You aspire to become a writer? You will never be a good one as long as you don’t defend a cause. You see, a writer has to go forward, see things in the real world, not be afraid of his ideas.

[…] [H]e learnt to hate the poets and the painters who only showed what was beautiful, who sang the glory of spring, forgetting the bitterness of the cold.   

—Ousmane Sembène, The Black Docker¹

I do believe that the filmmaker is a revealer. […] He reveals yourself to you. He can wake up a country. He can reveal a country to itself. 

—Aimé Césaire

Ousmane Sembène, Camp de Thiaroye, 1988.

Introduction:² A Counter-Discourse to the “Mythistory”³

As a result of slave trade and colonisation, colonial empires justified their rule through a history and a culture. They often elaborated their dominance through narrative forms: quasi-religious founding texts, rhetoric of national belonging, focusing on historical and geographical landmarks, enemies, and official heroes. This collective ethos termed by Pierre Bourdieu⁴ as habitus establishes a symbolical violence known and acknowledged by both the dominant and the dominated nation:

The effect of symbolical domination […] exerts itself not in the pure logic of informed consciences but through schemes of perceptions, appreciation and action which are constituent of habitus and which establish, within the conscious decisions and controls of the will, a sense of knowledge profoundly obscure to itself.⁵

The dominated society contributes, consciously and often subconsciously, to its own domination by tacitly accepting the imposed limits and censorships inherent to social structures. 

In African countries (particularly former African colonies), this “symbolical violence” has often been instigated through cultural imperialism. As David Murphy points out in Postcolonial African Cinema, the colonial era brought film to Africa and in some instances its introduction was a deliberate part of colonial policy.⁶ Césaire has emphasized this social phenomenon by stating that the only creator of cultural values was the coloniser and that consumer was the colonized and that everything went on well as long as nothing disturbed that hierarchy.⁷ Indeed, colonisation is a phenomenon which cannot be dissociated from cultural imperialism. To civilize and project one’s culture over another is the drive of imperialism; colonisation constitutes “the power of reproduction” of a nation in another space.⁸ 

A film is a cultural product where the director assumes the role of the creator of cultural values. Marc Ferro rightly points out in Cinéma et histoire: “each film has a story which is History with its network of personal interactions, its position of objects and men whereby privileges and duties, hierarchies and honours are sorted out.”⁹ Film thus becomes the privileged spatiotemporal framework whereby certain ideologies can (un)intentionally be constructed. 

Western cinema, during the colonial period, often superseded literature or journalism to implant and transmit, if not an outright colonialist attitude, “colonialist stereotypes about Africans and African culture among the cinemagoing populations of the West; [as such] it contributed towards the ideological justification of the colonial enterprise in a period when its legitimacy was increasingly being questioned.”¹⁰ If cinema was representing Africa to the West and beyond, it was also being used in different ways to represent the West to Africa. An entirely different approach to representing the West to Africa was that adopted in the French empire, which was simply to show French films to Africans, since the French colonial ideology, embodied in the notion of “la mission civilisatrice” (in keeping with Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” ideology), worked on the premise that their colonised subjects could, or would soon be able to, appreciate the products of French culture.¹¹ 

Even if the phenomenon of colonialism per se has disappeared with the onset of political independence, its corollary effects cannot be undermined at all. As Wole Soyinka pointed out:

we black Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonization — this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses and their value systems.¹²

This subjective representation has pushed Sembène towards refusing Western “value systems.” For Sembène, neocolonialism has been passed on culturally, through cinema. In an interview, he elaborates on this statement:

Cinema from the beginning has worked to destroy the native African culture and the myths of our heroes. A lot of films have been made about Africa, but they are stories of European and American invaders with Africa serving as decor. Instead of being taught our ancestry, the only thing we know is Tarzan. And when we do look on our past, there are many among us who are not flattered, who perceive Africa with a certain alienation learned from the cinema. African society is in a state of degeneracy, reflected also in our imitative art.¹³

Sembène perceives African cinema as “a useful instrument for change born out of social necessity which is in the process of becoming the most important tool for the fertilization of a new African culture.”¹⁴

The works of Sembène are mostly didactic with an inherent ideological and political elaboration: the problems that the society face are always present in the foreground. It seems that there is an analogous relation between the works of the writer/director and the Senegalese society or the milieu of the Senegalese immigrants in France. Sembène’s art depicts not only the poverty, the violence and the physical and moral degeneration of these immigrants but often establishes a counter-discourse to the official Senegalese discourse as regards to politics, social issues and religion. 

The artist is no longer only an individual subject; he is also a “social” subject, incorporating the conditions of objective existence under the form of social (national) outlook. Indeed, Sembène highlights that:

The role of the artist is not to say what is good, but to be able to denounce. He must feel the heartbeat of society and be able to create the image society gives him. He can orient society, he can say it is exaggerating, going overboard, but the power to decide escapes the artist. […] All that an artist can do is to bring the people to the point of having an idea of the thing, an idea in their heads that they share, and that helps.¹⁵ 

Hence, for Sembène, the artist becomes the representative of his social class and consequently, the mediator of a collective vision for his society.

