Ousmane Sembène, Ceddo, 1977.

“Were you closer to your father or your mother?” So asks Manthia Diawara early in the 1994 documentary, Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. Ousmane Sembène’s reply, unsurprisingly, is that his relationship with women⁠ — in particular, his grandmothers⁠ — shaped his development most profoundly; “I’d watch her work,” he says of his paternal grandmother. Sembène’s attentiveness to women’s work as a decidedly visual phenomenon⁠—that is, as something that one watches⁠ — remains an unmistakable feature of his cinema. For decades, critics have studied Sembène’s treatment of women in both literary and cinematic contexts. Varied characterizations of Sembène’s feminism/womanism, whether as an “old man” feminist (Kenneth Harrow) or as “the grandfather of African feminism” (Michael Janis),¹ speak to the complexity of the place of women in the director’s films. Sembène’s feminism is not without its flaws; Harrow faults the director for an antiquated politics that lacks the complexity of postmodern feminism, and Valérie Orlando argues that Sembène relies on ossified conceptions of women’s roles: “[Sembène] often succumbs to idealizing women in traditional roles in his films and novels.”² Whatever the shortcomings or merits one finds in Sembène’s feminist “night school,” however, what should remain undisputed is that the director’s feminism is as much a visual occurrence as it is a narrative one. Sembène’s use (or misuse) of women as cinematic subjects, particularly in the director’s meticulous crafting of space and spatial images, animates the feminist potential of his films. Scholarship on Sembène’s feminism has tended to stress narrative and allegorical interpretations,³ particularly by assessing the role of women in terms of the degree of agency allotted to female characters in a given social realist story. By contrast, this article conceptualizes the visual politics of working women in Sembène by attending both to the meaning of work and labor in his films and to the feminist potential of the director’s formal and aesthetic tendencies. Its potential symbolic meaning notwithstanding, the image of the laboring woman in Sembène functions as a form of world making that opposes the scopophilic male gaze of the West by insisting on the foundational female dimensions of African societies. Drawing on Obioma Nnaemeka’s notion of “building on the indigenous,”⁴ this article surveys films spanning Sembène’s filmography to argue that the politics of the image in Sembène’s depictions of laboring women centers the production of an “Afrocentric” feminist film aesthetic.

Sembène’s inaugural film closes with a reflection on gender norms in the Senegalese neo-colonial context. In the final scene of Borrom Sarret (1963), the wagoner (Ly Abdoulaye) enters the family’s courtyard to find his wife preparing the stove to cook food that he has not brought home. Instead, he has returned empty-handed and crestfallen from a day marked largely by the cruel hierarchies of neo-colonial Dakar. Sembène characteristically frames the characters in a long shot, placing the camera behind the woman, thereby emphasizing her assiduous work. As the wagoner enters the foreground, the camera pans left to track his movement. In the next cut, Sembène creates an analogous but opposite effect, as now the camera pans away as it follows the woman, who has removed the empty pot from the stove and carries it across the courtyard. In the next cut, a medium shot frames the couple’s two sons who return through the courtyard entrance. A reverse shot shows the woman leaving the house to deliver her infant to the wagoner who is now seated on the ground where the woman sat at the beginning of the sequence. The camera pans following the woman out and then a cut reframes the camera behind the wagoner in the foreground who, holding his infant child, watches perplexed as his wife leaves the courtyard to seek food for the family. By the end, Sembène has inverted the terms of the scene’s visual logic. Husband and wife traverse a meticulously crafted cinematic space, a space folded equally on the two axes of the courtyard. The net result is that, in purely visual and spatial terms, traditional gender power relations are rendered irrelevant in the struggle to endure under the bleak conditions of neocolonialism. In this reconfiguration of gender roles one can discern Sembène’s revision of one of his formative influences: Whereas in Bicycle Thieves (1948) our central figure dissolves into the crowd with his son, Borrom Sarret offers an alternative that affirms the resolve and ingenuity of women, even if their motives are not fully understood by the men around them.

A central assumption of the present argument, one intimately linked to Sembène’s feminist film aesthetic, is that the cinematic image thinks. On this view, social realist cinema does more than describe a pre-existing reality; cinema engenders realities in spectators that challenge the prevailing configurations of the world by way of their representational strategies. The notion that moving images produce thought is foundational in film theory⁠ — a truism in criticism from Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Deleuze. However, that this assumption, central to film theory and film-philosophical approaches to cinema, is so rarely extended to Sembène’s cinema betrays an underappreciation of the director’s distinctively cinematic representational strategies as noetically generative. When Diawara queries Sembène about the influence of the oral tradition in the director’s filmmaking, one can hear some impatience in the director’s reply: “Yes, there is that influence, and that’s fine. But in cinema there’s also lighting. There’s the set design and the backdrop. These give cinema its own character.” For Sembène, moreover, this specificity of the cinematic medium was never separate from its pedagogical function. In his 1972 interview with Harold D. Weaver, Sembène discusses the way his desire to inform his audience drives the cinematic style of Emitai (Emitaï, 1971); he explains,

