Ousmane Sembène’s cinema emerged after Senegal became independent from the French colonial empire. His works are not limited to observing the post-colonial reality, taking it as a starting point. They critically portray the colonial past. They seek to construct a post-colonialist perspective, analyzing the lasting impact of colonialism in the post-colonial period even when the narratives unfold in another historical era. One of the elements that shapes this view is the landscape—more specifically, the landscape as a produced thing, linked to social and economic organization. What we are dealing with here is the possession and enjoyment of land, from which power relations arise. Without a material and territorial base, a community cannot constitute or assert itself, that is, it cannot look at itself as a communal entity, much less create decision-making mechanisms regarding its internal and external relations.

At the beginning of the 1960s, when the war in Algeria was about to end and the wars of liberation broke out in the Portuguese colonies, starting with Angola, Franz Fanon wrote that “[f]or a colonized people the most essential value, because the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land: the land, which must provide bread and, naturally, dignity.”¹ Ato Sekyi-Otu reminds us that Fanon considered the forced expulsion of indigenous peoples from the land to control the use of this space and its resources as “the definitive material feature of colonial domination, the material expression of occupation.”² In The Wretched of the Earth, the political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique describes the different landscapes built by colonialism and the way they were inhabited: “The landless peasants, who make up the lumpenproletariat, leave the country districts, where vital statistics are just so many insoluble problems, rush toward the towns, crowd into tin-shack settlements, and try to make their way into the ports and cities founded by colonial domination.”³ In other words, colonialism left a territorial and landscape mark on the organization of space and the social relations that are part of its historical legacy. A break with the colonial political order is never sudden or complete, if that means razing everything that was built and consolidated during colonial domination and starting from scratch. Such a rupture implies, on the contrary, the permanence of some continuities in a complex process of reappropriation, reinscription, and reconstruction.

My brief analysis focuses on Sembène’s first feature film, Black Girl (La noire de…, 1966), which narrates the journey of Diouana, a maid who accompanies a French couple from the Senegalese capital to the French Riviera. The contrast between the landscape of Dakar and that of Antibes allows for a comparison between the past and the present, each one conveyed through images that are identifiable by the notable differences between their landscapes. The story unfolds in these landscapes and the historical process that the film aims to capture can be read through them. After the French colonial rule, the coloniality of power remained in Senegal, a social stratification of a racial nature reflected in relations of domination and subordination that only becomes clear to Diouana when she is in France. Aníbal Quijano, who developed the concept of “coloniality of power,” draws attention to the fact that, in the relationship between the European powers and their colonies, both race and the division of labor “were structurally associated and mutually reinforcing, although neither of them necessarily depended on the other to exist or change.”⁴ Quijano focuses on Latin America, but something similar can be said about Africa. The systemic imposition of a racial division of labor became a way to divide labor and wealth that lost its racial characteristics, which is why the author speaks of its relative autonomy. The historical reality of Black Girl is post-colonial at the national level as a space for political affirmation of self-determination, but the coloniality of power remains at the social level.

It is precisely from this perspective that the film dissects racism by spatializing it. The French landscape shown in Black Girl is punctuated by infrastructures and means of transport that invite travel and movement from the beginning, but Diouana is then confined to an apartment and sleeps in a windowless room. The tall construction is a sign of the transformation of the landscape, which rises from the plain. The improvised buildings in the poor neighborhoods of Dakar, where Diouana comes from, are low, barely rising above the height of their builders and inhabitants. When the female protagonist approaches the building where her bosses, Madame and Monsieur, live, the film fixes her gaze upwards, which has become one of the work’s iconic images (fig. 1). And then the film offers us the reverse shot: a tall building that covers the sky with many stacked floors.

Fig. 1: Ousmane Sembène, Black Girl, 1966.

The film’s first flashback is quite long, 9 minutes and 16 seconds long. It occurs after Diouana has been treated by an older male guest of her employers as an exotic object that can be forcibly kissed, instead of a person with a will of her own. His gesture, his possessive authority that asserts itself as unquestionable, does recognize her subjectivity. He displays the core of colonial relations: power over another who is not seen or recognized as equal, not even as a similar being of the same species. Diouana retreats to the kitchen. When Madame leaves the table to talk to her maid, Monsieur comments that “with independence, the natives have lost a natural quality,” which is a way of characterizing submission as something natural. In the kitchen, Madame apologizes and tells her that it was a joke, that everyone liked the food, that she is proud of her, and finally orders her to make them “some nice coffee.” In Madame’s mind, Diouana’s happiness depends solely on the success of her work as a maid. The flashback begins after Madame and Diouana glances at her. It narrates Diouana’s first contact with Monsieur in Dakar. She crosses the slum area where she lives, made of rough wooden buildings and sand roads, then a walkway, desperately looking for work. Her movement highlights the successive ascents and descents of stairs in the large apartment buildings that mark the urban landscape of Dakar. She walks this path countless times without getting hired. It seems like a pointless effort, but it is on one of these trips that she crosses paths with the man she is going to date. When they separate in the maids’ square, where unemployed domestic workers gather to wait for potential employers, the camera films her in a high-angle shot (fig. 2). It is a view similar to the one that someone might get from one of the balconies of the apartments in Dakar or Antibes—a view she never gets to see. The maids’ square seen from above looks like a frontier place where the maids go to wait and the landscape changes, the asphalt of the rich quarters giving way to the sand of the slums. It is a border between the working class and the ruling class, the impoverished and the affluent, that mirrors the divide between the colonized and the colonizer.

