respectful sequences Sembène employs the same techniques to protest the exploitation of labor. His near fatal injury that left him with a fractured backbone working as a docker underlies his consciousness of the dangerous, soul-numbing jobs that can be physically damaging and psychologically dehumanizing. In focusing on labor in fiction and film he insists that “I am trying to give an idea about the life of my people” and he celebrates the perfection of that work cinematically as well as exposing the exploitation of workers.⁶

Before making his early films, Borom Sarret (1963) and Black Girl (La noire de…, 1966), Sembène spent a year in Russia at the Gorky Institute working with the eminent Russian director, Mark Donskoy, whose influence can be seen not only in his themes that center on labor, but also in Sembène’s cinematic techniques which like Donskoy’s portray the details of urban life in slow-moving close-ups which capture the gestures of specific tasks.⁷ In capturing “work” on film and individual and collective labor, Sembène employs an array of cinematic techniques. Through the use of aerial shots, close-ups, montage and cross-cutting, he is able to convey the gestures, movements and expressions that define laborers as they work, creating a kinetic sense of their actions. Many of his films begin with images of labor and images of individuals and groups working are recurring visual tropes throughout his cinema. Faat Kiné (2000) opens with an aerial shot of a procession of women carrying baskets on their heads while Xala (1975) opens with musicians drumming in celebration of Senegal’s independence from France in 1960. Early in Moolaadé (2004), a small boy climbs up the side of a storage silo to retrieve a calabash. Sembène’s cinematic techniques allow audiences to see the intricacy and beauty of these skilled actions. The combination of the aerial perspectives zooming in on these active scenes along with the kinetic sensation the filmmaker creates through the actions of the women processing, the drummers performing or the small boy climbing express the weight and pace of the characters’ movements. These images testify to Olivier Barlet’s observation on Sembène’s cinema that “Gesture takes precedent over the spoken word. The precision of the daily gestures involved in preparing a meal or working in the fields symbolizes the force of tradition.”⁸ This attention to the gesture of labor Barlet identifies in Sembène’s films suggests the value he holds for laborers and their skills. And in an observation that is often repeated, Lyle Pearson notes in a 1973 essay on Sembène that he “never extricates characters from their environment” but makes “their work settings an integral part of the story” and a central fact in his narrative.⁹ His aerial shots like the opening of Faat Kiné and Moolaadé eventually come to rest on individuals in their work environments and it is these aerial shots which suggest Sembène’s consciousness of how individual members of African communities contribute to the collective whole. These opening scenes also anticipate so many of Sembène’s themes centering on labor in a neocolonial society. The drummers celebrating Senegal’s independence are an ironic contrast to the corrupt economy and politics that emerge after 1960. And Diouana’s dreams of her travel to France as a nanny to a wealthy family’s children which is illustrated in an expressive sequence in the beginning of Black Girl is a cruel contrast to the imprisonment she suffers as an exploited household slave when she arrives. And the orderly opening of Camp de Thiaroye (1988) with soldiers in crisp uniforms belies the violent chaos which disorders this military setting.