Sembène defends the cause of those who are socially marginalized and clearly positions himself against the dominating forces:

I need to be in contact with my people… I need to feel the pulsations, the smells, I need to be the witness of living scenes; without this crude, palpable material, I cannot create… We, dominated people, we cannot be silent, silence would be suicide. If we refuse to denounce the injustice, we would be its accomplices.¹⁶ 

The society as a construct of economic structures (determined by the complex intermingling of social conditions and diverse historical experiences), of hierarchies (North/South; White/Black; men/women) and of social classes, is explored through Sembène’s literary and filmic works. 

For Sembène, culture in all its aspects is political.¹⁷ The notion of art for art’s sake is rejected. His art is constantly searching for a better socio-economic and political alternative; the thematics he explores often overlap those brought about by postcolonial studies:¹⁸  

The unemployed, semi-skilled and unskilled, part-time workers, male and female, the low paid, black people, underclasses: these signs of the fragmentation of class and cultural consensus represent both the historical of contemporary social divisions, and a structure of heterogeneity upon which to construct a theoretical and political alternative.¹⁹

The term “postcolonialism” refers to all the cultures that the imperial processus has affected from colonisation until today. The sequels of colonisation are foremost political and economic but they also concern all the cultural forms which have been permanently modified, affected and distorted (when not completely eradicated) by the domination of the Centre.

The literatures and other art forms born of these “transformations” and for some well before the process of decolonisation per se, constitute an ideal, liminal space for observation of this postcolonial future in the sense that they question the very phenomenon of imperialism that has brought them forth. Hence, attentive to the sequels of the grand movement of civilisations and also that of the destruction of civilisations, that European colonisation embodied, postcolonial theory assesses the traces that Occidental hegemony has etched on more than three quarter of the nations of the world. 

Sembène’s works not only celebrate the history and culture of the African peoples but also question France’s imperial “mythistory,” which as David Slavin explains, followed a pattern that contemporary cultural criticism has made familiar: erasure of subjugated peoples’ achievements and substitution of derogatory stereotypes that bolstered white superiority.²⁰ In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha also highlights the same point: “The myth of historical origination — racial purity, cultural priority — produced in relation to the colonial stereotype functions to ‘normalize’ the multiple beliefs […] that constitute colonial discourse.”²¹ 

This article proposes to examine the emerging ethos of some of Sembène’s works to determine whether he can be considered as a postcolonial artist. Does Sembène “deconstruct” (in the term of Jacques Derrida) the eurocentric discourse to recover historical (and collective) memory²² as well as symbolically (re-)construct a “pan-African” discourse by inciting debates about themes (such as colonialism, tradition, capitalism, patriarchy, religion)  pertaining mainly to his own country and by extension to Africa, itself? And, is he in the process of “decolonizing” his culture, caught in the throes of postcolonialism? The works of Sembène examined for this study include most of his films but a few references are also made to his literary works²³ as he, himself, considers both art forms as being “compatible,”²⁴ that “African cinema is an evening class, a continuing education”²⁵ and that literature fills the gaps of cinema whenever “the image has limitations.”²⁶

Hegemony and Racism 

The postcolonial perspective raises several issues, the most salient of all, being the interrogation of the very philosophical assumptions on which the Occident has founded its notion of supremacy.²⁷ This interrogation, which seeks to highlight the new cartographies of power, of contact zones between the former Empire and the former colony and within the former colony itself, is quite present in Sembène’s works. The artist explores this ambivalent relation between the Centre and the margin (the former colony) as well as the “rapport” that the (ex-)colonised (who, is, often, profoundly scarred) has with his own traumatic past. In most cases, this past has consequences on the present as Edward Said points out in Reflections on exile:

To have been colonized was a fate with lasting, indeed grotesquely unfair results, especially after national independence had been achieved. Poverty, dependency, underdevelopment, various pathologies of power and corruption, plus of course notable achievements in war, literacy, economic development: this mix of characteristics designated the colonized people who had freed themselves on one level but who remained victims of their past on another.²⁸ 

The past is then lived as history and/or memory. The most telling example is Pays’s loss of speech in Camp de Thiaroye (1988) due to internment and torture at Buchenwald. He is both physically and psychologically scarred.  

Camp de Thiaroye, based on an actual event (the historical recreation of the events that built up to the French colonial massacre, on the 1st of December 1944, of repatriated African colonial tirailleurs, having served in the French army), clearly shows how Sembène intertwines a palimpsest of multiple complexities in the plot – French liberals (like Captain Raymond) torn between the desire for personal friendship and the duty of altruistic nationalism; Diatta, torn between duty to his maternal uncle and his personal choice; the racial division of public spaces in colonial societies is also highlighted, with the “European quarters” being “segregated” from the “native quarters”; how differently the African American is perceived as opposed to the African, Diatta (“a native”); the ambivalence of moving from a subordinate colonial status to one of equality and dignity; African heroism as portrayed by the revolt and resistance of the tirailleurs; and the complicity of those Africans willing to work with the French colonial forces. Diatta, himself, is silenced by the internal pressure of African traditions (he will keep quiet as regards to his arranged marriage, out of respect and duty to his maternal uncle) and is finally, tragically reduced to definite silence by the external forces of colonialism. 