The majority of the people who go to see the film, first of all, don’t speak Diola, and they have problems reading sub-titles. In order to have them better understand the film, then, it was necessary to have a slowness which was, however, not too slow⁠ — and that’s why I adopted that particular approach. I also worked a great deal on the decor. Each shot includes something which lets them see for themselves that their country is very beautiful, that we are not showing the countryside of France […]⁵

Here, Sembène theorizes the pedagogical dimensions of the image in two crucial ways: On the one hand, the presentation of images must meet the concrete viewing requirements of specific African audiences, and, on the other, cinematic images possess the capacity to (un)teach those audiences something about their own existences, to render the world anew in the image. For Sembène, then, the decolonizing work of the image produces an oppositional form of knowledge — a “militant cinema” — that resists the hegemonic image economies of the West.⁶ 

One can therefore read Sembène’s investment in the pedagogical force of cinematic images at the intersections of film and feminist theory. For decades, scholars like Chandra Mohanty and Obioma Nnaemeka have argued for a conception of feminist theory that interrogates the loci of knowledge production, particularly under the conditions of globalization. In her foundational essay, “Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way,” Nnaemeka highlights the urgency in conceptualizing knowledge production and theory as immanent rather than extrinsic, an approach to feminist thought she refers to as “building on the indigenous.”⁷ To be sure, this focus on immanent-indigenous knowledges is common to African feminisms.⁸ Unlike Sembène, Nnaemeka addresses conversations around Western poststructuralist feminism, particularly its tendency toward abstraction; however, she shares with the director a thorough critique of neocolonial knowledge formation; she writes, “No one bothered to ask us how we view knowledge, its formation and articulation; no one bothered to find out if we draw frames for knowledge…”⁹ Sembène’s transition from literature to cinema as a means of reaching African audiences and to enact a form of revolutionary pedagogy has been widely discussed. Unmistakably, this pedagogy centers African women in his films as paramount figures in the world⁠ — a claim not solely applicable to the protagonists of his so-called late feminist period,¹⁰ i.e., Faat Kiné  (Faat Kiné, 2000) and Collé (Moolaadé, 2004). That is, Sembène’s film aesthetics constitute a form of antipatriarchal knowledge production⁠ — indeed, world-making⁠ — precisely because it functions to depict a world in which African women are central. If, as Sembène has said, the “task” of the African filmmaker is “to create a standardized language of images,” then this standardization is to a large degree a feminization of the image.¹¹

Through editing, blocking, and pacing, the “slow” sequences of Emitai frequently depict visual opposites around a number of interconnected binaries. Chief among these binaries (modernity/tradition, colonialism/resistance, French/African, etc.) is the gendering of the image and the construction of image blocs in terms of men and women. An early sequence in the film tracks the march of Senegalese Tirailleurs; several long shots of the soldiers depict their progress as they chant a French marching song. The camera briefly cuts to a monument and then a close-up on a plaque commemorating “la gloire de l’armée noire”⁠ — West African military service in WWI. The image of the march is a favorite motif of Sembène, one that predates his entry into cinema. His novel, Les bouts de bois de Dieu (1960), famously describes the march of women revolutionaries from Thiès to Dakar. Indeed, Emitai cuts from the marching soldiers to a slow sequence that includes several long shots of women carrying baskets of soil on their way to work a field. In her analysis of Emitai, Sheila Petty stresses the “neutral angle” and “real time” in the film as general characteristics of African film aesthetics.¹² Careful arrangement of the characters⁠—tightly grouped figures walking in rows ⁠— emphasizes the comparative work performed by these introductory sequences. That is, this visual juxtaposition⁠ — the contrast of the singing military procession with the silent procession of laboring women⁠ — establishes one of the film’s central antagonisms, namely, the autonomy of the village against French colonial occupation. The women’s march transitions into the opening credits, and long shots of women working on their crops ⁠— children strapped to their backs ⁠— continue to emphasize their collective labor. Rather than focusing on individual characters, the credit sequence establishes the collective work of women as the film’s primary trope. Early in the film, then, Sembène’s “slow” images encourage spectators to reflect on the centrality of women’s labor in contradistinction to colonial violence. Later, the more literal forms of manual and domestic labor reshapes itself into the revolutionary labor of political action (i.e., the organized resistance to the French military). As he does in Les bouts de bois de Dieu and elsewhere, Sembène constructs a straight (marching) line, a continuum, between the labor of the everyday and the collective labor of resistance.

