Ousmane Sembene

Senegal's Ousmane Sembene wrote and directed "Black Girl," the very first African film, in 1965. Recently the Film Forum in NYC held a Sembene retrospective to run consecutively with his latest feature "Faat-Kine." This gave me the opportunity to see the 1971 "Emitai" (God of Thunder), which I saw when it first came out, and two other films that are closely related thematically: the 1977 "Ceddo" (Common Folk) and the 1987 "Camp de Thiaroye". These three films, dealing with questions of class oppression, colonialism and racism, are, like all of Sembene's work, passionate denunciations of injustice and an implicit call to action.

Born in 1923, his father a fisherman, Sembene fell in love with movies at an early age after seeing scenes of Jesse Owens' track victories in Leni Riefenstahl's pro-Nazi documentary Olympics documentary. "For the first time," he told the LA Times in 1995, "a black honored us by beating whites. . . . It became the film for the young people of my generation." We can be sure that this was not Riefenstahl's intention.

Sembene quit high school after punching out a teacher who had hit him first. He then joined the Free French army during World War II. After the war he became a rail worker, participating in an epochal Dakar-Niger railroad strike in 1947-48. After stowing away in a ship to France, he became a longshoreman in Marseilles and a member of the French Communist Party.

In France he started writing fiction in order to depict the reality of modern African life which could best be represented by the African. His first novel "The Black Docker" was published in 1956. But in the early 1960s, Sembene decided to turn his attention to filmmaking ("the people's night school") because most Africans were illiterate and could only be reached with this medium. His films would follow the same road as his writing, to offer an alternative to Tarzan movies and garish epics like "Mandingo." "We have had enough of feathers and tom-toms," he said.

So he went to Moscow, where he studied at the Gorki Institute under Soviet directors Mark Donskoi and Sergei Gerasimov. This was the time when the USSR was not only offering an economic alternative to developing countries, but a cultural one as well. Indirectly, the Soviet Union became a midwife to modern African cinema.

The 'common folk' of "Ceddo" are the serfs of a small village in 19th century Senegal who are miserably oppressed by organized religion and by their feudal overlords. Although the structures are much more modest than those found in any feudal society (Islamic services are held on the open ground bounded by pebbles), the bonds enforced by custom are the same. The ceddo must pay tribute to their King in the form of firewood bundles. An Islamic caste also takes tribute in the form of slaves, who are exchanged for guns or cloth in a general store run by a white man. To round out the microcosm of feudal society, there is a single white Catholic priest who is barely tolerated by the Moslems.

Weary of oppression, a ceddo youth kidnaps the daughter of the king and takes her to an isolated wooded glen near the ocean. She will only be returned after the ruling classes forsake slavery and forced conversion to Islam. The villagers, played by non-professionals as is the case in nearly all of Sembene's films, have a simple desire to live as they have always lived. No dogmatic Marxist, Sembene would have little tolerance for glib remarks about 'rural idiocy' for it is only in traditional village life that honesty and humility can be found.

The film's most dramatic scenes pit the hostage-taker against aristocrats from the village who come to rescue the princess with rifles in hand. Armed only with a bow and arrow and superior cunning, the ceddo youth vanquishes them one by one. In the course of his courageous resistance, the princess begins to warm to him although he is slow to respond in kind. His memory of oppression remains too strong. In one of the more gripping images of the film, the gorgeous princess bathes nude in the ocean while the young commoner stands on the beach glowering at her, bow and arrow in hand. He will not indulge himself in desire as long as his people are in bondage.

In a conflict between the King and the Islamic clergy over how to divide up ceddo tribute, the clergy seize power. Now that they are the new ruling class, they force the village to undergo conversion. One by one, the men's heads are shaved as they are given new names. The arrogant Imam tells the disconsolate villagers: "You are now Ishmaila", "You are now Ibraima", etc. Economic assimilation, whether in Africa or in the New World, is always preceded by cultural assimilation. Implicit in Sembene's films is the notion that cultural renewal must precede social and economic transformation.

Sembene returns to village life in "Emitai." It is in the early days of WWII and the French Vichy government is rounding up African youth to fight in their war. A village has been occupied by a company of native soldiers who are ordered about by a white Frenchman. Not one given to romanticism, Sembene depicts the lower-ranking African soldiers as passive servants of white rule.

Not satisfied with dragooning young men in a kind of neo-feudal tribute, the French demand rice as well to feed their army. With this demand, the villagers decide they have had enough. Not only is rice necessary for their physical survival, it is their link with their gods. Rice, like the rain that nourishes it, is sacred. To retain their links to the sacred, they hide the harvested rice from the soldiers.

In retaliation, the soldiers force the village women to sit in the brutal sun. They will only be released when the rice is turned over. In order to decide how to save themselves and their people, the village elders convene a series of meetings in a secluded altar to their gods beneath an enormous baobab tree. The gods, including Emitai, the god of thunder, instruct them to make sacrifices. So, in an obviously futile gesture, the elders sacrifice a rooster and then a goat, sprinkling the blood on the earth beneath the tree, after which the carcasses are heaved into a hollow in the trunk. Obviously there is an implied criticism of one aspect of traditional life by Sembene. Animism is no defense against French rifles.

In "Camp de Thiaroye," we meet the same sort of soldiers who passively accepted French orders in "Emitai" but who now, after defeating German soldiers all across Africa, will no longer be intimated by the white man, whatever his nationality.

After serving their tour, they have returned to Senegal where they are assigned to Thiaroye, a "transit camp" near Dakar. Supposedly, they will be processed there prior to being allowed to return to their villages. Their sergeant, an educated man who reads serious French novels and listens to baroque music, is visited by his uncle at the beginning of the film. From him he learns that his mother and father have been killed by the French, and their village torched, after refusing to turn over their rice. Thus, the link between "Emitai" and "Camp de Thiaroye" is made explicit.

One of the infantrymen has lost the power of speech after spending two years in Buchenwald. We identify with him as he strokes the barbed wire surrounding the camp in disbelief. Is this the reward given to African soldiers, to be interned in a detention camp run by the French rather than the Germans? Despite the appearance of freedom (the soldiers are allowed to visit a nearby town or kick a soccer ball around on the dusty grounds of the camp), they are little better than prisoners. Their first meal is virtually inedible. When they demand meat, they are told by the chef that meat is reserved for white men. He is only taking orders.

No longer willing to put up with such indignities, the infantrymen surround the French officers and demand meat. This begins a series of escalating confrontations that culminates in a battle over back pay. The French offer to exchange the soldier's francs for African colonial currency at half the normal rate. The soldiers rebel and take a general hostage. This decision is made after each of the barracks has elected men from their respective countries (Senegal, Congo, Gabon, Ivory Coast) to represent them on a camp-wide decision-making body. They proclaim that they are all Africans and must rely on themselves and not the white man. After the general promises--falsely--that the money will be exchanged at the proper rate, they release him and begin a jubilant celebration. Later that night, when they are all asleep, French tanks bomb the camp, killing most of the inhabitants. This, and the incident portrayed in "Emitai", is based on a historical event.

Sembene is an extraordinary artist. A modern day 'griot' who synthesizes indigenous and Marxist themes in a seamless call for social justice, he is unique in his ability to tell the story of Africans as they would tell it themselves. As such, he is unstinting in his view of this reality. Not content to deliver didactic messages about socialist revolution, he strives to show the shortcomings of traditional society, even though the collective and solidaristic elements of this world have to be reclaimed on a new basis. Sembene's films often appear in retrospectives such as the one that finished recently at Film Forum. If one is scheduled in your city, take the opportunity to go. It is the next best thing to visiting the continent.