Though this film depicts the massacre of the tirailleurs, it remains significant in that it brings to the forefront the African as a subject, as the “subaltern who speaks” (Gayatri Spivak) and not as a “fleeting shadow” as Sembène, himself, explains:  

In the history of cinema, particularly European cinema, you can see that if there are black people in the films made during the war of 1914-1918, they appear as fleeting shadows. The same thing is true of the last war. Even American films made during these two wars feature black people as shadows […] introduced merely to justify that blacks took part in the war; they are not really central to the movie. So we can say that in the history of cinema, black people were only dancers or fleeting shadows… That time is over now. The history of the world involves everyone, all races.²⁹ 

Sembène clearly denounces this corrosive social erasure and in Camp de Thiaroye, Africa and the African are no longer the “fleeting shadows.” 

The thematics of hegemony and racism are also present in the literary works of Sembène. In The Black Docker (Le Docker noir), the white defence attorney Mr. Bréa is very much aware that the case of Diaw represents more than a strife between the robber and the robbed: it is rather two different races who are confronting each other and centuries of hatred which are being measured. He supports his plea on the argument that Diaw is more of a victim than a criminal and that it is the Occident that has inculcated in him an inferiority complex:³⁰ the dominating race has forged an identity that will foster a “symbolical violence” (in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms) on the dominated race. Besides, in Ô pays, mon beau peuple, Oumar Faye comes to the understanding that he is without a real homeland when a Frenchman tells him: “Without us, what would you have become, what would have been the fate of the colonies?”³¹

Just like the Anglophone postcolonial theorists, Sembène denounces the ideological construct of the West with regards to colonized peoples. The Eurocentric discourse conveyed certain uncontested and preconceived ideas concerning Africa: its “bestiality,” its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its instability, its inferior state… The African was symbolically portrayed as the Other, looked down upon with fascination, fear and derision. As Frantz Fanon points out in Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs), the Other, is above all, the one who is invented. There is a eurocentric desire to establish an ontological and epistemological distinction in order to dominate, restructure and have power on the Other.  

It is undeniable that Western cultural imperialism by bestowing itself with “all the signs of the natural”³² ensures its hegemony on the dominated peoples. In Reflections on Exile, Edward Said highlights this point: “it is now evident that culture and imperialism in the West could be understood as offering support, each to the other.”³³ Fanon also denounces eurocentric colonialist discourses by stating that colonialism “is not satisfied merely with hiding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content; by a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.”³⁴ In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha also analyses the eurocentric construct of the Other: “The Other must be seen as the necessary negation of a primordial identity — cultural or psychic — that introduces the system of differentiation which enables the cultural to be signified as a linguistic, symbolic, historic reality.”³⁵

This cultural subjugation of the Other is often present as recurring theme in the works of Sembène. 

In The Black Docker, the journalists describe Diaw as “having no resemblance to a respectful Mamadou, inoffensive and candid, strong and smiling, dear to our hearts of good Frenchmen”;³⁶ André Vellin, Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, states: “science has determined that coloured men have psychoses in the presence of a white woman.”³⁷ In God’s Bits of Wood (Les Bouts de bois de Dieu), the Africans are treated as “half-civilized,”³⁸ of “[…] savages […] who do not even know what is good for them!”³⁹ Oumar Faye, in Ô pays, mon beau peuple, is treated as a “monkey which has escaped form the zoo”⁴⁰ by a white captain. Faye is doubly victimized by racism: by the Whites but also by the Blacks (including his parents) who consider him “a sell-out”⁴¹ as he got married to a white woman. 

In the introduction to Contemporary Postcolonial Theory, Padmini Mongia declares that: “the term postcolonial refers not to a simple periodization but rather to a methodological revisionism which enables a wholesale critique of Western structures of knowledge and power.”⁴² Likewise, Sembène, through his works, fustigates not only the Western structures of “knowledge” and “power” but also aims at “deconstructing” the Western canon by questioning, what he considers as the overt ethnocentrism of European works and (aesthetic) theories. Indeed, Sembène strongly criticizes the fact that Africans are not being accurately represented: 

I think for us in Africa and in the Third World, artists are cultural ambassadors. It’s a new Africa that’s being created, in a slow and difficult birth. People throughout the world know only the pictures of misery and suffering that are distilled on television by non-Africans. Those are real and serious, but there is another side of Africa, the Africa that is struggling every day and winning, the Africa fighting to resemble an illustrious past that was stolen. An Africa not losing faith. Our Africa is not represented by our leaders […] we are self-appointed emissaries with the desire to represent the best, the worst, the great and the meagre of Africa. For me, it is a duty and a cultural tradition.⁴³   

If he refuses a Western “model,” Sembène, also, lucidly examines the inscriptions of power within the cultures of African societies, themselves. 