Many of Sembène’s films depict a clash between a backward or corrupt male elite and oppositional, productive women. If Sembène literalizes impotence and male incompetence in the contemporary neo-colonial context in Xala (1975), his two other 1970s feature films consider gendered power differentials in historical contexts. Ceddo (1977) strikingly concludes with a scene in which the captured princess Dior Yacine kills the imam who has murdered her father and implemented forced conversion of the population. In the concluding image, the princess gazes defiantly into the camera, full of rage; the image confirms her newfound role in anticolonial resistance with the Ceddo — the rebels. The woman leader thus accomplishes what none of the men could by ostensibly restoring autonomy to the community.

Emitai, on the other hand, contrasts men’s ineffectuality with women’s struggle in collective terms.¹³ Following another unavailing meeting of village leaders, the film’s denouement begins when soldiers shoot a small boy. The women, previously seated in silent protest and refusing to give up the location of the rice, burst to their feet, furious at the sight of the boy’s murder. The subsequent sequence is pivotal, as it establishes the tragic outcome of the film. Two long shots capture the procession of women, who, having gathered the dead boy, march in a large group toward the site of the dead chief (having been slain earlier in the film by the French). The film then inserts a low-angle shot of the baobab tree⁠ — a slow tilt emphasizes its enormous size and verticality. The baobab tree, of course, is the seat of the village’s political and religious authority. In previous scenes, the village’s patriarchal authorities endlessly debate the French military’s demands around the base of the tree while the women act. With the cut away from the low-angle shot of the tree, the film moves to a long shot of the village’s men escorted by the white French officers and their armed tirailleurs. The village men march, carrying rice atop their heads. Sembène frames these two distinct marches⁠ — that of the women and the men ⁠— around the vertical image of the baobab tree. The following shots underscore the apparent triumph of collective political action of the village’s women (the carrying out of the funeral ceremony). When the capitulating men hear the women’s ceremony, they refuse to continue marching, and, as a result, they are lined up and executed. The tragedy, visualized on either side of the baobab tree, lies in the men’s inability to effectuate a strategy of resistance against the French.

To be sure, the gendered dialectics of the image operative in Sembène’s cinema consistently enforce a biological man/woman binary. Harrow has critiqued Sembène’s work for merely enacting a “feminism of the old man,”¹⁴ that is a feminism that “left intact phallocentric values, phallocentric logocentrisms in which the binary model of gender identity remains in place, with women joining the club without disrupting the structures responsible for domination.”¹⁵ In place of the first-generation feminisms of Sembène, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Mongo Beti, Harrow calls for “a radical feminism that reconfigured the subjectivities, that saw subjectivities being constructed so as to avoid the limitations of the unified, unitary subject and the metaphysics of presence […] a deconstruction of conventional feminism, not its reform.”¹⁶ Harrow’s Derridean brand of feminism sets a formidable standard. While Sembène undoubtedly clings to largely uninterrogated binaries, it is possible to read his films as negotiating the difficult path of making visible these invisible binaries to (male) audiences. To screen those binaries, even if it is, on occasion, to invert them, is to reinforce their epistemological availability⁠ — in other words, it increases their knowability. Sembène’s cinema defies reductive understandings of social realism; instead, strategically crafted images bring realities into being and seek to permit audiences to “see for themselves,” to quote the director. 

It seems plausible that the value of Sembène’s feminism ⁠— like his filmmaking⁠ — lies largely in its indifference to Western paradigms, even (or especially) if it remains imperfect.¹⁷ In the context of African literary theory, Nnaemeka’s insistence on the notion of “building on the indigenous” entails a bracketing of Western theoretical abstractions in favor of affirming the immanent theoretical value of African cultural production. From the point of view of film analysis, Sembène’s oeuvre is primed for such interpretations since his sedulous crafting of sequences articulate⁠ — indeed, theorize⁠ — the gendered relations operative in his subject matter.