His depictions on the operations of rural and urban “systems” assert the necessity of coordinated acts which keep communities functioning. In Moolaadé we see multiple sectors of the village — women caring for children and preparing food while the outsider Mercenaire sets up his cart for business. They illustrate Josephine Woll’s point on the way that the camera concludes its long panning shots by “coming to rest in the end on human labor.”¹⁰ Faat Kiné tests the grade of gasoline in the Total station she manages, her workers fill gas tanks and dockers secure lines in Black Girl, acts that illustrate Barlet’s perception of the primacy of gesture over words, that the actions “belong to a traditional register of gesture in which the significance of words yields before the meaning of movement.”¹¹ This “meaning of movement” is a characteristic hallmark of all of Sembène’s films and it is this technique which makes his realist cinema distinctive. Sembène himself commented to Rolf Richter that “The actor’s gestures […] are of great importance to us.”¹² It is crucial to remember, though, that Sembène’s films are as Sheila Petty asserts in the title of her study, A Call to Action.¹³ But Sembène has insisted that his films are not simply polemical: “There’s no point in making films to simply entertain or bore people with protest films about labor rallies. Our films must for an hour and a half or two, entertain, but also inspire and make the headlines of conversations in the workplace, and in the home.”¹⁴ His techniques serve the political vision he is promoting. The documentary techniques he employs—the slow deliberate pacing, the voice overs and montage—all serve his didactic purposes. In defining Sembène’s “indigenous aesthetics” Ukadike argues that the filmmaker is able to capture moments that are unique to African life through slow pacing and calculated close-ups.¹⁵ In his analysis of the cinematic method of Mandabi (1968), Manthia Diawara also emphasizes Sembène’s intention to convey a sense of the physical exertion of his characters’ movement when he comments on “the weight of every shot and image, including the sharp knife that the barber introduces inside the nostrils of Ibrahima Dieng, the stroll of the women in the sand with the calabashes on their heads, and the postman dragging his feet under the weight of his bag.”¹⁶ Identifying the kinetic sensations of all these actions, Diawara describes one of the key characteristics of Sembène’s cinematic techniques in envisioning the unique pace, weight and rhythm of workers’ movements. His juxtaposition of useful, skilled labor with the paper pushers who serve the neocolonial bureaucracy is apparent throughout Mandabi. The careful, precise gestures of the barber or the women’s practiced preparation of food are traditional images which contrast with the men in suits behind glass in their small offices. At one point construction workers carrying heavy beams cross through busy traffic walking to a construction site. The futility of Dieng’s pursuit of the necessary documents which would enable him to cash the money order only reiterates the contrast with worthwhile labor that Sembène insists on in Mandabi. Sembène’s insistence on the importance of labor—of work within the African community—is repeated visually throughout his cinema to foreground the critical roles coordinated labor plays in cohering human communities. In the course of Mandabi we learn that Dieng is unemployed and that the money order he receives is from his nephew who is sweeping streets in Paris because there is no employment in Dakar. The doctrine that work is a necessity for all individuals in a society is an indisputable theme in all his films. Therefore when economic conditions result in high rates of unemployment Sembène portrays the reality as destructive for the wellbeing of workers. Toward the conclusion of Guelwaar the title character pleads with the crowd to refuse Food Aid stating, “If you want to kill a proud man supply all his daily needs and you’ll make him a slave […]. This aid they are distributing here will kill us.”

If, as various critics have observed, Sembène prioritizes image over sound, this is particularly apparent in his use of costume and symbol to expose the tyranny of systems and hierarchies of the French to dominate the lives of African “subjects.” In Black Girl, Diouna’s movement from exultation when she learns she will accompany her employers to the French riviera as a nanny to her despair and suicide at the film’s conclusion is carefully recorded through coded clothing and symbol. As her excitement descends into anger, resentment, and resistance and as she comes to understand her imprisonment, her changing moods are demonstrated through her altered dress. Shortly after their arrival Diouna puts on an attractive dress and high heels only to be told by her harsh mistress, “You’re not going to a party. Put on something else” and the “madame” ties an apron around her waist to demonstrate her servile status. Her role as a slave, as a domestic worker and not a Nanny for the family’s children is made clear through her clothing. Her sense of her employers’ exploitation of her and her isolation is expressed throughout the film as she says in voiceovers “I’m alone,” “I’m their slave,” or “I’m a prisoner here.” As she retreats into smaller and more confined spaces, finally ending up as a suicide in the bathtub, the range of their living space is enlarged. Her mistress gestures out the window and says, “Here is the Riviera,” but Diouna is never allowed to venture out. The image of the ocean and the beauty of the landscape outside the apartment is the constant scene Diouna views which is for her a forbidden place. At the end of the film Diouna, as an act of resistance, once again puts on a beautiful dress and wears her high heels again to provoke the Madame, who once again insists she remove them. Diouna retrieves the African mask which she had given them as a gift representing her culture and claims, “It is mine.” Before her suicide in the bathtub, her final act of resistance, Diouna claims, “Madame will never scold me again […]. Never again will she lie to me.” The sequence of the small boy in Dakar who follows her employer returning Diouna’s suitcase to her family after her death, with the returned mask in front of his face, signifies the judgment her employers deserve. The imagery of Diouna’s continual labor throughout the film as she moves between the kitchen, the bedroom and the bathroom scrubbing, sweeping, and mopping as she recognizes that “Madame wanted a housemaid,” not a nanny for her children. Metaphorically Diouna’s dilemma is a microcosm of Senegal’s relation to France as the colonizing presence. Her employers’ guests worry that the unrest in the country, the coups d’État all over the continent, suggest that “Senegal isn’t safe.” Diouna’s resistance to her employers’ exploitation parallels the revolts against colonial rule erupting all over the continent. Ukadike sums up Sembène’s exposure of the inequities Black Girl exposes when he suggests “it uncovers the meaning of being African, the nature of unequal power relations, and the pervasive hypocrisy, intolerance and inhumanity of even the most well-bred in the French culture of Dakar.”¹⁷