Sembène’s last three films — Guelwaar (1992), Faat Kiné (2000), and Moolaadé (2004) — clearly show the refusal of an Occidental aesthetic model. These films constitute a passionate account of African culture by choosing the African as “hero”/“heroine,” by portraying their daily struggle and above all, their fight/resistance against certain African traditions (such as female genital mutilation, polygamy, gender inequality, patriarchal hegemony, amongst others). 

Language, also, becomes a significant cultural stake. Sembène agreed with Fanon who states that: “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all, to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.”⁴⁴ Bakayoko (in God’s Bits of Wood) insists that his maternal language should be used in meetings and the expression “with a half-mango, half-guava air”⁴⁵ shows that his cultural referent is different and that sometimes, the sensibility of a culture cannot be translated to another. Mandabi is the first West African feature-length film to be shot entirely in an African language. In Guelwaar, Barthélémy Thioune, the eldest son of Guelwaar, evolves in the film: at the beginning, he feels like an expatriate (in France) and presents himself as French, a stranger to his social mores and to his native tongue but by the end of the film, he, finally, identifies himself as a Senegalese. In Xala (1974), Rama and Pathé, her fiancé, speak in Wolof. And moreover, Kaddu, a newspaper, written in Wolof language and which associates itself with the plight of poor Africans, is prominently featured in the film.⁴⁶ Sembène also criticizes the dependency and inauthenticity of other African characters who mimic the western culture: Dieng’s nephew in Mandabi (1968); El Hadji and the ruling Chamber of Commerce as well as his second wife, Oumi Niang in Xala. 

In the same continuity as traditional African culture, Sembène identifies the role of the filmmaker with that of the griot who chronicles events. In an interview, he expresses this point of view:

The African filmmaker is like the griot who is similar to the European medieval minstrel: a man of learning and common sense who is the historian, the raconteur, the living memory and the conscience of his people. The filmmaker must live within his society and say what goes wrong with his society. ⁴⁷  

This helps to embed the African filmmaker (at least Sembène) firmly within the tradition of orality (and of a clear linear progression) that has strongly characterized African cultures. The griot, as well as a number of characters associated with traditional African storytelling (members of the royalty, the trickster, the jealous wife, amongst others) are also in some of his films like Borom Sarret (1963), Xala, and Ceddo (1976). 

In geopolitical terms (and according to postcolonial criticism), the centre of the world as seen by the coloniser is “discarded” to finally to leave a predominant ideological/liminal “space” to the African so that he can affirm himself in a social, political, aesthetic and cultural milieu that is his very own.   

Political Activism 

If postcolonial theory questions the abstract ideal of Europe, it also focuses on the political situation of the postcolonial state, itself, who very often, tends to derogate from critical analysis by referring to its colonial past as being the main source of its problems instead of assuming its own part of responsibility. It is hardly surprising that Sembène should have a Marxist sensibility given his involvement with the CGT in France (when he worked as a docker in Marseille). This sensibility is often reflected in his works which denounce the aberrations of political excesses, the corruption of the minority in power and particularly, the state of neo-colonialism (often, if not in all cases, with the complicity of the local authorities) in which stagnate a lot of African countries. 

In Guelwaar, the eponymous character condemns with anger and conviction the food assistance proffered by the West. He is convinced that this aid will result in deeper economic inertia and encourage the people to lethargy: 

A single finger extended outwards indicate direction but the five fingers extended towards a passer-by, is begging… If you want to kill a man, give him everything that he needs for his survival; at the end, you no longer have a man but a slave. This begging [the North-South “co-operation”] is killing all feeling of dignity within us. 

He openly blames the politicians, who, for their own personal self-interest, encourage this demeaning and humiliating situation. Indeed, the flashbacks in his Guelwaar’s life build up to a hugely powerful climax at the aid rally where the political activist uses the words of the Senegalese “philosopher” Kocc Barma to castigate his audience for allowing themselves effectively to become beggars.⁴⁸ 

The characters in Sembène’s works, are mostly from the low strata of society and still feel that they are under the yoke of neo-colonialism as in their daily life, they are under the oppression of a system whereby they are exploited and deprived of their human dignity. They have an acute political consciousness and defend their ideology, sometimes even to the detriment of their own life (like Guelwaar who is murdered, Diaw Falla will be imprisoned, Oumar Faye is beaten to death, Bakayoko and the other members of the trade union will be threatened).⁴⁹ Diaw realizes with bitterness that it is an oligarchy which governs his native country: “The fault lies with the institutions. All these people have no bread, no joy, they are only rich with poverty. The scales weigh in favour of a handful of men who enjoy everything.”⁵⁰ The economic problems are grafted onto political problems and innervate each other.