Xala, like much of Sembène’s cinema, mobilizes the image of laboring women to emphasize the intersectionality of the critique advanced by the film. The result is that cinematic space becomes demarcated not only in terms of women’s work, but also through the struggle of society’s downtrodden. In a scene that opens nearly midway through the film, the president of the chamber of commerce (Makhourédia Guèye) arrives at El Hadji’s (Thierno Leye) shop. Just before his arrival, his secretary (Fatim Diagne) opens the shop for the day. She enters and complains aloud about a noxious odor: “It smells bad in here.” As she prepares to spray the air with an odor-masking scent, a man selling Kàddu newspapers interrupts her. She hurriedly purchases a paper⁠ — seemingly happy to exhibit her spending power⁠ — but shows no interest in its contents as she reaches back to her air freshener. The irony of her purchasing Kàddu ⁠— a political newspaper that highlighted economic disparity¹⁸ ⁠— becomes clear, not only through her general association with a corrupt elite, but in the immediately following cut. Here, a medium shot follows a woman balancing a large container on her head as she makes her way through the noisy street in front of the shop. Sembène cuts back to the interior of the shop, where the secretary still busily sprays fragrance, surrounded by stacks of imported luxury goods⁠ — markers of El Hadji’s wealth. As we find elsewhere in the film, the mise-en-scène instructs the viewer on how to read characters’ class allegiances; these goods reinforce the secretary’s position as inside the neocolonial order. An eyeline match indicates that the secretary has now identified the source of the odor, and the film cuts back to the exterior space of the street where the head-carrying woman now pours wastewater into a drain in the street. “Mon dieu,” the secretary exclaims, “these women and their stinking water!” She quickly produces a bottle of liquid from beneath her desk and proceeds outside to douse the street. Satisfied, she returns to her desk within and settles into the task of writing a letter; meanwhile, the camera cuts back to the street where a second woman approaches the drain to empty another container of dirty water. Unbeknownst to the secretary, the effort to deodorize the street is futile. 

Throughout, the sequence deftly differentiates cinematic space, mapping interior/exterior space onto a rigid class hierarchy: The gulf between rich and poor is articulated in the film’s cuts between inside and outside, and the comedic effect of the scene lies in the absurdity of the secretary’s efforts at purifying the indexes of the gendered labor in the street. The following sequence, similarly structured by an oscillation of interior and exterior shots, extends this critique: The president phones the police from within the shop to remove a group of beggars seated opposite the shop along the street. Like the secretary in the previous scene, the elite seek to “purify” the realities of the street through absurdly ineffective means. The construction of cinematic space in this sequence aligns the working women from the previous sequence with the lumpenproletariat beggars, who are agents of justice in Xala since they enact their purifying rite upon El Hadji at the end of the film. 

In a characteristic mobilization of horizontal and vertical axes, Sembène conflates the image of the street in this scene with women’s work and with an enduring underclass. The director frequently depicts horizontal lines as planes from which (particularly women’s) work and resistance persist. In a powerfully affecting image of solidarity later in Xala, a collective of beggars crosses the screen horizontally from left to right. Because several of the men are amputees (likely polio victims), they crawl along the ground (increasing their horizontality). These figures anticipate the handicapped character Pathé (Ibrahim Sow) in Faat Kiné, with whose plight the eponymous protagonist sympathizes. Marcia Landy has noted Xala’s use of horizontal and vertical framing, pointing out that the “beggars are portrayed in horizontal lines.”¹⁹ For Landy, horizontal imagery stands in “contrast to the verticality of relationships seen to exist among the members of the council and all who border on their society.”²⁰ 

Indeed, Landy’s remarks are generalizable: Expressive vertical images abound in Sembène’s cinema. Consider, for example, the low-angle shots in Le Noire de… from Diouana’s (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) perspective as she gazes up at the towering buildings that will effectively imprison her (one finds similar shots in Borrom Sarret). In other instances, Sembène’s camera comes to rest on images of power and verticality par excellence, such as the Place de l’Obélisque (Borrom Sarret), the baobab tree (Emitai)or Grande Mosquée de Dakar (Xala).

 In contrast to such verticality, low, horizontal images stress the plight of women, their resistance, and their labor. In an oft-analyzed scene in Black Girl (La Noire de…, 1966), Diouana and her fellow domestic workers wait on a street corner while the white mistress assesses their suitability for labor. This shot, so suggestive of the slave auction block, positions the standing, surveilling white woman over and against the would-be laborers. Quite unlike the women of Emitai,who are similarly sitting on the ground in resistance as befuddled whites stand above, Diouana’s seated passivity in this scene is what ingratiates her to the mistress. If, as Lieve Spass argues, the film renders Diouana a passive victim, it nonetheless posits women’s collective precarity, and it does so in terms consistent with the director’s film aesthetic.²¹ Black Girl, like Faat Kiné, and Naiye (1964), conclude with images of young, male children as emblems of the future; the future, it would seem, is a male one. Spass suggests that Black Girl “has the woman killing herself and the boy chasing the French man: woman is victim, boy is male avenger of the future.”²² In its denouement, Faat Kiné emphasizes Presi’s perspective⁠ — not his mother, Kiné’s ⁠— because he functions as bearer of a Senegal-to-come in the film’s logic (the nickname “Presi” is short for “Président”). That the young men in these films are given the last word, does seem to relegate women to the status of midwives of the future. Nevertheless, Kiné’s success as a bourgeois business owner, her hard work and perseverance, have created the conditions for a new reality, one in which women’s work⁠ — a labor that includes child rearing ⁠— is extolled while the claims of unproductive men are rejected.      