Sembène’s historical films are the most devastating portrayals of exploited labor since they focus, first, in Emitai (Emitaï, 1971), which means God of Thunder, on the forced conscription of young men from the Casamance into the French military in WWII, and, secondly, in Camp de Thiaroye, on the massacre of African soldiers waiting to be returned to their countries after the war. The latter which Sembène co-directed with Thierno Faty Sow centers on tirailleurs—soldiers temporarily housed at this camp—who are massacred because of their resistance to the French military’s refusal to pay them the full value of their promised wages. Here the filmmakers expose a horrific event French authorities have tried to suppress and deny for decades.¹⁸ Although Sembène claims that “it’s without grudge” that he speaks of Thiaroye, he goes on to say, “But I must educate about my history […] those soldiers were coming from the battleground […]. They had given their blood for France and the French did not hesitate to kill them.”¹⁹

Sembène’s symbolic use of costume prefigures the French domination of African soldiers since as the soldiers arrive at Camp de Thiaroye, they are handed new uniforms with short pants and fezzes to be exchanged for the American military dress that identifies them as soldiers with equal status to the French military. The change in status is immediately clear; they are now subalterns and their dress demotes them in the French military hierarchy; the stark contrast between the white French soldiers and the black Africans in different uniforms is a visual sign of their subordination. Emitai begins with armed African soldiers, again in short pants with fezzes, capturing resisting African men, in village dress with spears, for conscription into the French army. The men in the village council meet under a Baobab tree, a vivid contrast to the French officers conferring in an office in the regalia of the upper echelons of the French military. One elder comments that “The whites have emptied the village with their war,” and other villagers express their anger at African men having to fight in the “white men’s war.” The ending of Emitai is another horrific massacre of the African men who are rebelling against the French military presence in their village. Again, it is the conscripted African soldiers who are ordered to shoot their fellow men and Sembène closes his film with gunfire and a black screen to protest this violent and unjust action.

A similar juxtaposition of tropes in Mandabi carried out through a series of contrasting images suggests the fate of the unfortunate Ibrahima Dieng, illiterate and unemployed, as he finds himself at the mercy of bureaucrats who shuffle papers and send him on an infuriating chase to cash a money order which requires identification papers which can only be obtained with other papers—in this case a birth certificate and a photograph. Here the imagery of the everyday working world of the urban proletariat—cooking, building, transporting—is seen in dramatic contrast to the neo-colonial bureaucracy who indolently pass papers among themselves and confuse the illiterate Dieng on his quest to cash a 2500 CFA money order.²⁰ Sembène’s imagery contrasts useful work that enables the lives of the urban poor with the paper pushers sitting at desks in offices, bureaucrats who inhabit another realm. As Ukadike comments on Mandabi, Sembène examines “social injustice more forcefully, critically and at greater length” when “he focuses on the exploitation of illiterates by the smart, corrupt and self-centered literate.”²¹ The close-ups of the barber in the opening scene or Dieng’s wives preparing meals are set in ironic contrast to those who sit behind desks and demand documents that Dieng can only barely comprehend. While many critics label Mandabi a comedy, I would have to agree with Diawara who describes it as a “political tragedy.”²² Sembène himself described it as a “comedy that turns into a tragedy.”²³ Here the rituals of neo-colonial capitalism replace the rhythms of family and communal life and Dieng is ultimately betrayed by a nephew who steals his money order.