Fig. 2: Ousmane Sembène, Black Girl, 1966.

In another flashback, Diouana announces to her boyfriend that her boss invited her to go to France with her and continue taking care of the children. The scene symbolically takes place in Independence Square and Diouana’s voice splits into two, one external and one internal, both speaking in the present of these past events. In the previous flashback, on the contrary, her narration goes from the present tense to the past tense. The comments we hear from her are thoughts about what she thinks her boyfriend, upset by the news, would have said to her (“That’s domestic slavery.”) and about her mother’s permission. Her reaction becomes childish: “To France! To France!”, she says hastily as she climbs the steps hopping on one foot. The square features a large monument across its entire width dedicated to those who gave their lives for the emancipation of Senegal from the colonial yoke. The shot that shows the inscription “TO OUR DEAD / A GRATEFUL HOMELAND” (À NOS MORTS / LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE) is followed by a sequence of an official ceremony in which flowers are laid in commemoration of Senegal’s independence in 1960. When she tries to balance herself on one foot above the monument, the man considers this playful gesture as a kind of sacrilege (fig. 3). In a somber landscape of long horizontal and vertical lines, her amusing attitude seems to have no place. Yet her gestures of freedom are not presented as a desecration of the country’s liberation, but rather as a celebration of it. Her boyfriend takes her by the arm away from the monument, forcing her to leave and to behave as he sees fit. The image is swept away by another as if it were being erased. The scene underlines the subservient condition of Senegalese women, still prevalent after the independence in Senegal (the recent past) as well as in France (the present), and simultaneously posits a lack of political conscience about the national liberation and independence of Senegal. After this dramatic outcome, the film returns to the poor landscape of the slums where a boy drives a two-wheel car made of wire. The boy is soon joined by Diouana. There are still places where people can play.

Fig. 3: Ousmane Sembène, Black Girl, 1966.

I conclude by briefly drawing attention to other uses of landscape in Sembène’s cinema that deepened the aspects mentioned in Black Girl. My aim is to leave some clues for the development of this research topic. It is worth noticing the importance of filmed space in Sembène’s creative process. In an interview by Pierre Haffner, the filmmaker explains how his ideas and plans were often reshaped when he confronted the actual, real location because its materiality brings forward mutable traces of social and economic history:

What I have seen in my ‘laboratory’ is no longer at the level I am. I could dream, idealize a decoration, a feature, or a landscape, but when I am there, I have to acknowledge that the condition of the place has changed. I have to use it wisely, and the terrain is the infantry, which I use as a weapon.⁵

Figs. 4-5: Ousmane Sembène, Mandabi, 1968.

Figs. 6-7: Ousmane Sembène, Moolaadé, 2004.

His next feature film after Black Girl, Mandabi (1968), stages a confrontation between tradition and modernity through the differences between the rural landscape (fig. 4) and the urban landscape (fig. 5) and the way they instigate relationships of dominance or collaboration, corruption or honesty, and greed or solidarity. In his last work, Moolaadé (2004), the action takes place in a village in Burkina Faso where earth-colored buildings seem to sprout from the ground, made of clay, and surrounded by termite mounds. The location seems frozen in time, but little by little it becomes clear that the preservation of customs and traditional construction techniques does not mean that this world is impervious to change. From the exterior arrive plastic pieces that are practical and radios that allow contact with other views on female excision in Islam, which give women strength to challenge the rule of mutilating their genitals (figs. 6-7). In these two examples, as in Black Girl and throughout his filmography, Sembène sought to delimit and characterize the landscape space to inscribe various and complex social conflicts in it—particularly the clash between capital and labor, often represented from the perspective of working-class women.⁶

Sérgio Dias Branco

1. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 9. ↩︎
2. Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 160. Cf. Tumultes 31, “Vers une pensée politique postcoloniale: À partir de Frantz Fanon,” dir. Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun (2008) and Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, ed. Anthony C. Alessandrini (London: Routledge, 1999). ↩︎
3. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 111. ↩︎
4. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America,” International Sociology 15, no. 2 (2000): 216. ↩︎
5. Ousmane Sembène, “Sembène Ousmane in Kinshasa,” interview by Pierre Haffner, in Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, ed. Annett Busch and Max Annas (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 88. ↩︎
6. See David Lee Astley, “Continual Discontent: The Cinema of Ousmane Sembène,” Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal, 21 Feb. 2017, https://www.anothergaze.com/continual-discontent-the-cinema-of-ousmane-sembene-la-noire-de.  ↩︎