The final sequence in Naiye ends with the exiled young mother (deemed fungible by her community for birthing a child out of wedlock) traversing horizontally down a beach as the griot narrates: “Since when is a child responsible for the misconduct of his parents? May Allah grant that if this child is not of noble birth, he’ll become noble by his behaviour. From them something new will rise [emphasis added].” The long shot of the young mother on the beach, waves lapping near her feet, stresses her isolation and the difficulty of her future. Prefiguring Kiné (who is nearly killed by her father when he learns that she is pregnant out of wedlock), this young woman, admonished and expelled by a patriarchal order, walks tentatively into the future. Though the voiceover fixates on the future of the child, its last line⁠ — “from them something new will rise [emphasis added]” ⁠— reflects the reality of the image and emphasizes the demands this society places on (lone) mothers as domestic laborers and child rearers. Dudley Andrew has argued that, “[a]s powerful and effective as [Sembène’s] films may be […] they do not point the way to an alternative cinema. Instead, in the mode pioneered in the Soviet Union, they employ variants of didactic cinema to help build an alternative society.”²³ While it’s certainly true that the director’s objective has always been to engender “an alternative society,” Andrew’s assessment of Sembène’s cinema as merely didactic and derivative overlooks the extent to which the director’s feminist critiques show up in the image itself; that is, he engenders a feminist film aesthetic that is precisely new, alternative, and oppositional.   

Though Guelwaar (1991) aims its didacticism at the deleterious effects of foreign aid, an early scene helps delineateSembène’s vision of women’s work, which is not restricted to the motif of the head-carrying woman. During the scene in question, Hélène, a sex worker from Dakar, shows up in the wake of Guelwaar’s death and finds herself discussing her life with the Catholic priest. Their conversation transpires in a breezy courtyard, and their exchange is captured in medium shots. There is a slow tenderness in cinematographer Dominique Gentil’s treatment of the subject that encourages sympathy with the young woman. The characters do not face one another; instead they are staggered, and the scene, rather than unfolding by way of a shot-reverse-shot structure, emphasizes the confessional nature of the exchange. Hélène relates to the priest that her work as a prostitute, which she takes up to escape poverty, has allowed her to provide for her family (sending money monthly to her family, she is helping to put her brother through school and also gave her father the funds to pilgrimage to Basilique Notre-Dame de la Paix in Yamoussoukro). She insists on her devoutness, showing her cross necklace to the priest and responding with pride that she was one of the first to see the Pope during his visit to Senegal. She fears contracting A.I.D.S., she says, and gets weekly medical examinations. The scene thus functions to maximize audience’s sympathy with Hélène by stressing her moral purity (her intentions are altruistic; she is devout, etc.). Hélène’s role in the didactic dimensions of the film are clear enough⁠ — she functions as a foil to an Africa that is dependent on foreign aid. As Roger Ebert writes, “the passionate message of Sembène’s film is that anything is better than begging — or accepting aid.”²⁴ While the moralizing cliché of the “pure” prostitute remains problematic (cf. Les Misérables), Guelwaar’s affirmation of sex work as distinctively women’s work contributes to the rich array of working women in Sembène’s oeuvre.

Like Guelwaar, Faat Kiné addresses women’s work in a contemporary context, but the latter goes farther in theorizing labor in a contemporary urban context. Though Sembène’s films can roughly be divided in terms of their urban or rural locales, these categories express women’s struggles in a more or less continuous manner. The director explains, for example, that Kiné and Collé are deliberately similar (“I made a decision to make both women the same age,” Sembène explains). The organizing difference is “just that one woman⁠—Faat Kiné⁠—deals with life in an urban setting and the other is in a rural, traditional setting.”²⁵ There are, however, important differences that emerge on the basis of class; Kiné is a petite bourgeoisie manager, and, as such, images of her work differ greatly from representations of women’s work in the rural films (and, indeed, from those in Black Girl and Tauw with their focus on the working poor).