Critics refer to Xala as a comedy, which it is, albeit a dark comedy in the end. But it is more accurately a grim political satire. Along with Mandabi, Xala records Sembène’s allegory of how his country fails to become the socialist democracy he saw as just and transforming. Ukadike points out that “the film denounces the excesses and misplaced priorities of the new African elites, by equating their neocolonial exploitation […] with sexual impotence, presented here as a metaphor for Africa’s socio-economic impotence. This critique manifests itself by the miserable condition of the multitude of beggars.”²⁴ Unlike the imagery of everyday labor he focuses on in his earlier films, the imagery in Xala centers on business deals and commerce. The opening sequence contrasts the departing French ministers with the new Senegalese ministers who enter in dashikis which they quickly exchange for dark suits as they acquire attache cases filled with cash—bribes from the ferret-like Frenchman who is a trope throughout the film; he’s silent, but manipulative, symbolizing the power behind the scenes controlling the new regime—a puppet government for the French. The new ministers proclaim “We choose socialism […] African socialism.” But as they chant “Long live Africanity” they leave the office as “mimic men,” lining up in a motorcade of Mercedes as they go off to display their new-found wealth and status. El Hadji, one of the newly enriched ministers and protagonist of Xala, issues a wedding invitation to his colleagues for his third marriage to a young bride. A display of wedding gifts, a new car for the bride and a lavish ceremony ensue. The celebratory mood, though, is disrupted by his progressive daughter’s putdown of polygamy which provokes a slap from her father when she proclaims “men are dirty dogs,” when his first two wives quarrel and finally, when he discovers he has the “xala,” the curse of impotence as he attempts to consummate the marriage.

Throughout this film Sembène contrasts opposing value systems. It is not only clear that African socialism is nowhere to be found in this new neocolonial world, but also that traditional African values and customs disappear when the corrupt capitalism left over from the departing French colonizers takes over. El Hadji wastes his money on a third wife he really cannot afford and along with his mimic men colleagues he engages in illegal business practices—selling rice on the black market and never supplying the poor with their intended allotments. The preference for the French language, the “official” language as one of the newly minted ministers insists, is a constant tension in Xala. El Hadji chides his daughter “How dare you speak Wolof when I address you in French.” Vacationing in Europe is promoted; although when one minister is asked if he intends to go to Spain, he retorts “I don’t go there anymore—everywhere you look there are negroes.” The self-hate this consciousness reveals is apparent in the many ways what is familiar and traditionally African is rejected. El Hadji rejects the traditional African practice of the mortar and pestle guaranteeing virility which precedes his impotency. Throughout Xala Sembène’s satire pokes fun at El Hadji’s turning his back on tradition when against his modern leaning he is forced to consult a marabout in an effort to regain his potency. When he begs “Make me a man again” the marabout instructs him to crawl on all fours like a hog with fake teeth in his mouth to his new bride which he obediently carries out in one of the more vividly absurd and comic actions.

Throughout Xala Sembène demonstrates visually how the new regime fails as a socialist democracy by ignoring the beggars who they consider “human rubbish” and who they feel discredit the city. The military forcibly deport them “far away to a remote location” where Sembène portrays them in a desolate sandy desert. The beggars and cripples Sembène juxtaposes with the newly rich businessmen is his ironic comment on the neocolonial capitalism which never accommodates a need to share wealth. In fact, of all of his films, Xala exposes the economic inequality inherited from colonial rule most explicitly. In the Dakar of this era of independence there are only the rich and the poor. Except for a few drivers serving the newly created business class there are few scenes of a street culture. El Hadji’s secretary works in an office with boxes, a telephone and a typewriter. And when she arrives at work she must shed her traditional boubou to display her European dress underneath. 