Bakayoko, an autodidact inspired by Marxist ideologies, has to fight against the deputies (corrupted by the French company managing the railway network) so that the demands of the strikers are really taken into consideration: pension plans, benefits, increase in salary, ancillary services and the right to have their own trade union. Bakayoko understands the crucial issue of this socio-economic struggle and thus confronts the Director: “Mr. Director, here you are not representing a nation nor a race but a social class. And likewise, we, ourselves, represent a class whose interests are different from yours. We are searching for common ground and that’s all!”⁵¹ Likewise, in The Black Docker, Sembène’s Marxist outlook can be perceived: 

It is even more absurd to say that evil is not a product of the times. Where do murders, abortions, poisoning, theft, prostitution, alcoholism and homosexuality come from? From unemployment! There are too many unemployed people! An accumulation of poverty: that is the root of all evil.⁵²

Sembène examines repercussions of governmental policies on the daily life of people. Two of his favourite expressions are: “My fight is for the exploited social class” (Ouagadougou, 1972) and “my solidarity is not based on race” (Smith College, 1990).⁵³  

Generally Sembène’s films make few direct references to government policies and ideology. They are more interested in politics “from below,” and this attention to the specific details of daily life in Africa nuances the ideological dimension of his work.⁵⁴ However, Xala is considered by many film critics as being a national and political allegory. El Hadji’s temporary impotence and “domestic politics” are intricately interwoven with the film’s political portrayal of the impotent bourgeoisie (which is critiqued by Rama, the radical young student and finally by El Hadji, himself, in the sequence where he is removed from the Chamber of Commerce). The opening scenes of the film show that if the Chamber of Commerce – formerly occupied by the French – has been taken over by native businessmen (who will be as obsessed with power and as corrupt), exploitative economic structures still subsist. El Hadji steals land from the blind beggar and this blindness could also be interpreted as being metaphorical: El Hadji is blinded about his own self, snared by corruption, greed and desire and by prosperity won by theft. He is a telling example of what Fanon denounces as the “laziness and cowardice” of the national bourgeoisie who is “not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor in labour” and who has foremost succeeded in defending their own immediate interest.⁵⁵ The beggar’s revenge, near the end of the film, could also be interpreted as an attack on neocolonial hypocrisy and greed. 

By exploring the political problems of Senegal (and particularly those from the lower social strata), Sembène also retraces their origin resulting from the former imperial power and their perenniality with the present neo-colonial power. By so doing, the works of Sembène can be considered as being postcolonial. Indeed, the authors of The Empire Writes Back highlight that postcolonial works emerge from the experience ofcolonization:  

these [works] […] emerged in their present from out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre. It is this which makes them distinctively post-colonial.⁵⁶

These works often dismantle and (re-)appropriate the notions of power inherent in the Centre/margin schema. Sembène explores not only the “rapport” between Centre and margin but also points out to the contradictions of the post-independence African state.  

Women: An affluent and Confluent Generation?

Far from being a simple temporal indication, postcolonial theory questions all the forms of exclusion produced by the colonial period as well as the (post-independence) national situation and refers to all forms of artistic, cultural strategies debunking this vision. The Black woman, twice a victim of exclusion — as a result of colonialization and her marginalized status with regards to men — becomes in most of Sembène’s works a promising figure of hope for the future of Africa. Sembène highlights this point in an interview:

If we do not praise and dignify our women’s heroism, which I see as preeminent, Africa is not going to be liberated […] Women work a whole lot more than men do […] Women’s emancipation doesn’t depend only on labour. If we do not wake up and appreciate justly the role of women and share responsibilities, we will lose. But I think there’s a gender revolution going on in Africa anyway, and we will have to conform. ⁵⁷ 

Sembène is clearly an advocate for the emancipation of women and the abolition of such traditions as polygamy, patriarchy and female genital mutilation. 

Faat Kiné denounces the “symbolical violence” (in the terms of Bourdieu) against women. Through the heroic figure of Kiné (betrayed three times: by the fathers of her two children and by her own father who rejects, then repudiates her), Sembène portrays a liberated woman. Kiné is, also, sexually liberated and she does not hesitate to pay Mass for his services as a “stallion” (in her own words) and takes full responsibility for her status as: a single mother, the head of the family as well as the head of her company. She is clearly the one in power. If one of her friends is pressured by her parents to get married to her ex-husband, Kiné insists that she uses a condom (considered as a taboo in certain traditional families). This very optimistic film depicts a young generation of women who is gradually liberating itself from masculine domination. Aby is aware that if her grand-mother has accepted a polygamous husband, her mother, Kiné, is fiercely independent and that, for her generation, education will further help her pave the way to her emancipation.      

As opposed to these women who are (becoming) liberated, the traditional African woman is also depicted. In God’s Bits of Wood, Assitan is described as: “a perfect wife according to ancient African traditions: docile, submissive, hard-working, she never raised her voice. She ignored all about her husband’s activities or at least pretended to forget them.”⁵⁸ Assitan is very much like Awa Adja, first wife of El Hadji in Xala who embraces the same traditional values of an African wife. She is resigned and submissive as opposed to the second wife, Oumi N’Doye, who is tyrannical and abusive. N’Gone, the third wife, is perceived more as a fetishized sexual object. The film depicts the interplay of power amongst the women within the polygamous marriage. Amadou, in Ô pays, mon beau peuple, reduces the women in his family to silence: “when men talk, an educated woman has to shut up”;⁵⁹ they are only considered as sexual objects, mothers and servants to maintain the home. These different African feminine figures depict two very distinct social realities of the traditional versus the modern. 