Kiné is frequently shot to emphasize her social, financial, and sexual independence; her managerial prowess gets expressed in the authority she asserts from behind her office desk. In an early scene, low outdoor shots follow Pathé, whose disabilities force him to walk on his hands, as he approaches Kiné in her office. When he arrives, Pathé explains that the wheelchair that Kiné purchased for him (along with his belongings) have been stolen, and he vows lethal revenge. Wagging her finger, Kiné admonishes him for his irresponsibility. The scene alternates between low- and high-angle shots, emphasizing the power differential between the characters — here and throughout the film, Kiné’s visual presentation renders her the boss. Further, Kiné is framed by her desk and the managerial mise-en-scène of the office, which includes a horn that she uses to summon employees. But, despite her financial and social clout, Kiné’s struggles are still distinctly women’s struggles. Indeed, even her success in the capitalist framework that she embraces is expressed in gendered terms. However, Harrow critiques the film precisely for its failure to interrogate the gendered construction of subjectivity. He asserts that the film posits Kiné’s subjectivity as empty, as merely a liberal universalist conception of subjectivity:

[T]he feminism of the old man is simply a vision of woman joining the male club, that is, assuming the subjectivity outlined above as conventionally associated with the male political subject. Her task, in this version, is to acquire the rights, given as universal, previously enjoyed by men alone. This translates into political rights and, eventually, economic rights and social status. The notion of this subject being gendered, and therefore different, is never raised — her universality obviates her gender.²⁶

On this view, the film positions Kiné as a universal subject; her newfound autonomy is coded in terms of a purely economic and consumerist potentiality. Everything else, for Harrow — her being deceived and abused by men, her single motherhood, her memories — do little to advance an analysis of gendered subjectivity since they are merely the product of melodramatic conventionality and exaggerated emotion (“there will be tears of sadness and joy,” Harrow writes).²⁷ Instead, the film’s politics remain individual rather than collective, and Kiné constitutes “an overly limited individual model of subjectivity that is ultimately subservient to a liberal political order.”²⁸ 

If, however, Faat Kiné meditates on contemporary political subjectivity, the film also offers a critique of universalist (ipso facto, male) conceptions of labor, one that tempers the emancipatory logic of liberal (i.e., Western philosophical) paradigms. The various abstractions employed by theories of human activity (e.g., the labor of the negative in G.W.F. Hegel; the category of “man” in Karl Marx and John Locke) are here repudiated by way of a gender analysis of labor. The film suggests that the teleological-emancipatory mythos concerning labor that celebrates the individual subject’s capacity to act upon the world fails to account for the gendered character of labor. In one scene, Kiné explains to friends at lunch that, “If it only took work to liberate women, women farmers would be liberated.” Though Kiné enjoys a degree of freedom not available to the urban women of previous films, she is still mired in a patriarchal order that seeks to undermine her autonomy and agency at every turn. Sembène discusses this problem at length in a 2000 interview with Mamadou Niang:

If we do not praise and dignify our women’s heroism, which I see as preeminent, Africa is not going to be liberated. Let’s be clear about this: If we do not accord women their rightful place, there will be no liberation. Women work a whole lot more than men do, and if work was in and of itself liberating, women who farm fields daily would have long been liberated. Women’s emancipation doesn’t only depend on labor.²⁹

From this perspective, the traumas that condition Kiné’s experience rupture their melodramatic trappings to express the gendered specificity of work for the new African woman. That there is a conspicuous absence of images of collective work and resistance (so typical of the rural films) owes more to the urban setting of the film than an investment in individual subjectivity. In Sembène’s cinema, modernity expresses itself in urban spaces as the fragmentation of collective experience. Instead, intersubjectivity in Faat Kiné lies in its theorization of women’s labor. That is, the flashback structure of the film functions to imbue Kiné’s work in the present. Her relative success, figured in terms of her labor and class status, emerges not despite male forms of physical and psychic violence, but rather as a response to it. Women’s work is not strictly figured as individual or universalist (pace Harrow) but rather as conditioned by a ubiquitous experience of generational, gendered oppression. The lesson, to speak in pedagogical terms, thus has a kind of continuity with Black Girl: Though the latter emerges decades earlier, both stress the point that labor alone — entrance into capitalism—fails in itself to offer liberation from oppressive structures such as patriarchy and neocolonialism.  

Much has been said of the intersection of gender and labor in Black Girl. For this reason, this article has emphasized less trodden territory (insofar this is possible with the veritable institution that is Sembène). However, it must be reiterated that in Black Girl Sembène critiques neocoloniality by way of a representation of labor. Diouana herself is rendered as a working commodity placed amongst the objects of her labor. The film’s real-time shots of Diouana immersed among objects (for cooking and cleaning) reduces her very being to the status of mere object. Sembène’s camera carefully sculpts the space of the apartment into distinctly coded spheres: black/labor; white/leisure. Diouana continues to question her place in France, which she regards as having been reduced for her to nothing but the non-place of the small apartment. She turns away toward the window at which she ponders her situation. The film cuts to a nighttime shot through the glass; the screen is a black void, save a few distant lights, and Diouana wonders to herself: “Qu’est-ce que je suis ici?” For a moment, then, the film considers her ontological status, before proceeding into Diouana’s account of her various labor roles: She reflects that she is neither cook, nor “cleaning woman,” nor “washerwoman,” nor nanny. Instead, her entire being has been consumed in the labor relation, effectively reducing her to the position of slave or, as she says, a prisoner. Diouana’s family’s final rejection of the white man’s payment stamps the film with an overt political statement; as Spass writes, “In their refusal, they reject a system in which labor becomes a commodity and money a means to pay for death.”³⁰ 