At the end there is nothing in his storeroom and one of his distraught clients insists he produce his ordered goods. El Hadji is unable to persuade him that his new “business plan” will eventually give him what he wants, he replies, “I need rice and tomatoes” now. When El Hadji applies for a 500,000 franc loan the bank director informs him “I have a file on you… you are living beyond your means.” The denouement of El Hadji’s saga is not surprising; spending money he does not have he goes bankrupt and must face the wrath of his fellow ministers who chastise him for abusing his privileges when they claim, “we’re being accused of being feudal, negligent, fraudulent” he reminds them “We’re all crabs in the same basket… we’ve all diverted goods intended for the needy.” After reminding them of “the injustice which we all practice,” he’s voted out only to be replaced by another mimic man in a cowboy hat who takes over El Hadji’s attache case. His sad fate is having all his material possessions confiscated, losing his new wife and facing the vengeance of one of the beggars who claims he is the one who cursed him with the xala because he had ruined his life. Samba Gadjigo explains the historical background: “The land issue is at the heart of the climactic standoff between El Hadji Abdou Kadar Beye and the leader of the beggars. The latter sums it up very well: ‘Our story goes way back in the past, it was before your marriage to this woman here. You don’t remember it? I knew you wouldn’t! What I’m right now [a blind man and a beggar], it’s all your fault… do you remember selling a big plot of land located in Diecko and that belonged to our clan? With the complicity of people in higher places, you falsified the clan names, you expropriated us.’” When he explains the only way El Hadji can be rid of the xala is to be spit upon by the beggars, El Hadji agrees because he is still so desperate to end his plight. Hadji being spit upon is the final vivid image—the disgust of the dispossessed. In a film where long shots dominate the close-ups of the beggars faces as well as El Hadji’s naked torso being spit upon is one of the few intimate and repellant shots in Xala. 

Faat Kiné Sembène’s 2000 film opens with images of labor that emphasize a contrast between the old and the new. A procession of women carrying colorful bins on their heads snake through streets, a colonnade and eventually cross in front of Faat Kiné on her way to work as the manager of a Total station. Anjali Prabhu reminds us this contrast is “intellectual montage.” Here Sembène portrays an urban world where traditional women’s work contrasts with Faat Kiné’s more powerful role in a burgeoning capitalist economy. Again, as Prabhu asserts, “This film […] departs from the revolutionary stance of reversal or revision that his earlier films privileged” because “the film accepts the terms of modernity and explores the opportunities for women in African contexts that still remain largely unexploited in the new roles it offers them.”²⁵ In contrast to the washed out color in Xala, Sembène’s cinematography of the urban world in Faat Kiné is vivid with striking color. From Faat Kiné’s bright blue car, her colorful boubou and the brilliant reds of the gas attendants’ uniforms, the Dakar in this film is a far cry from the drab grayness of the Dakar in Xala. The modern emerging capitalism in Faat Kiné features the constant exchange of money; the imagery of labor recedes in importance here. Discourse on financial transactions and commerce are the tropes that define the urban world here. Faat Kiné pays for flowers an old peddlar brings to her shop, she gives coins to each person in a procession of blind people being led past her station, and she pays a bike messenger who delivers papers for her. The language of commerce prevails. When she applies for a bank loan, she rejects their high interest rates, and is told “you are tough.” She refuses a former borrower’s loan request telling him “You don’t pay your debts.” When he turns to the banker who also turns him down he accuses him of practicing “free market colonialism” only to be told “You are an African from colonial times.” But this new economy does encompass Tontines and Solidarity groups which individuals pay into to finance exceptional expenses like funerals, baptisms or pilgrimages which exist to keep the economy functioning. When her disappointed former borrower complains of having to support his family—his children and four wives—Kiné reminds him that he should have paid into the “Solidarity.” When the wife of Faat Kiné’s lover accosts her on the street and threatens her, if she continues to sleep with her husband, she reminds her that even this is transactional; “I pay for his services.”