Though Sembène does not overtly denounce polygamy in his films, he condemns it strongly in his written works. It is seen as a symbolical violence against women, imposed by the society, the traditions and the family as well as tolerated by the State. In Ô pays, mon beau peuple, Agnès explains to her friends why social progress is stalled by polygamy: “[if] you will not consider women as human beings but only as an instrument of your vile passion, you will stagnate. Women constitute a majority of the population. There is no such powerful obstacle as polygamy with regards to progress.”⁶⁰ The doctor shares the same opinion: “How do you expect Africa to shake off its somnolence with guys like Diagne? […] they spend their evenings searching for new victims for their bed.”⁶¹ Rama (in Xala), Kiné and Aby (in Faat Kiné) are also opposed to those traditions. And in Emitai (Emitaï, 1971), it is the women who show resistance against the French colonial forces as opposed to the men who are resigned.  

Moolaadé (2004) constitutes a harsh criticism against physical violence (female genital mutilation), often, imposed on young girls and carried out by certain women whose sense of tradition is so anchored that it has become an indelible “value system.” Moreover, having themselves been victims, they take on the role of the torturer. The victim of female genital mutilation becomes only a sexual object, proscribed from her own pleasure but inscribed entirely in masculine pleasure. Sembène illustrates this point by the love sequence between Collé and her husband: she is agony as she bleeds while her husband is clearly enjoying himself.

All this violence imposed to women, is it not “a prominently relational notion, established for […] other men and against femininity, in a sort of fear of the feminine and above all, of oneself”⁶² as Bourdieu explains in La Domination masculine? By portraying all these diverse female characters (the oppressed, submissive woman; the liberated woman; the woman, victim of patriarchal values, imposed by men and also, ironically, by some women as well), Sembène incites debates about the role of women in African societies for his “main contention is that African societies in general and the Wolof ethnic group in particular, are essentially matrilineal and indeed have been disfigured by Islam and Christianity which are both grounded in a patriarchal vision that erodes female power in society.”⁶³ By questioning the “exclusion” that (some) women have to face in the African society which was traditionally matrilineal, Sembène clearly embraces their cause. 

Christianity and Islam: The Rhetorics of Power

Sembène’s works, often, portray marginalized groups: women but also the Christian minority in Senegal who is largely dominated by the Muslims. Guelwaar shows how the tensions between the adherents of these two religions are latent and that the apparent tolerant co-existence, is, in fact, very precarious. The Christians are treated as “atheists” (by the Muslims) and without the intervention of the police force, an altercation would have surely followed. The drift was imminent. The people are clearly intolerant whereas the two religious leaders respect each other and reach a mutual agreement concerning the body of Guelwaar. 

Indeed, at the beginning of the Guelwaar, the Christians and the Muslims can be seen as representing conflicting modernities knit through imperialism and subsequent independence into a neocolonial state – a state all too willing to exploit religious difference to consolidate its own power.⁶⁴ In Faat Kiné, a scene, also, depicts the intolerance of certain Muslims against the Christians: at the gas station of Kiné, a customer looks at the chain with a cross that a young employee is wearing around the neck and exclaims: “Allah is great!” However, the couple formed by Kiné (a Muslim) and Jean (a Christian) at the end of the film embodies hope, that of a peaceful and tolerant cohabitation, based on the mutual respect of their respective religion.

Within the Muslim community itself, tensions subsist. In The Black Docker, Diaw is aware that “if Blacks and Arabs live almost in the same community, based on the Koran […] deep down, the fear of commingling prevailed…”⁶⁵ Racism supplants the notion of brotherhood founded by the same religious community.

Ceddo examines the formation of identity in relation to Islam and how the Ceddo refuse to submit themselves to the domination of another religion and culture. Though Islam and Christianity represent two major components of African identities, Sembène warns against cultural and religious assimilation: “[d]espite the fact that we are Muslim or Christian, we remain deeply rooted in the universe of the ceddo. This is of paramount importance. It means that our culture is very much alive and strong. We can accept, adopt other cultures and use them without losing our own.”⁶⁶ Indeed, in Ceddo, the expressions of masculinity are disrupted by the incursion of Islam: Madior, the king’s nephew, is incensed to learn that Islam forbids his culture’s traditional practice of matrilineal succession to the throne as well as the “legitimate” betrothal to his cousin, Princess Dior. At the end of the film, Princess Dior, by killing the Imam, embodies not only the empowerment of women but also, an agent of change against oppression, both cultural and religious.  

Through the portrayal of religious praxis, Sembène examines the inscriptions of power within African societies. By attempting to restore the representativity of social groups considered as marginalized and by ascribing a voice to them, Sembène’s works tie into postcolonial criticism which also points at inequalities within the dominant cultural sphere and offers an academic and aesthetic concurrent platform for reflection.   