Moolaadé, Sembène’s last film, returns to a lush rural setting (Djerrisso, Burkina Faso) to focus on women’s collective resistance to the practice of female genital excision. Samba Gadjigo describes the parameters of the film in terms of collective resistance to tyranny; he writes, “Sembene’s last film is about tyranny and oppression on the one hand and collective resistance, rebellion, and change on the other. The internal tyranny and oppression rely on a feudal and patriarchal order but also on a global world order in the form of external economic, political, and cultural constraints.”³¹ Moolaadé tracks the reshaping of these constraints by way of the central character, Collé, and her efforts to galvanize resistance against the oppressive forces operative in the village. Most scholarship on the film aligns with Gadjigo’s assessment that “Moolaadé is a film about a struggle for human rights and dignity.”³²

It is within the context of the film’s overt messaging that Sembène operationalizes a film aesthetic grounded in everyday women’s work. That is, Moolaadé’s narrative development is punctuated throughout by shots of women immersed in the “heroism of the quotidian.”³³ What is more, the insertion of these shots functions to develop the setting and tone of the film rather than advance the narrative. Consider the following sequence. Early in the film, Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly) is rebuked by the first wife Hadjatou (Maimouna Hélène Diarra) for overstepping her boundaries. The film cuts to a long take of the Djerrisso mosque. The next cut, reminiscent of the earlier pastoral films, inserts a shot of women carrying containers (a recurring image in the film). This montage ends when the film cuts to the village leaders gathering to discuss the issue of Collé’s issuing protection over the four girls who have escaped excision. During the council meeting, an elder member explains that the large termite mound before the mosque dates back to the village’s first king — indeed, the king was transformed into the termite mound after breaking the moolaadé. The film’s many shots of the mound signal a warning against violating Collé’s appeal to pre-Islamic tradition. When the meeting concludes, the camera tracks, following the Salindana (the group of women who are responsible for carrying out the excisions) offscreen. The following shot lingers on the termite mound, and the film then cuts to the courtyard of Collé’s family. Here, a shot of a woman grinding grain widens to include the four girls, who are also working. Abruptly the Salindana appear at the main entrance, frightening the children until Collé appears to protect them. These sequences exemplify a tendency in the film to bridge narratively significant scenes with non-narrative images of working women. Here, the working women are sequenced between two images of power in the film, namely, the mosque and the patriarchal village authorities. In purely visual terms, the short sequence establishes the basic terms of the film’s antagonisms.

Crucially, it is with these interstitial shots that Sembène visualizes women’s collective political energies—here, as in other films, the visual emphasis on everyday work translates into a group struggle for autonomy. Moolaadé’s opening shots establish both the space of the village and the persistent work that maintains it. In these early shots, the camera registers the heroines of the quotidian as they sweep, carry, and tend to children. Beyond articulating the film’s spatial parameters, this introduction gently conveys a sense of the temporality of everyday work, which is at once slow and perpetually unfinished. As such, the opening introduces spectators to the film’s organizing motif since such images are recurring in the film. Rather than functioning as anthropological scene setting, these images fill the interstices of narrative action throughout the film, thereby engendering a profound affirmation of the women’s socio-political force as agents of change.

Sembène is known for pithy aphorisms, and what is perhaps his most famous quip — “when women progress, society progresses” — remains an apt slogan for a director who sought to center women and their work through a world reimagined in cinematic images.³⁴ Yet, careful attention to his work reveals that his thinking about the nature of women’s work in colonial and neocolonial contexts, combined with an oppositional film aesthetic that seeks to teach spectators in visual terms, cannot be reduced to catch phrases. The militancy of Sembène’s cinema, consistent with Third Cinema generally, was sustained by a pedagogy of images, as well as by more didactic, allegorical narrative modalities. No doubt, humanist images of empowered working women in themselves fall short of critical demands for a dismantling of the subject and gender binaries as such. If, however, the aim of creating a new language of cinema becomes, in Sembène, indissociable from a feminization of that language, then overlooking the formal dimensions of these films has more than aesthetic consequences.