To clarify the reasons for Faat Kiné’s success and affluence, Sembène turns to her backstory in a dark sequence which is a montage that contrasts with the brightness of his protagonist’s current position. It is a tale that foregrounds the way she worked to raise her two children on her own while their fathers who took advantage of her as a girl never offered her marriage or money and disrupted her education. Seduced by her teacher, she is expelled from school and her dream of becoming a lawyer is abruptly ended. Her father’s wrath at Kiné’s dishonoring her family for bearing a child out of wedlock results in her mother being horrifically burned when, in anger, he throws a burning log at his daughter. Mammy, who resides in and oversees the spacious house Faat Kiné has built, has helped to raise her grandchildren and serves as a trope throughout the film opposing the figures of the exploitative men who took advantage of her daughter. Faat Kiné’s strong spirit, her years of hard work eventually bring her success as a businesswoman and she emerges as an autonomous woman who dictates the terms of her emotional and sexual life. One of the most beautiful and comic scenes in the film centers on Faat Kiné and her close friends at FGM, an ice cream shop in Dakar where they share frank anecdotes about their amorous adventures and exult in their freedom and affluence. The beauty of their colorful clothes, the open-air greenery, their spirited and amusing chatter reflect a new world for women. Content with the comfort of their lives they question the decision of one of them to agree to become a third wife, reminding her “you can support yourself.” Faat Kiné is a celebration of a woman’s individual success as well as a critique of a patriarchal system that seems out of sync with the modernity of evolving urban life. Sembène comments on Faat Kiné that “she discovers the power of money and the value of freedom. The only solution she can have to her problems is a personal and individualistic one.”²⁶ In contrast to Sembène’s earlier emphasis on the ideal of African socialism and a collective society as well as his satire of the capitalists who emerge in a mean-spirited neocolonial world, Faat Kiné negotiates the economic corridors of modern Dakar with ease and competence. But as an accomplished businesswoman in contemporary Dakar, Faat Kiné is charitable and sympathetic to those who are less able and unlike the greedy capitalists in Xala and Mandabi she exemplifies the best traditional African ideals of communal responsibility. On this day when she celebrates her children’s academic success because they had passed their baccalaureate exams which will enable them to go on to the university, the audience is deeply aware of the ways the film exposes the negligent, corrupt behavior of men. The party celebrating their success concludes the film and exposes the two absent fathers who show up to bask in the glow of their off springs’ success. Aby turns her father, Professor Gaye, away saying, “My mother and brother helped me.” Djibril, whose father duped Faat Kiné into giving him her savings for a half-built villa, rejects his biological father when he asks, “Do you know who I am?” Djibril replies, “Why should I recognize you as my father. You have not earned my filial respect.” He points out that “I don’t know my brothers and sisters… where were you?” When he asks if he would help him now with tuition money for his university studies, his father replies, “Are you kidding? Kiné is richer than I am.” Djibril’s final comment that “I owe everything to my mother,” is the just praise that highlights her devotion and determination and the moral failure of both men in a patriarchal society. Professor Gaye’s friend who has accompanied him to his daughter’s party urges him to marry Kiné suggesting he would benefit from her wealth. But the film concludes with Faat Kiné taking Jean, the uncle Aby and Djibril has selected for their mother, to her room.

Although he sets his 2004 film in a traditional African village, Sembène returns to the themes in Faat Kiné—female strength, oppressive patriarchy, and progressive ideas on gender roles. Faat Kiné is an entrepreneur whose individual success promotes her family’s interests, while Colle, the female protagonist of Moolaadé acts in the interests of all the females in her village. Sembène’s opening segment captures the daily work of the women as they carry out the tasks that keep the community going. His camera focuses on women and children as they grind grain, pump and transport water, wash babies and prepare food. As in earlier films, he slowly and respectfully records the intricate gestures and deliberation their work requires. Early in the film, however, two events threaten to disrupt the serenity and order of this village—a peddler mercenaire arrives with his cart filled with goods to sell to the village and Colle declares a “moolaadé” or asylum for four girls resisting the genital “cutting” or “purification” ritual the Saldana is carrying out. In bright red robes they process through the village with the initiates draped in white and represent the opposition to Colle and her protection of the four small girls. The Mercenaire’s arrival is a disruptive event; he is seen as a menacing figure as he flirts with women enticing them to buy his overpriced goods and most importantly selling them batteries for their radios which allow them to hear ideas from the outside urban world which the village elders see as threatening their traditional Islamic values. Mercenaire’s trade also challenges the rural economy of the village which works for the common good. Filmed in Burkina Faso, Sembène chose the site for its dramatic mosque whose architecture mimics a giant anthill at the edge of the village, and the men streaming in and out clarifies not only the separation of sexes, but also the patriarchal power that governs the village. The politics that drive Moolaadé like the revolts that emerge in his earlier films are clearly intended to expose the evils of the practice of genital cutting for all women. When Colle asks the girls she is protecting where they got the idea of resisting, one child tells her “My older sister died of the purification.” Sembène’s didacticism here ensures that his audience knows the particular horrors of this traditional practice which still prevails in some African countries. Colle’s first two children died in childbirth because of the harm done to her body from female circumcision. And we see her writhe in pain and bleed during intercourse with her husband Cire. Female solidarity is foregrounded in Moolaadé and this is reminiscent of the women bonding in resistance to the French military in Emitai. Sembène portrays these village women in the earlier film as they plant rice, harvest it, hide it and bearing the consequences when the French round them up and sequester them until they give it up. Ultimately the women in Emitai cannot save the men who resist the orders of the French military officers and in a truly horrific scene their fellow villagers, the conscripted African soldiers, line them up and are ordered to shoot. In Emitai Sembène is exposing an historical atrocity, but in Moolaadé he is exposing a present danger and it is the women here who are protecting the children from harm.