Conclusion: Towards a Pan-Africanist Discourse?

In Sembène’s works, there is one theme, in particular, which is recurrent: the power of one dominating group over another dominated group, which is explored through certain strategic binary oppositions (White/black; Rich/poor; Men/women; Muslim/christian; Modernity/tradition; geographical North/south, Centre/margin). This recurring theme is inherent to postcolonialism, as explained by the authors of The Empire writes back : “The existence of these shared themes and recurrent structural and formal patterns is no accident. They speak for the shared psychic and historical conditions across the differences distinguishing one post-colonial society from another.”⁶⁷

Sembène, by symbolically constructing his own context of enunciation, rejects the dominant models drawn from the Centre and subsequently contributes to the creation of a new artistic field, inscribed in African traditions whereby the recovery of historical memory is, also, crucial. Sembène does  highlight that for him, “Africa is the centre of the world.”⁶⁸

As Murphy and Williams point out, left-wing critics have generally lauded Sembène’s films for their political stance, while other critics (from a wide range of positions) have accused him of simplistic, Manichean arguments, of “artistic Stalinism,” of disrespect for indigenous African cultures.⁶⁹ But through these very same “Manichean arguments” and binary oppositions as cited above, Sembène attempts to create a liminal, “third space” (in Homi Bhabha’s terms) which would incite debates about the various issues he raises in his works. In so doing, he, definitely, takes up the stance of a postcolonial artist. This “third space” is evident in the lack of narrative resolution in some of his films: Ceddo and Xala both end with a freeze frame whereas Emitai ends with a blank screen. As Sembène, himself points out, he is not “looking for a school nor for a solution but asking questions and making others think.”⁷⁰

Sembène, also, poses the question of artistic independence in the socio-economic context of Senegal for this issue comes with its own challenges from both the former empire and the postcolonial state itself. In 1963, the French government made an attempt to assist Africans in film production. A bureau of Cinema was set up within the French Ministry of Cooperation to provide Africans with the opportunity to create independent productions.⁷¹ But the Bureau would refuse to fund Black Girl (La Noire de…, 1966) on the grounds that it was too political. Xala, the first film to be co-produced with the Senegalese Société nationale de cinéma (SNC), was censored with several cuts to the original film. Ceddo would remain unreleased in Senegal until Senghor left power in 1981. If funding and censorship would prove to be problematic, Sembène, also, had to contend with the complexities of Western technology concerning the process of film-making. In an interview, he explains the challenges of shooting in 35 mm and then, changing to 16 mm.⁷²  

If Sembène’s works do offer “a third space” for “negotiation,” can his filmic discourse, also, be considered as a pan-africanist one, going beyond race and class identification and promoting unity amongst the African peoples? The meticulous mise en scène in Xala where Rama confronts her father in his office may provide an answer: El Hadji is seated in front of a political map of Africa (with borders established during colonialism) and Rama is seated in front of a pan-African map (without any political borders). When asked whether his films do promote a pan-Africanist discourse, Sembène explains: “It’s too easy to speak of Pan-Africanism […]. Africa is a vast continent. It’s in the interest of Africans, however, to have regional ties because the countries complement each other, both economically and culturally.”⁷³ Despite the challenges of forging ties with other African nations as they do not spend enough time with each other, African unity remains the ultimate goal.⁷⁴