Eddy Troy

1. Michael Janis, “Remembering Sembène: The Grandfather of African Feminism,” CLA Journal 51, no. 3, 2008: 248-64. ↩︎
2. Valérie Orlando, Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 12. ↩︎
3. This tendency to read Sembène’s films allegorically aligns with Fredric Jameson’s infamous assertion that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society,” “Third-World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 69. The shortcomings of allegorical readings become all the more pronounced in cinema, since by effacing the individual, one also undermines the political and pedagogical efficacy of individual images (i.e., the medium of cinema itself). Sembène has defended his work against similar reductionist readings, insisting, for example, that “African cinema is not a cinema of folklore,” interview by Siradiou Diallo, in Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, ed. Annett Busch and Max Annas (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), 52-62. ↩︎
4. The men of Sembène’s cinema frequently find themselves befuddled by the ideas and actions of their female counterparts, and Sembène’s deployment of dramatic irony is such that the spectator is encouraged to make sense of what these male characters ostensibly cannot.
   Obioma Nnaemeka, “Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way,” Signs 29, no. 2 (2004): 366. ↩︎
5. Ousmane Sembène, “Filmmakers Have a Great Responsibility to Our People,” interview by Harold D. Weaver, in Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, ed. Annett Busch and Max Annas (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 29. Sheila Petty analyzes other scenes in the film from the perspective of Sembène’s remarks about slowness in “Postcolonial Transformations: From Emitaï to Moolaadé,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 14, no. 3 (2011): 323-38. ↩︎
6. Sembène, “The Power of Female Solidarity: An Interview with Ousmane Sembene,” interview by Jared Rapfogel and Richard Porton, in Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, ed. Annett Busch and Max Annas (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 202. ↩︎
7. Obioma Nnaemeka, “Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way,” Signs 29, no. 2 (2004): 366. ↩︎
8. Sheila J. Petty offers more comprehensive reading of the prevailing strains of African feminist thought. In summarizing these, Petty notes that “African feminism is arising from within African traditional cultural practice with its own unique set of priorities.” See Petty, “How an African Woman Can Be: African Women Filmmakers Construct Women,” Discourse 18, no. 3 (1996): 75-76. ↩︎
9. Nnaemeka, “Nego-Feminism,” 361. ↩︎
10. Annett Busch and Max Annas, “Introduction,” in Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, ed. Busch and Annas (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), xviii. ↩︎
11. Sembène, “Interview with Ousmane Sembène,” interview by Rolf Richter, in Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, ed. Annett Busch and Max Annas (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 101. ↩︎
12. Petty, “Postcolonial Transformations,” 325. ↩︎
13. Eleanor Huntington, “Individual vs. Collective Resistance: Portrayal of Women in Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de… and Emitai,” Film Matters 1, no. 4 (2011): 11-14. ↩︎
14. Kenneth W. Harrow, “Faat Kine and the Feminism of the Old Man,” Études littéraires africaines 30 (2010): 20-32.  ↩︎
15. Id., 20. ↩︎
16. Id., 21-22. ↩︎
17. The tacit analogy with Julio García Espinosa’s notion of “imperfect cinema” is deliberate. See Julio García Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” trans. Julianne Burton, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 5, no. 20 (1979): 24-26. ↩︎
18. Kenneth Harrow, “Sembène Ousmane’s Xala: The Use of Film and Novel as Revolutionary Weapon,” Studies in 20th Century Literature 2, no. 4 (1980): 182. ↩︎
19. Marcia Landy, “Political Allegory and ‘Engaged Cinema’: Sembene’s Xala,” Cinema Journal 23, no. 3 (1984): 38. ↩︎
20. Ibid.. ↩︎
21. Dudley Andrew, “The Roots of the Nomadic Gilles Deleuze and the Cinema of West Africa,” in The Brain is the Screen, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 230. ↩︎
22. Ibid.. ↩︎
23. Dudley Andrew, “The Roots of the Nomadic Gilles Deleuze and the Cinema of West Africa,” in The Brain is the Screen, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 230. ↩︎
24. Roger Ebert, “Reviews: Guelwaar,” RogerEbert.com, April 22, 1994, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ guelwaar-1994. ↩︎
25. Sembène, “The Power of Female Solidarity,” 202. ↩︎
26. Harrow, “Feminism of the Old Man,” 31. ↩︎
27. Id., 32. ↩︎
28. Ibid.. ↩︎
29. 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 Press of Mississippi, 2008), 188-89. ↩︎
30. Spass, “Female Domestic Labor,” 27. ↩︎
31. Samba Gadjigo, “Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaadé: People’s Rights vs. Human Rights,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 61, no. 2 (2020): 79.  ↩︎
32. Id., 85. ↩︎
33. Héroïsme au quotidien (1999) is the title of Sembène’s late-career 11-minute short. As Gadjigo has explained, its emphasis on women’s liberation prefigures Moolaadé. See ibid., 78.  ↩︎
34. Sembène, “The Power of Female Solidarity,” 202. ↩︎