Moolaadé is different from some of Sembène’s earlier films in the sense that it has a strong emotional component that elicits sympathy and compels audiences to identify with the small girls put at risk, with the mothers who lose children because of excision, and with Colle who heroically defends the asylum and suffers a brutal beating and public humiliation. And the awakening conscience of many in the village reveals the swing away from accepting mindless traditional practices that damage the community. The ironic, satiric tone of Xala or Mandabi or even the distanced critique in Black Girl make valid arguments and exposes practices which are unjust, but none of these earlier films grabs the audience’s heart the way Moolaadé does. This final Sembène’s film not only presents the deleterious effects of genital cutting, it also raises questions about the patriarchal structure of traditional communities, the role of women in village decisions and religious practices that exclude women or put them in an inferior position. Clearly the women who have been damaged by “purification” processes and who have lost daughters who died from it, are in a superior position to recognize its dangers. The village structure here which puts male elders in charge of governing is exposed as damaging for communal life. Sembène does not oppose polygamy in this film; indeed Colle is supported by her senior wife who agrees with her and comforts and nurses her when she is hurt. She assures her, “I am on your side. I too do not like excision.”

And through his characterization of Doucoure who is returning from his education in France, he articulates alternatives to the village elders who are narrowly and literally focused on traditional practices and on their own authority in upholding them. Doucoure’s arrival brings perspectives and practices from France including practices from a capitalist economy and advanced social ideas which challenge his family and the village. He is joyfully greeted by the villagers, an exuberant praise singer and his proud parents. Dressed in an elegant European suit he generously distributes money, pays his father’s debts to Mercenaire and responds to the warm welcome. But he is surprised when his father bans TV and tells him, “We can’t cut ourselves off from the progress of the world.” When his father tells him he cannot marry Amsatou, a bilakoro, he asserts” My marriage is my own business,” despite his father’s threat that he will be disinherited if he disobeys. The other outsider, Mercenaire, is a morally ambiguous character—he is a womanizer who cheats his customers—and yet he is the only one to intervene when Colle is being flogged when she refuses to call off the moolaadé. As many in the crowd urge her to “Say it” to call off the moolaadé, she is silent. But his action here is too threatening to some in the community; he is killed by a group of masked men for intruding. The other action that reveals the elders’ determination to control women’s thoughts and behavior is the confiscation and burning of their radios. One woman’s protest, “They want to lock up our minds,” predicts the ongoing conflict within the village that will certainly go on.

Sembène often spoke of his films as a “night school” and used his films to provoke discussion as a forum for learning. In reporting on a discussion, he participated in after one screening of Moolaadé he said that “Sometimes we manage to convert men to our viewpoint although it’s usually women who agree with us […]. But no one can give a proper explanation of why excision should be allowed because the origin of that practice dates back to time immemorial.”²⁷ The final section of Moolaadé is not a resolution, but the action does bring change for many in the community. Two missing girls who ran away from the initiation are found dead in a well where they threw themselves to avoid being cut. And after Diata, one of the four girls Colle is protecting, is kidnapped by the Saldana and is taken off to be cut, she dies which elicits intense heartbreaking weeping from her mother and prolonged grieving from the other women fighting this tradition. Finally, Colle challenges the Saldana, demanding they throw down their knives before the entire village. It is a sombre conclusion, but unresolved, raising the question on where the consciousness of the village will go from here.