Savrina Chinien

1. All translations are ours, unless otherwise stated.  ↩︎
2. This article has been expanded from an original French article (which has also been translated into Italian): Savrina Chinien, “Ousmane Sembène, artiste postcolonial?,” Africultures 76, “Sembène Ousmane (1923-2007),” ed. Thierno I. Dia (2009): 73-82. ↩︎
3. See David Henri Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919-1939, White Blind Spots, Male Fantasies, Settler Myths (Baltimore, MD and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 35.  ↩︎
4. See Pierre Bourdieu, Le Sens pratique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980). ↩︎
5. Bourdieu, La Domination masculine (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 58-59.   ↩︎
6. David Murphy and Patrick Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), 11.  ↩︎
7. Christian Lapoussinière et al., Aimé Césaire: une pensée pour le XXIe siècle, 24-26 juin 2003 (Paris: Présence africaine, 2003), 143.  ↩︎
8. Marc Ferro, Histoire des colonisations des conquêtes aux indépendances XIIIe – XXe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 31.  ↩︎
9. Marc Ferro, Cinéma et histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 24.  ↩︎
10. Murphy and Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema, 11.  ↩︎
11. Id., 11-13.  ↩︎
12. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), x. Emphases are by Soyinka himself.  ↩︎
13. Ernest Cole and Oumar Chérif Diop, eds., Ousmane Sembène: Writer, Filmmaker, Revolutionary Artist (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2015), 15.  ↩︎
14. Françoise Pfaff, Twenty-five Black African Filmmakers: A Critical Study (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), 243.  ↩︎
15. Cole and Diop, Ousmane Sembène, 18.   ↩︎
16. Pierre Haffner,  “Éléments pour un autoportrait magnétique: Ousmane Sembène,” CinémAction, ed. Guy Hennebelle (1985): 23-24. ↩︎
17. Sembène, “Man is Culture,” African Studies Program, Sixth Annual Hans Wolff Memorial Lecture, Bloomington, IN (5 March 1975). ↩︎
18. In a general sense, postcolonial studies encompass the integrity of works dealing with the writings of peoples previously colonised by Europeans. There is no eurocentrism but the realization that the variable processes of the different colonisations of Europe have produced a continuity of situations and preoccupations influencing forms and written symbols.   ↩︎
19. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 28. ↩︎
20. See Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 35. ↩︎
21. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 74.  ↩︎
22. Concerning history, Sembène declared: “It is a question of allowing the people to summon up their own history, to identify themselves with it. People must listen to what is in the film, and they must talk about it.” John D. H. Downing, Film and Politics in the Third World (New York: Autonomedia, 1987), 46.  ↩︎
23. As listed in the filmography and bibliography of Sembène’s works at the end of the article.  ↩︎
24. Cole and Diop, Ousmane Sembène, 45.   ↩︎
25. Id., 46.  ↩︎
26. Id., 50.    ↩︎
27. Bill Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 33.  ↩︎
28. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 294-95.   ↩︎
29. Ousmane Sembène, “Ousmane Sembène’s remarks after the showing of his film Camp de Thiaroye,” in Samba Gadjigo, Ralph Faulkingham, Thomas Cassiserer and Renhard Sander, eds., Ousmane Sembène: Dialogues with Critics and Writers (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 81-82. ↩︎
30. Sembène, Le Docker noir (Paris: Debresse, 1956), 73, “Racism is not only a form of hatred; it is the apprehension of being a victim of racism that Diaw Falla hesitated to confide his interests to the Justice. It is us who have ingrained in him this formidable complexity.” ↩︎
31. Sembène, Ô pays, mon beau peuple (Paris: Edition Poche, 1957), 117. ↩︎
32. Bourdieu, La Domination masculine, 166.  ↩︎
33. Said, 373. ↩︎
34. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 146.    ↩︎
35. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 52. ↩︎
36. Sembène, Le Docker noir, 27. ↩︎
37. Id., 55.  ↩︎
38. Sembène, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, 257. ↩︎
39. Id., 378. ↩︎
40. Sembène, Ô pays, mon beau peuple, 91. ↩︎
41. Id., 36. ↩︎
42. Padmini Mongia, ed., Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1997), 2. ↩︎
43. Cole and Diop, Ousmane Sembène, 52.  ↩︎
44. Fanon, Peau noire, Masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), 18.  ↩︎
45. Sembène, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, 156. ↩︎
46. Sembène invested heavily in that newspaper to promote the Wolof language and denounce the living conditions of poor Africans.  ↩︎
47. Murphy and Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema, 8.   ↩︎
48. Id., 53.  ↩︎
49. The characters listed are from the following works: Guelwaar; Le Docker Noir; Ô pays, mon beau peuple; Les Bouts de bois de Dieu. ↩︎
50. Sembène, Le Docker noir, 216. ↩︎
51. Sembène, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, 281. ↩︎
52. Sembène, Le Docker noir, 119.  ↩︎
53. Samba Gadjigo, Ousmane Sembene: une conscience africaine, genèse d’un destin hors du commun (Paris: Editions Homnispheres, 2007), 218. ↩︎
54. See Murphy and Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema, 54.   ↩︎
55. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 149-59. ↩︎
56. Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, 2. ↩︎
57. Cole and Diop, Ousmane Sembène, 54.   ↩︎
58. Sembène, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, 170. ↩︎
59. Sembène, Ô pays, mon beau peuple, 27. ↩︎
60. Id., 98. ↩︎
61. Id., 95. ↩︎
62. Bourdieu, La Domination masculine, 78. ↩︎
63. See Lifongo Vetinde and Amadou T. Fofana, Ousmane Sembène and the Politics of Culture (Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Lexington Books, 2015), 86.  ↩︎
64. See Cole and Diop, Ousmane Sembène, 211.  ↩︎
65. Sembène, Le Docker noir, 163. ↩︎
66. Sembène, “An Interview with Ousmane Sembène by Sada Niang,” in Ousmane Sembène: Dialogues with Critics and Writers, ed. Samba Gadjigo, Ralph Faulkingham, Thomas Cassiserer and Renhard Sander (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 96.  ↩︎
67. Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, 29.  ↩︎
68. David Murphy, Sembène: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction (London: James Currey; Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000), 228.  ↩︎
69. Murphy and Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema, 64.  ↩︎
70. Cole and Diop, Ousmane Sembène, 40.   ↩︎
71. See Sheila Petty, ed., A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembène (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 4. ↩︎
72. Cole and Diop, Ousmane Sembène, 16.   ↩︎
73. Id., 68.  ↩︎
74. Ibid.  ↩︎