Sembène’s films center on the issues of work and the economy in Senegal in the last four decades of his life (1965-2004). Moving from considerations of the work lives of Senegalese to the complications a changing economy brought, he offers a graphic sense of how these changes affected men and women in their work in both rural and urban environments. From the colonial atrocities of Emitai to Camp de Thiaroye that devastated Africans during World War II to the more contemporary issues in Faat Kiné and Moolaadé Sembène exposes injustice as well as celebrating progress.

Mary Jane Androne

1. David Murphy, Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction (Oxford: James Currey, 2001), 82. ↩︎
2. Nwachukwas Frank Ukadike, “The Creation of an African Film Aesthetic/Language for Representing African Realities,” in A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembene, ed. Sheila Petty (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 115. ↩︎
3. Samba Gadjigo, Ousmane Sembène: The Making of a Militant Artist (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), 47. ↩︎
4. Ibid.. ↩︎
5. Ousmane Sembène, “Ousmane Sembène: For Me, the Cinema Is an Instrumental of Political Action, But…”, interview by Guy Hennebelle, in Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, ed. Annett Busch and Max Annas (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), 17. ↩︎
6. Ibid.. ↩︎
7. Josephine Woll, “The Russian Connection: Soviet Cinema and the Cinema of Francophone Africa,” in Focus on African Film, ed. Francoise Pfaff (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2004), 227. ↩︎
8. Olivier Barlet, African Cinema: Decolonizing the Gaze, trans. Chris Turner (London: Zed, 2000), 158. ↩︎
9. Lyle Pearson, “Four Years of African Film,” Film Quarterly 26, no. 3 (1973): 46. ↩︎
10. Josephine Woll quoted in Barlet, African Cinema, 39. ↩︎
11. Id., 158. ↩︎
12. Sembène, “Interview with Ousmane Sembène,” interview by Rolf Richter, in Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, ed. Annett Busch and Max Annas (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), 104. ↩︎
13. Sheila Petty, eds., A Call To Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembene (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996). ↩︎
14. Sembène, “Still the Fire in the Belly: The Confessions of Ousmane Sembène,” interview by Mamadou Niang, in Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, ed. Annett Busch and Max Annas (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), 180. ↩︎
15. Ukadike, “The Creation of an African Film,” 105. See also Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 247. ↩︎
16. Manthia Diawara, African Films: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics (Munich: Prestel, 2010), 139. ↩︎
17. Ukadike, “The Creation of an African Film,” 107. ↩︎
18. Both Joseph Gugler, “Fiction, Fact, and the Responsibility of the Critic: Camp de Thiaroye, Yaaba, and The Gods Must Be Crazy,” in Focus on African Film, ed. Françoise Pfaff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 69-85, and Kenneth Harrow, “Camp de Thioraye: Who’s Hiding in Those Tanks and How Come We Can’t See Their Faces?”, Iris 18 (1995 ): 147-52, take issue with Sembène’s historical inaccuracy in this film, claiming that the massacre took place at 10:30 AM, that there were no tanks and that the African soldiers purportedly were going for their weapons when they were shot. They also point out that other African soldiers carried out the massacre. ↩︎
19. Amadou Fofana, The Films of Ousmane Sembène: Discourse,Politics and Culture (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), 41. ↩︎
20. Francoise Pfaff points out that the 2500 CFA is only worth $100 and of this “sum $80 is to be saved by Ibrihima for his nephew’s return, $12 must be given to the nephew’s mother and $8 for Ibrihima because the nephew knows he is unemployed and needs help.” Francoise Pfaff, The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene: A Pioneer of African Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 129. ↩︎
21. Ukadike, Black African Cinema, 84. ↩︎
22. Diawara, African Films, 41. ↩︎
23. Woll, “The Russian Connection,” 225. ↩︎
24. Ukadike, “The Creation of an African Film,” 111. ↩︎
25. Anjali Prabhu, Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 110. ↩︎
26. Sembène, “The Power of Female Solidarity: An Interview with Ousmane Sembène,” interview by Jared Rapfogel and Richard Porton, in Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, ed. Annett Busch and Max Annas (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), 202. ↩︎
27. Ibid., 201. ↩︎